Simple question for debate.

Should the Department of Education be Abolished? Why or why not?

If America were to return to it's constitutional roots, Education would be left to the states, and the people respectively, per the 10th ammendment. I believe that the DoE is a beaurocratic waste. I am also against Federal standards. I am not just saying that, I'm going to be a teacher, and have been studying it. Federal funding is only about 6% of school funding anyway. States are much more able to make sure curriculum is relevant to their population. The beaurocratic hoops are a major burden on teachers, and actually get in the way of education. Teachers spend an enormous amount of time catering to the TESTS, and losr their focus on what the students actually need as individuals.

http://www.ed.gov/index.jhtml

I'm not sure that the DoE is doing any good. Especially when we find out about the Armstrong Williams punditry scandal. NCLB is generating better test scores, but at what cost to the teachers, and the students? Tests don't exactly measure everything that education requires. In fact surveys of the job market, CEO types reveal that the most desireable skills for their employes to posess are social skills. Those are the very skills that get bypassed with the rote teaching methods brought about by teaching responses to NCLB.

Sure, get rid of the DoE, it would certainly make the Libertarians, and the Constitutionalists happy. The new director was a lobbyist, not a teacher. what's the point?

The NEA seems to know more about it anyway. Give them a little more control. They are not part of the government. They are the people in the field. Despite the fact that they were once called "terrorists" by Bush officials, they are the ones with the hands on experience.

http://www.nea.org/index.html

Yes, and no. It should change its mission. At the federal level, there should be an effort towards making sure that minimal standards are met, and that is all.
At the states level, competition should be encouraged to exceed those standards such that industry is attracted to the best educated populations.
If Dinkytown, Idaho is happy with its farming based education system, so be it. End result will be that Dinkytown will continue to see its children either have a less than average lifestyle, unless they move away, which happens a lot.
I and my family spent 8 years in a small town in Idaho and we got our children out of there before getting into high school, where the worst attitudes toward education existed.

Two issues are involved here:

1) Does the United States Constitution grant the U.S. Government authority to administer education? The answer is clear: NO! Nowhere in the Constitution will you find the word education or anything similar to it. The only arguments that can possibly be made are to invoke the General Welfare and Interstate Commerce clauses, and the framers of the Constitution made it clear that these two clauses were only intended to apply to those powers explicitly delegated elsewhere in the Consititution.

2) Has the Federal Government's involvement in education improved the institution? Again the answer is no. Year after year, scholastic achievement declines. Every year, the average high school graduate's mastery of basic skills is reduced. One study has shown that a collegiate degree earned today is roughly equivalent to what a High School diploma would have been worth several decades ago. The comparative track records of private- and home-schooled children indicates that public education is doing a sorry job of educating our youth.

The bottom line is that the federal government should butt out. Programs like "No Child Left Behind" sound good at first, until you realize that, like all socialist programs, the only way you can make everyone equal is to hold everyone back. I am for the elimination of the U.S. Department of Education.

In principle, I agree with eliminating the D of E for constitutional reasons. In practice, it will never happen. The D of E is silly and incable of actually educating anybody. Example, Title I funds, which go to low-income schools. According to the American Enterprise institute, these funds have achieved no results for 20 years. So our "conservative" president increase federal Title I funds from $8 billion to $13 billion last year. (Which, I'm sure the NEA called a "cut")

As for this gem:



You are seriously proposing to replace a government agency with an active arm of a political party (The Democrats). The NEA has been failing our children for 50 years. They are wrong on bilingual education, home schooling, federal funding, phonics, sex education, etc. Take a look at the high standards the NEA suggests for teacher recruitment, from their 2004 Convention in Washington, DC:


While replacing an incompetent Federal Agency with an incompetent union seems unorthodox to me, I'll agree only if you agree to replace the IRS with the CATO institute. At least that way I could use my tax cuts to put my kids in private school.

Should the Department of Education be Abolished? Why or why not?

I agree with the Department of Education being abolished when it comes to the bulk of it's operations. I feel that the money spent through the department of education (and the various forms of political manipulation that it has been used for over the years) could better serve our kids and our communities in the form of federal grants, distributed to school districts nationwide based on financial need. Who better to determine what to address and how to address it then the local people on the ground that see the problems everyday?

I do however think the department of education still needs to exist. The department develops statistics that help us track the performance of schools nationwide. This department is also responsible for the various forms of federal financial aid we give to college students. I see no reason to abandon student loans and pell grants as they seem to be the only thing in the department of education that could be considered a success.

However, what we really need to do to help the school is re-examine our laws. How much time, energy and money that could be better spent on educating our kids is lost to litigation when a parent decides to sue their childs school because the school dared to discipline their child? How many kids loose out when they have an out of control classmate, who disrupts their class on a daily basis that the adminstration will not expel at least remove from the traditional classroom environment for fear of lawsuits?

We have to get the authority back to the schools to be able to properly maintain discipline if we are ever to hope for real improvement in learning.

We also need to re-evaluate how we treat our teachers. We need to insulate them for all but the most extreme cases of negligence when it comes to lawsuits, and we need to institute PERFORMANCE based pay incentives so that better we can recruit and keep skilled teachers without also rewarding those that would prefer to wander blindly through the day.

One thing we could do right away in this regard is give a 100% tax credit to teachers working in blighted urban areas. That should roughly equate to a 17-20% pay increase to those teachers who are willing to work in the toughest work environments.

Will it happen? Now way. To much political power is wielded through this department for congress (even those who's platform once included the removal of this department) to ever give it up, regardless of how much good it could do if we did so.

I'd go for that, replace the IRS with CATO. Sounds like a winner. Let's let them draft the President's budget while we're at it.

My point about the NEA, and perhaps their partisanship makes them a bad idea (I wasn't thinking about it), was that the control needs to be in the hands of the people in the field. I, personally, would like to see it completely managed within the states. Preferably within the counties. Less beaurocracy is a good thing. Federal funding is relatively insignifigant, but the impact of the federally mandated testing is enormous. That is my point. I'll grant that the NEA may not be the best agency for it. It really is more of a Teachers Union that is heavily partisan. I can't think of a better suggestion other than letting the already existing states' infrastructures do their thing.

Currently, the disparity between what research shows to be "best practice" for children, and what the Federal government mandates as "operating procedure" is a bit unsettling. The federal regulations really get in the way of meaningful education.

I think the DoE should be reduced to one guy sitting in a cubicle who's job it is to take the $56B DoE budget and divide it amongst the states, by population. Each year the budget should be cut by $5B, and in 12 years the guy should be retired.