Mr Puggsly said:
I think John Stossel sums it up well. "The department doesn’t teach kids or pay teachers. It comes up with studies, test requirements, and one-size-fits-all rules that limit what schools can do if they want federal money. That money gets taken from states and shipped to Washington, D.C., which then ships it back to states if they do something the department likes. On that long journey, plenty of the money disappears into the hands of bureaucrats. Turn education back over to local governments, the way it was not so long ago. Let entrepreneurs and local governments compete to improve schools." |
I could be sold on the idea of abolishing the federal department of education, but no viable alternative has been provided. Local governments already have the bulk of the educational funds, and for the most part have the discretion to do what they want. There are incentives to doing things like adopting common core standards or nclb standards, but these are actually not mandated. As a teacher, the stuff that the federal DOE is a distant fourth concern after city, district, and state standards.
Entreprenuers running schools has been rife with fraud and abuse. Not that this DOESN'T happen in public schools to an extent, but the degree of fraud in charter schools has been utterly obscene in some cases. If entreprenuers are involved, then you need strict oversight, which would require a department of eductation in some capacity.
If schools are funded 100% by municipal government, that's going to exacerbate the already huge difference between schools in high income and low income areas. Ideally, the federal DOE would do more to correct this imbalance. For instance, the quality of eductation that exists in Long Island is typically far better than what is in NYC because of the fact that education funding is almost exclusively based on property taxes. There needs to be some corrective force, which the federal DOE can serve as, although as you rightly point out, it has not been effective in this.
So, I agree with the problem, but the solution you're endorsing does not fix it.
