Should education be left to the states to administer?

I personally believe we should get rid of the Department of Education, and push anything related to education down to the state and local levels. Do you agree or disagree, and why? Feel free to discuss...

 

The federal government has no constitutional authority to administer education. It should be left up to the state/local government.

 

I agree. The federal government has no constitutional authority to administer education. Education ultimately is the responsibility of the parents, not the government.

 

How do you see national college admissions being handled if there isn't federal oversight of schools? How are they to compare the results of students from different states? The same question arises, even more so, if control lies at the local level without even state oversight. One local school is going to give everyone lots of "A"s to keep parents happy, one is going to rewrite history to suit themselves, one is going to to teach religion and call it "science", and so on. It is only some sort of central oversight that allows the results of one school to be compared with the results of another.

 

Read the 10th Amendment to our constitution. There is no mention of education in our constitution. We don't have national college admissions now.

 

Like it's done now. Evaluating transcripts and using standardized test scores (ACT and SAT).

See above--just like they've done for the past 60 years or so.

The above doesn't happen in real life. Parents don't want everybody to have A's. They just want their child to have A's. Schools seemed to do fairly well before the feds got intrusive in the 1970s.

 

Sweden has a notoriously Sovjetesque central-planned education and now look at where we stand; teachers earn garbage money, there is a huge shortage of teachers and student permormance is really bad and Sweden are not even top 10 on the PISA-report.

And American Socialists usually point at Sweden as some kind of role model.

The closer the control of school (and everything else really) to the people, the better.

 

Except for student loan programs, yes. Until President Trump gives us free vouchers for Trump U, we will still need loans.

 

How was it handled before the Department of Education each college and university decided on their own admissions standards for example their own in house admissions tests or other means to pick students. And there are the ACT and SAT tests which could be used to see if students are ready to graduate. Or just trust educators to educate.

 

There are already severe problems with grade inflation and letters of recommendation that are meaningless.

As far as national standards go, there is still the SAT and ACT that universities can use, and many have writing samples and interviews as part of the admissions process.

And it schools give out "A"s, it is up to them. And it would be better to have local institutions - with more control by parents - "rewrite" history, than have the Central Authority rewrite it.

 

In Canada (which is more socialist than the US in many regards) primary and secondary education is mandated at the State/Provincial level. I think this is better because it allows the states more freedom to experiment with innovative approaches. It's harder to break away from the outdated model of a comprehensive school system, which locks students in a grade level, when everything is centralized.

Universities are usually joint public/private ventures at the State level that receive funding from the federal government. Ultimately in today's day and age, where it is becoming more difficult to get a good paying job without a high skilled education, I support federal involvement to keep the tuition down.

 

An excellent question posed by OP. I agree that the federal government has no legitimate role in education. At the time, I'm sure it sounded like a good idea, but all these years later can a case be made that federal involvement has improved education in any way?

So maybe a better question would be that: has federal involvement improved education in this country? Has it been cost effective?

 

Here is the budget information for the Dept. of Education since 1980.

Data from: https://www2.ed.gov/about/overview/budget/history/edhistory.pdf

The total is:

$1,432,736,720,000

1.4 trillion dolllars since 1980

If it cost $100,000 per book to create a 10,000 book National Recomended Reading List for K-12, that would only come to One Billion Dollars. The list should include a paragraph or two for each book explaining why it qualifies.

But have any of our federal education bureaucrats suggested such a thing?

Cur their budget to $5 billion per year and give them the task of doing nothing but creating and maintaining a National Recommended Reading list, not to be greater than 20,000 books.

Of course the state and local governments can use or ignore the list as they wish. But students and parents can access the on-line database also. California has one that is really stupid.

http://www3.cde.ca.gov/reclitlist/search.aspx

psik

 

Take any beautiful concept there is and add the prefix "state" and it will turn disgusting. School is no exception.

A state runned school is about as Orwellian it gets. It is a Socialist idea that has the purpose of indoctrinating and shaping the perfect worker/citizen (obviously this, being Socialism, fails and generates horrible results). Each generation that graduates state school gets mire and more stupid and the teachers have laughable salaries. I see nothing positive with a state-run education.

 

Probably 90% of us are products of state schools.

 

And look at our society.

 

I’m going to get very controversial here! I think the biggest problem with our schools today are the teacher unions! 98% of all teachers are great people and they should be paid more than they are getting. We should be raising teacher salaries to entice even better and better teachers, BUT, if you do find on of the 2% who can’t do the job, we should be able to fire them. AND if they become one of those rogue college professors who wants to rant on a campus that we should over through our government, we should fire his butt too, what the heck is tenure anyway.

