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Abolish the U.S. Department of Education: For the Children!
January 22, 2004It's all about educash and edulaws.
Two articles by Heartland Institute staffers on school budgets and red tape raise some questions regarding the connection between dollars and regulations. In Where Do Public Education Dollars Go? we learn that out of $410 billion spent on US public education in the school year ending 2001, 52% went for instruction, while 29% went for support services.
Only fifty-two percent!?
The same article reports that only 7% of public education revenue comes from federal sources. Is it possible that many of the dollars going to "support services" are because of regulations, especially federal ones? But isn't there something absurd about the fine citizens of Duluth helping fund school children in Philadelphia? Isn't a more reasonable solution to have the good people of Philadelphia and the rest of Pennsylvania be responsible for their own schools?
David W. Kirkpatrick's article The Schools and Red Tape contains an especially eye-opening section:
A school superintendent in suburban Philadelphia once said he had to comply with 1,027 mandates, 70 percent of which were unfunded. Ohio Governor, now U.S. Senator, George Voinovich estimated Ohio school administrators spent 50 percent of their time filling out federal forms, which accounted for only 6 percent of education funding there. Arizona's chief school officer, Lisa Graham Keegan, said it took 165 of her staff, 45 percent of the total, to manage federal programs that comprised only 6 percent of her budget.Isn't it just possible that the Federal government gives more of a burden than a helping hand to schools? If 45% of Arizona's state education staff manage programs that comprise 6% of the budget, wouldn't the money saved by eliminating the management of the federal programs (and complying with the miles of red tape) help defray the lost revenue by eliminating the federal funding?
The USDoE has estimated its requirements impose 48.6 million hours of paperwork, the equivalent of 25,000 full-time employees.
The anguished knee-jerk reaction to the proposal that the U.S. Dept of Ed be abolished is usually "doesn't the United States care about the education of its children?" Sure, it sounds cold-hearted if you look no further than the end of your nose. But consider a few facts.
- There was no Department of Education before 1979. (Does this mean school kids were out in the cold prior to that watershed date? Hardly. It was created by President Carter as a sop to the teacher unions.)
- There are Departments of Education in every state of the union. (Isn't it possible that these good people, who are tending bureaucracies of their own, can manage the education of their state's children without the Fed's meddling?)
- The US Constitution doesn't support a role of the Federal government in public education. (There's this little thing called the Tenth Amendment: "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.")
- Isn't reducing the size of our beloved Washington D.C. bureaucracy always a good thing?
Former secretaries of education Lamar Alexander and William Bennett have stated that the department has ''an irresistible and uncontrollable impulse to stick its nose into areas where it has no proper business. Most of what it does today is no legitimate affair of the federal government. The Education Department operates from the deeply erroneous belief that American parents, teachers, communities and states are too stupid to raise their own children, run their own schools and make their own decisions.''Are we saying that there aren't good ideas in Federal programs like No Child Left Behind? No. But ideas are free, federal regulations and programs aren't.
Break the chains.
Portions of this entry originally appeared in TheInternetParty.org, dedicated to smaller government and greater individual liberty.
Whenever the gov/bureaucracy gets involved in any endeavor, it immediately sets standards and requirements for whatever "product" it may be procuring, whether it be education or hammers. Of course, to ensure that the "purchaser" is getting it's money's worth and not being "cheated" there must be tests and validation that the product being procured meets the specified standards and requirements. In this case, that is probably where much if not all of the 29% for "support services" went. Of course, the supplier appends the cost of meeting these standards or testing the total cost of the product to verify it "meets spec" and passes on the costs. Thus the cost of the product is now inflated by the necessary "verification and compliance costs". This higher cost immediately alarms the buyer, whose general reaction is that the product is overpriced, and that the supplier must be "cheating" the buyer, and then adds additional requirements and oversight (cost accounting) requirements. These, of course cost money to provide and are also appended to the cost of the product. . . . and the cycle continues. That's how in the defense business the senator or congressman who knows he can go to Sears and buy a hammer for $20 is agahst that when the government buys the same hammer (according to spec and cost accounting requirements set forth by the buyer) it costs $600!
harvey January 23, 2004 02:36 PMThe state of Utah's legislature is in session right now, and they're considering opting out of the federal funding to avoid the excess cost of unfunded mandates. I don't know how seriously they are taking this proposal, but they're at least considering it as an option. Also one state rep is proposing (more seriously) a moratorium on new state educational laws this year, citing administrative expenditures in trying to meet all the mandates of educational laws of years past.
Wacky Hermit January 23, 2004 02:58 PMWhat Harvey said. I've seen it in defense contracting, from two sides: as an Air Force repair tech ordering custom-made brass nuts at $200 apiece (for example), and as an engineer at a defense contractor. To meet the requirements of proving you're not cheating the government, you need one QA person and almost one accountant for every person doing the job. Since the company gets to keep 10% of the payroll and other expenses for all those extra employees, from any rational standpoint, we WERE cheating the government - at their request.
markm January 23, 2004 05:12 PM