I have no problem with a Dept of Education at the FedGov level. There is merit to having some common guidelines available to all the education systems.
However that department should consist of no more than 6 people whose only job is to produce generic guidelines for education programs used in the individual states. Non of the guidelines will be mandatory and none will carry any sort of punishment should a state ignore it.
They will be sunset every 4 years. If a guideline has merit (as decided by Congress only, no Senate, no POTUS), it will be updated and reinstated.
... just my $0.02 ...
“However that department should consist of no more than 6 people whose only job is to produce generic guidelines for education programs used in the individual states. Non of the guidelines will be mandatory and none will carry any sort of punishment should a state ignore it.”
Six worthless jobs
As a practical matter, maybe, but the deeper principle is that we should run the federal government in accordance with the Constitution (Yeah, I know, I’m a “right wing extremist” because I want the government to actually follow its own rules).
People misunderstand the nature of our federal government, so badly and so universally so that as a practical matter the actual truth about it is flipped 180 degrees. People think (mainly because of a misunderstanding of the supremacy clause) that the federal government is the rightful sovereign entity in America and that the states derive their authority to govern from the federal government. The opposite is the actual structure— it is the states that are the rightful sovereign entities; the federal government derives its authority to govern from the agreement by the states to voluntarily cede their authority to it.
The kicker is that the states never entirely ceded their sovereign authority (although the federal government has mostly usurped it). They ceded their authority only with regard to a limited list of items, which are spelled out explicitly in the Constitution. These are the enumerated powers, and the list was intended to be exhaustive. This was reinforced by the inclusion of the Tenth Amendment in the Bill of Rights stating that powers not explicitly delegated to the federal government are reserved to the states or the people.
Well, the power to regulate education is most certainly not one of the powers that was explicitly enumerated in the Constitution as a power of the federal government. Therefore it is reserved to the states or the people. Of course, the federal government now freely ignores the enumerated powers and the Tenth Amendment, so we have a Department of Education. We have a pretty good Constitution- we really should try using it some time and see what happens.