Good Riddance to the Department of Education, Symbol of Constitutionally Dubious Efforts To Federalize Schooling

In 1977, millions of American tempers flared against the treaty giving Panama control of the canal that bisects its country. A bemused senator said: My state’s residents are of different races, ancestries, religions, and politics but are united in white-hot attachment to the canal, which until now they had not thought about since hearing of it in third grade.Today, there are widespread laments about the diminishment, perhaps to extinction, of the Education Department, although the lamenters cannot connect it with educational improvements since its founding nearly 46 years ago; there having been few, if any. Although the department has been often slathered with high-minded devotion, it was born from a banal political transaction between a notably pious politician and one of the principal causes of the subsequent decline in K-12 education quality.In 1976, the National Education Association, the largest teachers union, made its first presidential endorsement in gratitude for Jimmy Carter’s promise to create the department, which arrived in 1979. This federalization of education was partly a consequence of what happened 14 years earlier.In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson got enacted the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. This completed the collapse of what political scientist James Q. Wilson called the “legitimacy barrier.” Hitherto, before Congress acted on a particular subject, it asked (or pretended to): Is this a legitimate federal government concern, given that the Constitution supposedly limits Congress’s powers by enumerating them? When President Dwight D. Eisenhower wanted to build the interstate highway system or fund postsecondary education after the panic sparked by the Soviet Sputnik satellite in 1957, Congress, nodding to an enumerated power, passed the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act and the National Defense Education Act.The 1965 federal intrusion into K-12 education, a quintessentially state and local responsibility, enabled the department to use its share of what is spent nationwide on K-12 education (at most 13 percent) as leverage to become a bossy national school board — and an accomplice of teachers unions, as when the department was lackadaisical about pressing for reopening public schools even though children were known to be at low risk from the pandemic.When Johnson signed the ESEA, he said “no law I have signed … means more to the future of America.” (Oh? He signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act.) In early MAGA-speak, Johnson said the act “began a new day of greatness in American society.”A year later, the Coleman Report refuted the act’s premise, which was that the best predictor of improved education is the amount of money spent on it. The report was written because, as the post-World War II baby boom moved through public schools like a pig through a python, cognitive outputs of education systems lagged far behind financial inputs.The report said: “Schools are remarkably similar in the way they relate to the achievement of their pupils when the socioeconomic background of the students is taken into account” (emphasis added). Meaning: The best predictors of a school’s performance are attributes of the pupils’ families. Subsequent research suggested that 90 percent of the differences in schools’ proficiency can be explained by five factors: days absent from school, hours spent watching television (today, hours spent immersed in social media), pages read for homework, quantity and quality of reading matter in the home, and two parents in the home. Government can do next to nothing about these.The National Assessment of Educational Progress (the “nation’s report card”) shows that fourth- and eighth-grade reading scores are where they were 33 years (the NAEP was first administered in 1992) and $2 trillion in federal K-12 spending ago. Aside from teachers unions, who is pleased by K-12 education’s trajectory since 1979?A recent Gallup poll showed 24 percent of adults were satisfied with public education, the lowest amount in the 24 years the question has been asked. Social science tells us not what to do but the results of what we are doing. Surging support for school choice programs, and for charter schools emancipated from union straitjackets, tells what the public thinks about the government-school monopoly tenaciously defended by teachers unions.Today’s K-12 calamity is chronic absenteeism, defined as students missing at least 10 percent of the school year. This is partly an echo of teachers unions’ conniving at the unnecessary and wickedly prolonged school closures during the pandemic. The 2023 Trends in Mathematics and Science Study showed that students’ scores in those subjects have continued to decline since the pandemic.Education problems abound. But if the Education Department is the answer, what is the question?The Washington Post

Good Riddance to the Department of Education, Symbol of Constitutionally Dubious Efforts To Federalize Schooling

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