And as far as the children in the classroom, I don’t care if Johnny is left behind. If he comes to school, yells at the teacher, and totally disrupts the classroom, through his butt out!

If a student can’t keep up with the curriculum, don’t slow down the entire classroom, make allowances for each student to learn at their own level.

 

We already had 50 Departments of Education before they created the Federal Department of Education. Anything a state can screw up, a country can screw up worse.

We had good schools 50 years ago. They were locally ran and financed. The teachers would rank us for reading and math and then they would divide us by ability so that we could work at a common pace. The faster kids learned more than the slower kids, but everyone learned as much as they were able and people often moved up or down between classes according to their performance. All other subjects were taught with your regular class. (I assume chosen randomly.)

I say scrap the federal department. Read my signature.

 

The Fed needs to be kicked out of education it the worse thing Jimmy Carter did as President. Used too if your parents did not care and you did not care we were able to kick you out for good and you were to root hog or die. We waste too much time on the bottom 1/3 and not enough on the middle and top 1/3's of the student population.

 

I support the idea.

 

Yes. And based on the growth of the home school movement here in California, I'd say that the verdict is in. Parents want their kids to have a solid education, plain and simple, and that is not happening under the federalized public school system.

The free market should drive education. When that happens, the results will speak for themselves. If you centralize things and let poor teachers entrench themselves in that system, those results will speak for themselves as well.

Perhaps. But that's neither here nor there. The real question should be whether that 90% received the best education to which they were entitled. For many, the resounding answer is "no".

Both excellent points. We have managed to create a system that worries more about ineffective teachers and disruptive students than it does about students which want to learn and teachers which want to teach them.

I agree 100%.

Yup. I'm still looking for what the Constitution says about education, but I'm fairly certain the 10th Amendment means what it says about leaving things not specifically stated as being the responsibility of the federal government to the states.

Perhaps one of the most important shortcomings of the educational system used during the past 40 or 50 years is the ability of those educated under it to perform a simple cost benefit analysis.

 

Abortion is not mentioned in the Constitution either but the right wants the federal government to ban it.

Education:
Which of these do you disagree with?...

1) Education is a national "good". An educated society is a benefit to all.

2) All citizens should have an equal opportunity to get an education.

3) Scattered "pockets" of excellent schools and of poor, ineffective schools are not acceptable. All schools should be as effective as possible, thus providing relatively equal opportunity.

4) Quality education should not be for sale to the highest bidder.

 

1) Yes it is.

2) No, they should get some level of education of one is for example too disabled to benefit why poor in more money than is needed on them, say they have an IQ of 65, they likely aren't college material and learning a skilled trade is unlikely so why invest in more education than say 8th grade then employment and life skills to be marketable to employers and have as full a life as possible is fair. And brilliant students will find a way no matter what to be successful. But society offers free public libraries and will never eliminate public schools so there is a basic education for all if one uses these and their own creativity.

3) No, why take away from good schools to schools poor performing who have students who may not care but gifted students and those wishing to learn a career trade should have the opportunities to do so.

4) Why not, the well off and those who make he commitment will always have private options as well as those who opt to homeschool sacrificing for their children, the public schools and I include universities should be adequate overall and if a university as inexpensive as possible for state residents while limiting admission to only qualified students.

 

I didn't say everyone should get the same amount/level of information. I said everyone should have the same opportunity. I.e. the same opportunity to pass or flunk final exams in high school, the same opportunity to pass or flunk college entrance exams if they successfully finished high school, etc.

what? In spite of your difficulty with writing sentences, I think I understand what you're saying. And if I do, the problem is much the same as in the case of #2 above. Again, I spoke of opportunity. Not equal funding, equal students, equal equal equal. So I consider neither 2 nor 3 to have been addressed by you.

I see you have a problem with education: yours. That is not a sentence. But again, I think I get what you are trying to say so poorly. And my answer is that if we allow high quality private schools with high tuition, we will end up with all the best teachers wanting to teach there to make top dollar, the students being just those of the richest who can afford it, other students of families with average income relegated to inferior schools. And this will lead to the kids of the richest being the best educated and worthy of the best jobs with the best incomes.

That is a non-starter for reasonable and intelligent people.

 

Agree. Turn it all back to the states and local school boards.