Dude is not making the point he thinks he’s making:
I can’t even imagine a bureaucracy this size. It needs to be, if not eliminated, then “rightsized” to about 10% of what it currently is.
Department of Education
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Clarissa's Blog 
It can be both, the department of education is too large, but giving corporations more tax cuts just sounds borderline crazy to me.
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I agree, it’s all nuts. We are choosing between dumb and dumber in this election.
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I’d prefer to go further. I would very much like to see the dept. of education shut down, and control of the schools returned to state and local control like they were supposed to be in the first place. Our founding documents clearly stated that the federal government was given limited powers, and those powers were specifically listed out in the founding documents. The founders even went so far as to say any powers not listed belonged to the various state governments.
The powers given to congress are listed in Article 1 Section 8 of the Constitution of the United States of America, further the 10th Amendment to the constitution states, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
Going back to Article 1 Section 8, the powers granted to congress include collecting taxes, paying debts, providing for the common defense and general welfare. To borrow money on the credit of the United States, to regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the states and Indian tribes. To create a uniform rule of naturalization, and uniform laws on bankruptcies. To coin money, regulate the value of, and fix a standard of weights and measures. To provide punishment for counterfeiting the coin of the United States. To establish post offices and post roads. (Note, it specifically states post roads, not infrastructure in general) To promote the progress of science and useful arts, buy securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries. To constitute tribunals inferior to the supreme court. To define and punish piracies and felonies committed on the high seas, and offenses against the Law of Nations. To declare war, grant letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make rules concerning captures on land and water. To raise and support armies, but no appropriation of money to that use shall be for a longer term than two years. The remainder are specifics about creating militia forces, training them, and building forts, dockyards, other such buildings needed for war, and making laws as needed to make all this legal.
You can read the specifics pretty much anywhere on the internet or senate.gov What I would like to point out though is that Congress did not have the power to create a dept. of Education, fund it, and demand all the states take their marching orders from it. In fact by our very founding document, the one every member of Congress gave an oath to God to obey, they were not granted the power to do that, the states were supposed to be in control of their education system.
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State of FL is doing a really fascinating experiment in school choice right now. Anybody with kids can apply and get an $8k/kid scholarship from the state to put toward sending their kid to a private school, or even use for certain types of homeschool expenses: curricula, tutors, private lessons, sports, that sort of thing (there are some pretty stringent rules, not a free for all). There are, predictably, little private schools popping up everywhere. My cousin (who used to be principal of a very successful charter school) just started one. Locally, I know a guy administering a new itty bitty classical school.
No idea how that’ll turn out in the long run– I expect there will be some gaming of the system, or a change of admin, and it’ll get axed or saddled with so many regulations it’s not worth doing anymore… I’m waiting and watching to see what happens with that, before applying (heaven knows it’d be great to be able to use it to pay for swim coaching and music lessons!), as I don’t trust free money. But so far… I’m delighted that we’re actually running the experiment. There’s griping in other parts of the state that they are having to shut down some really dismal public schools already because so many parents have availed themselves. And the thing is: the scholarship is less than the annual cost of a student in the public school system, so it’ll probably save the state money *and* give kids better alternatives.
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That bit right there, “But so far… I’m delighted that we’re actually running the experiment.” That is one of the reasons the States were to be more independent. We were not supposed to be a one size fits all country. Instead each individual State would run things in concurrence to their own populations wishes. This would allow for new ideas and ways of doing things, instead of locking everyone into a single failing standard. Which was how things were originally set up to be.
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Yeah, the school system nationally is in a sad state. I’d love to see individual states, and even counties, running ALL the experiments. Let’s try everything and figure out what works!
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You’d think that diversity should include diverse approaches but no such luck.
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We’re trying it though! It’s exciting!
My cousin’s charter was a really neat school, everybody loved it– they were teaching the core subjects, plus swimming, sailing, scuba, and marine biology, I think. And then the school board got territorial and started insisting on micromanaging everything. Cousin left, started a private school, and took every single teacher with her. This school year is gonna be LIT as the kids say. Enrollment’s already doubled.
Our church is running through the logistics of whether we can start our own school now. Everybody’s keen on having one, but nobody’s actually done it before.
What I’m hearing through the grapevine is that the state scholarships are allowing very small private schools to actually pay their teachers better than the public schools did– an actual living wage.
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I live in a different state that has created a voucher system that can be used for private schools. It seems like the private schools here all took this as an opportunity to jack up tuition rates so that the poor still have no choice because of the increased prices.
I have really mixed feelings about these voucher programs. Having a variety of options is definitely a good thing, and I know there are some really good private schools out there, but there are also some that are far worse than public schools. I know people who went to Catholic schools in my city and got great educations, I have no issues with some tax money flowing into that system, but one of my family members sent her kids to a small Christian school for a couple of years that was poorly run and had the kids doing all sorts of nonsense. They made them memorize really obscure parts of the Bible and they “learned” Latin starting in the first grade from a teacher who didn’t actually know any Latin herself. Every kid who left that place for the local public schools (and tons of kids did because the place was a mess) was years behind in math and reading skills. There was all sorts of family drama about the kids going to that school, and I would not want to see any tax dollars supporting a place like that.
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I am very much of two minds about it. I myself attended a very experimental little church school for my middle school years. I, and every fellow student who went there that I’ve been in touch with since, have fond memories of it. And nobody likes middle school, so that is really saying something! My sister taught latin the first year, and the second year, not having any teacher available, we used a self-study curricula. Did we become latin scholars? No. But I remember a surprising amount of what we did learn: basic grammar, a lot of vocabulary, and I can still use it to decipher latin quips from literature, pick apart root words, and figure out the occasional unfamiliar Spanish vocab. No teacher at all, just 8 kids lying on the carpet around a tape player, following along in our books. And none of my public school peers had any Latin at all.
