Eliminating The US Department of Education - Common Sense Reform

Socialist President Jimmy Carter created the US Federal Department of Education as a pay off to the teacher unions when he was being challenged by Senator Teddy Kennedy in the Socialist Presidential Primary.   Before then, Education was included in the Health and Human Services Department.   Today, there are about 4,300 employees at the US Department of Education doling out more than $60 Billion in various programs presumably to support public education and college loans etc.  To do so, no doubt several billion dollars of the $60 billion are necessary to support this overlay bureaucracy.   What a waste of money.

A case could easily be made to eliminate the Department of Education, since from its founding three decades ago, student achievement has actually gone down.  Though education is not specifically mentioned in the US Constitution as a federal government responsibility, assuming Congress wants to provide some funding to public schools, monies could just be allocated on a per pupil basis, with twice as much money going to school districts with poor kids.  Do we really need 4,300 federal bureaucrats to hand out $60 Billion.  

Keep in mind, what we have today is the Federal Department of Education, State Departments of Education, County Departments of Education and then local school districts actually charged with educating children.  All of these bureaucrats do nothing but create paper work for each other to justify their jobs and fat pensions.   It is time to get  more money into the classroom by getting rid of all these layers of bureaucracy that do nothing to improve public education.  If anything, these bureaucrats get in the way of improving our schools. 

It is time to get back to basic by making sure that local schools are properly funded.  The answer we always hear from Socialists is that more money is needed to support our schools, when in fact there is more than enough money devoted to public education and more than any other country.  The problem is that too much of it is paying the salaries and overhead to support bureaucrats and not enough is being used to pay good teachers more money through merit pay.  We will never fix public education as long as so much is wasted on the Education Establishment at the expense of kids.  By the way, Common Core, the Federalization of public education is a dumb idea that should be eliminated.   It is just more baloney being used to justify administration jobs and an even bigger education bureaucracy.