Posted on 09/09/2016 7:23:50 AM PDT by Kaslin
On September 1, the Center for American Progress (CAP), a group of self-proclaimed “progressives,” declared in a headline on its website, “Trump’s Plan to Eliminate the Department of Education is Yet Another in a List of Terrible Ideas.”
In addition to being an example of “terrible” headline writing, CAP’s proclamation is just one of many horrific and long-standing progressive mantras that have been used and reused for decades.
“Donald Trump is again proposing to eliminate or drastically cut the U.S. Department of Education,” the article’s author wrote. Doing so “could mean that more than 8 million low-income students … would lose millions of dollars for college.”
Will Ragland, campaign director at CAP’s action fund, said, “A Trump presidency would devastate state and district education budgets and exacerbate inequities between the working class and the wealthy elite.”
The article goes on to claim, “Trump’s proposal also means that over 490,000 teacher positions could be eliminated—14 percent of K-12 public school teachers nationwide. This would have a terrible effect on the U.S. economy. The loss of that many jobs would be like UPS—one of the country’s largest employers, with over 350,000 American workers—going out of business.”
It’s interesting CAP uses UPS, a privately owned and operated company, as a parallel in its dire public-teacher layoff scenario. If UPS goes out of business, would packages stop getting mailed across the world? Would all logistics operations stop on the spot? My bet is FedEx, DHL, and others would step up and fill the void. The “terrible” part would be the possibility of having to rely more on the U.S. Postal Service, a government-run agency that lost $5.1 billion in 2015 alone.
If the DOE teaching positions were eliminated, would those 490,000 public school teachers abruptly not know how to teach anymore, or would the children they were employed to teach suddenly disappear? CAP portrays the U.S. education system as all but disappearing in the absence of the federal government’s oversight, so how is it that our great-grandparents and generations that came before DOE’s massive expansion in the 1960s managed to become educated? And, by the way, weren’t American students better-educated relative to the rest of the world back then?
Kind of makes you wonder: What does DOE do, anyway?
The agency’s first duty, according to its website, is to “[establish] policies relating to federal financial aid for education, administer distribution of those funds and monitor their use.”
Student loan debt in the United States is now at historic highs, currently listed at $1.3 trillion, and there’s no end in sight.NBC News declared earlier in 2016 the “tangled financial aid process” has deepened the “college affordability crisis.”People are taking on debt that burdens them well into old age, and college graduates still aren’t finding meaningful jobs.
Time.com similarly reported,“Student loan debt is increasing because government grants and support for postsecondary education have failed to keep pace with increases in college costs. Since family income has been flat since 2000, students must either borrow more to pay for college or enroll in lower-cost colleges. That shift in enrollment, from private colleges to public colleges and from four-year colleges to two-year ones, has also been responsible for a decline in bachelor’s degree attainment among low- and moderate-income students.”
It doesn’t sound as though DOE is doing a very good job at fulfilling one of its primary duties, does it?
The agency names three other main responsibilities: “collecting data and overseeing research on American schools, identifying the major issues and problems in education and focusing national attention on them, and enforcing federal statutes prohibiting discrimination.”
How well has DOE done at accomplishing these goals?
DOE has provided hundreds of millions of dollars to support the increasingly unpopular Common Core State Standards,which data show are not preparing students for a career or college. Our children are not leaving public schools prepared to compete against other countries, either. In a 2013 piece analyzing “American Schools vs. the World,” The Atlantic labeled U.S. schools as “expensive, unequal, and bad at math.”
Does anyone, other than teachers unions, really think a gigantic nationalized agency is qualified to mandate education across our diverse nation? Parents certainly don’t think so. Thousands of students across the country are stuck on school choice waiting lists, hoping—in some cases, desperately—to be able to attend a school other than the closest government-operated school. And by the way, these programs, which have been much maligned by many government-school advocates and teachers unions, benefit poor and minority students the most and often save school districts money. More and more parents, including black families, are also homeschooling their children every year.
Getting rid of DOE is not a crazy, right-wing conspiracy. FreedomWorks’ Julie Borowski points out, “Eliminating the Department of Education used to be a standard Republican talking point. In 1980, Ronald Reagan ran on abolishing the federal department soon after Jimmy Carter created it. The 1996 GOP platform read, ‘he Federal government has no constitutional authority to be involved in school curricula or to control jobs in the market place.’”
DOE is a wretched and intrusive experiment that has cost taxpayers billions of dollars since it was created and has failed to accomplish most of its primary goals. DOE has not proven its value. It’s time to cut funding for this unconstitutional, worthless agency and return control of education to state and local governments and, most importantly, to parents.
the DOE has NOTHING to do with education - it doesn’t even teach a single student.
The way to attack it? Student debt. the DOE has literally made millions of Americans debt slaves to their government. And this is not regular debt, this is debt that can NOT be discharged in bankruptcy. You are indentured slaves to the US Government, people. Is that what “the land of the free” is all about?
However did we survive before the DOE was created in 1980? We must have been a nation of knuckle dragging, ignorant dullards.
>>a group of self-proclaimed “progressives,”
I can’t take a person seriously who says this. The Progressive Movement has existed for over a century as a growing cancer eating away at the USA. We have a obligation to educate ourselves on this enemy and not to wish them away with quotation marks.
It’s like saying that the red spot on your skin is just a mole, but some Doctor keeps calling it a “cancer”.
Another bloated bureaucracy that needs to be left to the individual states.
Yeah the DOE does a great job training teachers with boring PD taught by crusty people who make $200,000 a year and have never stepped in a classroom.
The Department f Education was created by Jimmy Carter as a sop to the Teacher’s Union for their support.
How many employees?
Teachers’ unions as well. Remember the NYC teacher’s union leader who said that he’d only be concerned about the good of the kids when they started paying union dues?
I saw that coming. And, of course, they claim that the cuts are to pay for tax cuts for the rich. The State and local governments can pay for their schools with the savings of their citizens not having to pay the federal government.
Wow I thought Donald Trump was not a conservative—
Shut
It
Down
Ron Paul made this a Key Part of his Platform in 2008
Property taxes are supposed to pay for schools and education. Where I grew up. 80% of all property taxes were used for education, and that education was notorious for being 2+ years ahead of the national average. When states have to funnel their tax dollars to the central government, not much is left for education. From each according to his ability......right? /not!
Trump’s policies and plans are likely to force a whole lotta change and a shuffling of the cards. We need that.
Eliminating the Department of Education would certainly result in different approaches to educating our children. I thought liberals would embrace such diversity.
which he said would fix the education system already fixed by the 2001 GW Bush and Ted Kennedy legislation called “No Child Left Behind,”
which was supposed to fix a system supposedly already fixed by a 1994 piece of federal legislation called “Goals 2000,”
which was supposed to fix a system already fixed by “America 2000,”
which was a 1991 response during the Bush administration to a 1983 federal report on education called “A Nation at Risk,
which was published a full four years after Jimmy Carter first fixed the nation’s public school system by establishing a cabinet-level Department of Education in 1979.
The Department of Education is a useless redundancy.
It provides no multiplier of any kind to the education of a child. More than anything else, it’s bureaucracy soaks up money that otherwise could go to states or localities in the form of bloc grants.
If we have a textbook advisor at the local or district level, then there’s little reason to have one at the state level and no reason to have one at the national level.
If we have social services, intervention, special needs, etc., etc. at the local, district, and/or state levels, that is already too much duplication.
The Department of Education is useless. It’s only purpose is the consolidation of power. It is not about getting kids educated.
Revert it and its budgets all back to the states.
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