Education thoughts

I have to give lefties thanks when it's due for bringing things onto my radar that might not otherwise show up.

Today, several rants showed up on my Facebook newsfeed about Betsy DeVos and her views on budget and funding matters for her department. I'd been busy thinking about Kim Foxx and the implosion of the Southern Poverty Law Center and missed coverage of DeVos' appearance before a House committee.

Here's a fairly objective report about it:

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos on Tuesday defended deep cuts to programs meant to help students and others, including eliminating $18 million to support Special Olympics, while urging Congress to spend millions more on charter schools.

"We are not doing our children any favors when we borrow from their future in order to invest in systems and policies that are not yielding better results," DeVos said in prepared testimony before a House subcommittee considering the Department of Education's budget request for the next fiscal year.
It was the first time that DeVos, a wealthy former Michigan Republican Party chairwoman and school choice advocate, had been called before a Democratic-led panel in the U.S. House to explain President Donald Trump's spending priorities.

While proposing to add $60 million more to charter school funding and create a tax credit for individual and companies that donate to scholarships for private schools, DeVos' budget proposal would still cut more than $7 billion from the Education Department, about 10 percent of its current budget. President Trump proposed a $4.7 trillion overall budget this month with an annual deficit expected to run about $1 trillion.

It calls for eliminating billions in grants to improve student achievement by reducing class sizes and funding professional development for teachers as well as cutting funds dedicated to increasing the use of technology in schools and improving school conditions. In many cases, DeVos said the purpose of the grants has been found to be redundant or ineffective.

In the case of the $17.6 million cut to help fund the Special Olympics, a program designed to help children and adults with disabilities, DeVos suggested it is better supported by philanthropy and added, "We had to make some difficult decisions with this budget." 

A fair number of the FB rants focused on the Special Olympics cuts.  I did not see any of the ranters address her assertion that that enterprise is better supported by philanthropy. And that leads me to a very basic question: Why should the federal government be in the Special Olympics business at all?

Seriously. What the hell does it have to do with the core functions of government outlined in the Constitution?

Which in turn leads to the larger question I've asked for years: What justification is there for a federal Department of Education?

In my coverage of local government for some radio stations and a website, I am constantly amazed at the number of local things that happen - some in the education area, but also in stuff like bridge construction and community corrections staffing - as a result of federal grants.

I suppose there's a tilting-at-windmills element involved in asking why that money couldn't stay in our city and county in the first place and not be run through the DC filter where various layers of bureaucracy take their cut for - well, indeed, for what? I guess to come up with the acronyms for the programs by which they send it back to us. The whole scheme is so entrenched in our way of operating as a nation that no one seriously proposes looking at dismantling the whole apparatus, even though it would be the sensible way to proceed.

With the table thus set, may I recommend a piece by the American Enterprise Institute's Frederick Hess at Forbes entitled "The Problem With Senator Harris' Proposal to Have Uncle Sam Boost Teacher Pay." He says that teachers, many of whom do indeed deserve more pay, ought to look at what really erodes their chances of getting it: good old administrative bloat:

. . . here’s the bizarre dynamic at the heart of the challenge: Teachers have a legitimate gripe about take-home pay, even though school spending has steadily gone up over time. Nationally, after-inflation teacher pay actually declined by two percent from 1992 to 2014, even as real per-pupil spending grew by 27%. This disparity is mostly a product of two realities. The first is that schools have added staff—particularly support staff—at a rate that far outpaces growth in student enrollment. Nationally, between 1992 and 2014, student enrollment grew by 20%, the number of teachers by 29%—and non-teaching staff by 47%. The second is that the cost of teacher pensions and health care have eroded paychecks. Nationally, between 2003 and 2014, even as teacher salaries declined, the per-teacher cost of benefits rocketed from $14,000 to $21,000. That’s $7,000 a year that would, other things equal, be showing up in teacher paychecks.

And federalizing teacher pay is only going to add more bureaucrats to the mix.

The first step in curing post-America's education problems is for someone somewhere to quit taking for granted that the federal gravy train ought to be ridden, since it's there. It would take guts, but everything about returning post-America to its previous identity as the United States of America is going to take guts.

And I daresay that hopping off the gravy train would go a long way to rectify the damage being done by the social-justice jackboots. They'll get weeded out as local taxpayers insist on some accountability. Teachers aren't going to be as likely to stand at the front of the classroom and prattle on about gender fluidity and the global climate being in some kind of trouble if no one is goading them with federal dollars.

And people who personally know Special Olympic athletes and care about them and cheer them on in competition would feel a greater sense of connection, since there would be no faraway filter between their dollars and the games and meets.

Freedom is always elegantly simple compared to any alternative. It also has a far greater human touch.