We had so much freedom those years, as a result of the smallness of the school, and the informality of it: we volunteered on an archaeological dig, we all got our RedCross CPR/First Aid certifications, we went sailing on a historical replica tallship. Every one of us became proficient at touch-typing even though it was in no way part of the curricula– we were all just competing for high score on the Typing Tutor game on the classroom computer. I’m not sure there’s any objective assessment that would’ve rated that school as academically excellent. Whose standards would you use? There are a lot of objectively true things you could say about it that would make it seem badly run, but… we loved it, we learned a tremendous amount that was useful to us right through into adulthood, even though half the teachers were uncertified and a lot of the curricula was patched together on the fly. It was brilliant.
Reading Daniel Greenberg’s *Free at Last* helped me clarify what was going on there– he did follow-up interviews with grads of the Sudbury Valley school, an experimental Free School in MA. There was no curricula, only materials. Students were allowed to do as they liked, run around campus, read books, play games, use tools, whatever. Supervised but not led. Adults were present only as facilitators– they could answer questions, and get kids “licensed” to use the more dangerous things like power tools.
Students of the school often graduated missing huge chunks of what kids would normally learn in school– history, say, or science, might be entirely skipped. And it didn’t matter in the end. They had been well served by the culture of freedom and exploration and independence at the school, and were able to pursue the career paths and secondary education of their choice without problems. In some cases, they spent half a year “catching up” on any missed stuff they needed to start college, and were fine. Which says as much about the way we teach ordinary rote subjects in public school as anything else: what does it mean that a normal non-genius kid who’s never had regular science classes, can get up to college-entry speed on all that in six months of independent reading?
Yes, there are bad schools with bad internal culture and bad admin. I think that is every bit as likely in public schools as it is with private ones, probably moreso. Do you object to public funds being spent on bad public schools? But with public schools the parents have less influence. If you don’t like what your church school is doing, you can take your kid out. And frankly, if you don’t like the priorities of the church that’s running the school (memorizing obscure parts of the Bible…), then you’ve got no business enrolling your kid there anyway. Parents who just want a public-school alternative but aren’t onboard with the religion in question, need to stop bloody enrolling their kids in religious schools and then complaining when they teach religion. That’s bollocks.
Running a school is a lot of work, and they should try it sometime instead of inflicting themselves on church schools. From the admin side, it is a constant challenge trying to figure out how to be ‘open’ to families from, say, other denominations or religions, and not letting them totally ruin your school. Most end up with some kind of statement of faith and conduct you have to sign onto, but plenty of parents are willing to sign in bad faith just so junior doesn’t have to go to the public middle.
I went to a couple of different Presbyterian schools. I did not become Presbyterian, but they did a very thorough job of religious education that has served me well throughout my adult life. I know what is in the Bible, I know what Calvinists believe, and I had at least an overview of what most of the larger Christian denominations believe, as well as the other major religions. I would appreciate that cultural literacy even if I had not remained a Christian.
That said, I have reservations about private schools accepting public funding at all. My sister went to a really superb tiny Catholic college, got a great education there, and ten years later when I was looking at colleges, I went for a visit and did their summer scholar program. I would have loved to attend. But in the intervening years, the school had started accepting federal student assistance money– Pell grants and such. It was supposed to help lower-income students be able to attend. But actually what happend is fed money came with all sorts of strings attached. Now they had to meet quotas, every part of every building (the buildings were 200 years old) had to be ADA compliant. As a direct result of accepting federal money, the school’s tuition went up so much that I could not dream of affording it, once I was old enough, even though I was offered a scholarship. I went to the local community college and then state school instead… and ultimately did not finish because what was the point?
So… when your local schools started taking state money and then jacked up tuition, was it because they were greedy and they *could*, was it because they needed to keep the riffraff out to make their core customers happy? Or was it because the money came with so many strings attached that their physical plant and admin costs skyrocketed? Any idea? This is one of the reasons I’m holding off on trying out the scholarship with my own kids… waiting to see what strings are attached. So far, so good. At the same time as the program launched, state law was amended to make it easier on the permitting side for new schools to use existing buildings such as churches, theaters, and other facilities, precisely so they wouldn’t get stuck in that quagmire. But it hasn’t been in place long enough to see whether this will actually work out.
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I really wish I could give multiple thumbs up, as this one definitely qualified.
Your not wrong on the strings attached to federal funds, those are no joke.
As for the students missing chunks of education, is it really a problem if its not something that will effect them? I mean I work in finance, we handle the money, do you know what level math is required? Its basic arithmetic, subtraction, multiplication, and division. We don’t need calculus, geometry or anything above basic level math?. Any of the other types, seriously never even touched. As for literature, I am an avid reader, I read at least 2 books a week, sometimes up to 15 books a week, (yes 15), I hated with a passion our literature classes that were required. Why the frick would I need to know what a author wanted to convey. 9 times out of 10, they were simply writing, not trying to communicate some secret of the universe. Or to put it another way, an apple on a table, is probably just an apple on a table, not some metaphor for life. My point though is, I fully approve of that school in MA you were talking about. That seems like a school I would have loved to attend.
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I think it still exists. In theory I like the model, but like with any school, I reckon more depends on the individual people running it, and the internal culture it develops, than the specifics of what it teaches or its organization and philosophy.
In the end, *who* seems to matter more than the *what*.
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