Remember when Senate HELP Committee Chairman Lamar Alexander sheepdogged the No Child Left Behind rewrite bill through Congress, and this author and colleagues argued it would not “end the national school board,” as Alexander promised? That was just four months ago. Four. Alexander himself now agrees with us – conveniently after rushing the bill into law.
Alexander has been beating his chest about how the regulatory process is yielding … well, the same thing big government always yields: a bureaucracy that does whatever it wants, a.k.a. torpedoes the rule of law and government by consent. Susan Berry at Breitbart.com reports:
During an oversight hearing of the Senate Health Education, Labor and Pensions Committee (HELP), chairman Alexander told Education Secretary John King that in a negotiated rulemaking session, “your department proposed a rule that would do exactly what the law says it shall not do. … Not only is what you’re doing against the law, the way you’re trying to do it is against another provision in the law.”
Someone get the smelling salts! An administrative agency assuming it’s above the law? Maybe Alexander should have thought about this possibility when he increased funding for and granted vast power to the U.S. Department of Education (USDOE) via the Every Student Succeeds Act, especially since the department has been ignoring the law’s boundaries for essentially the entire duration of President Barack Obama’s tenure, starting with pushing states into Common Core and illegally creating national tests. That should have been a major clue that bureaucrats are laughing at elected lawmakers like Alexander behind closed doors.
Former U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan even said as much after ESSA passed, telling Politico, “We were intentionally quiet on the bill – they asked us specifically not to praise it – and to let it get through.” “They,” by the way, were not Democratic strategists, but Republican leaders – like Alexander. Someone tell me why Tennesseans keep electing this double-crosser.
This episode is yet another reminder of why federal agencies should not be permitted to control state and local school systems. If Congress can’t stop agencies it ostensibly oversees from breaking the law, what’s the point of Congress? Both Congress and USDOE have proven they cannot be trusted with power over education, continually promising one thing and delivering the opposite. This is yet another reason to oppose a new bill working its way through Congress, which would grant the government more power to psychologically profile children and attach that information to them for life.
Look: Federal involvement in education, Cato Institute research shows, has not coincided with any benefits to American children. If they aren’t doing well with the job they’re doing now, it’s senseless to give them even more responsibilities. It’s time to devolve power to the people closest to children, to stop these rampant abuses of power that serve only to benefit the ruling class at the expense of all the rest of us.
(For details on the regulations prompting this controversy, see here.)
SOURCES: Breitbart.com, Education Next, Townhall.com, Washington Times
IN THIS ISSUE
- DC: After failing to embed a renewal for DC’s voucher program in a must-pass federal bill, as is customary to get it past Obama, congressional Republicans and a handful of Democrat compatriots are trying to renew it in a standalone bill. Meanwhile, new federal data show parents of DC voucher students are extremely satisfied with the program and academic quality is their biggest priority in using vouchers.
- INDIANA: This past school year, the state’s voucher program growth rate was the slowest it’s ever been since arriving five years ago, at 12 percent. Just under 3 percent of Indiana schoolchildren are enrolled.
- KANSAS: Lawmakers have proposed an education savings account program that will also overhaul the state’s education finance system
- COLORADO: The Institute for Justice and a set of parents are suing the Douglas County School District for limiting the local voucher program to nonreligious schools.
- MICHIGAN, CALIFORNIA: Some Detroit parents spend hours getting their kids to and from schools every day, just for the chance they’ll get a better education: “It would be a blessing if you could get a quality education in your own community where you don’t have to get up extra early and travel.” In California, a mother who made a 100-mile round-trip commute to put her child in a charter school has now brought that charter school to her town.
- MARYLAND: School choice supporters celebrate a bitty new voucher program that will benefit approximately 1,000 low-income students. It’s Maryland’s first school choice law.
- MICHIGAN: Sending Detroit yet more millions of dollars when it has disastrously spent its previous billions is foolish, says House Education Committee member Tim Kelly. Instead, he proposes amending the state constitution to allow school vouchers and other choice-oriented reforms.
- GEORGIA: This fall, voters will encounter this question on their ballots: “Should Georgia empower parents with the right to use the tax dollars allocated for the education of their children, allowing them the freedom to choose among public, private, virtual, and home schools?”
- TENNESSEE: Two legislative committees have approved a bill that would allow children to use some of their state education money to take classes in nearby public school districts, a limited form of a “course access” program.
- COLORADO: As Denver has expanded charter schools and allowed families other public school options, its student achievement has climbed significantly, finds a new study.
- FLORIDA: Gov. Rick Scott has signed a bill allowing parents to enroll their children in any public school in the state, providing it agrees to take the child and parents provide transportation.
Common Core and Curriculum Watch
- TESTING: Thanks to federal pressure to use national Common Core exams before they’d been tried out, 30 states have experienced massive testing problems since 2013 that call into question the accuracy of student test results. New Jersey may have experienced one of the biggest testing problems with national Common Core tests – they don’t yet know if students will test this spring at all.
- REPEAL, REPLACE: A new report shows how states can replace Common Core and ensure testing mandates are not applying it to schools through the backdoor.
- MASSACHUSETTS: Grassroots folks are going door to door collecting signatures to put a Common Core repeal measure on the ballot.
- IOWA: Lawmakers may pull the state from expensive national Common Core tests.
- MATH: Common Core supporters admit it’s deceptive to claim Common Core is “not a curriculum.”
- TENNESSEE: The state has phased out Common Core by modifying it slightly.
- MISSOURI: The state has finalized its update of Common Core.
- ART HISTORY: The College Board’s new Advanced Placement art history course reinforces leftist-style multiculturalism and relativism.
- SHAKESPEARE: Almost none of the nation’s “leading” colleges and universities requires English majors to study Shakespeare, finds a new report.
- SUPREME COURT: A teacher who is not a union member petitioned courts to be released from paying union fees; after Justice Antonin Scalia’s death, the U.S. Supreme Court delivered a 4–4 decision against her. She has asked the Court to review its decision once the Senate confirms a ninth justice.
- MINNESOTA, CALIFORNIA: Advocacy groups have filed suit against Minnesota’s teacher tenure laws, saying they end up sending worse teachers to the neediest students. This is the third such lawsuit nationwide – the first two are ongoing in California and New York. Meanwhile, a California appeals court has reversed an earlier decision agreeing that teacher tenure laws harm students, and that case will move to the state supreme court.
- STUDENT LOANS: Rising juniors and seniors at Purdue University can finance their educations through an income-share agreement instead of student loans, allowing them to graduate without debt or taxpayer subsidies. An income-share agreement is a new idea in which investors pay a student’s tuition in exchange for receiving a percentage of the student’s future income.
- SCHOOL LUNCH: The House is proposing a bill that would moderate Michelle Obama’s expensive, unworkable 2010 school lunches law.
- NEW YORK: New York City is refusing to release records about the approximately 1,100 teachers it continues to pay but who aren’t working, at a cost to taxpayers of $100 million per year.
- CHARACTER: Teachers who are more attentive to detail and conscientious improve these character skills in their students, finds new research.
Joy Pullmann is a research fellow on education policy for The Heartland Institute and managing editor of The Federalist, a web magazine on politics, policy, and culture.
