Education: is the government doing too much?

 

What does it mean to take a anti-federalist stance when it comes to education? Well, as reported by Trip Gabriel of the New York Times, Michelle Bachmann promises to “turn out the lights” at the federal Education Department. Gov. Rick Perry calls it unconstitutional. Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker, would allow it to live but only as a drastically shrunken agency that mainly gathers statistics. Mitt Romney, too feels as though the government and education should have nothing to do with education. There goes Mitt Romney once again, with his flip flopping ways, as once a defendant of the “no child left behind” law. Anyway, that’s beside the point, but I just thought I’d throw that in there.

The Republican presidential candidates feel as though the states and local districts should take care of the educational system and the government should NOT. States are more likely to know what’s going on with their school districts far better than the government does. The government takes care of the educational system as a whole, not really considering what each school district individually needs.

Margaret Spellings, the education secretary in the latter years of the Bush administration, said that before No Child Left Behind, when federal laws had few strings attached, many states showed little progress raising student achievement, especially for poor and minority students. “We tried that for 40 years,” she said. “The results were far from stellar.”

“People want government money, they want higher standards, they want greater accountability,” said Chester E. Finn Jr., president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative-leaning education policy group, who was an education official in the Reagan administration. “None of those things in most places comes from local control.”

Gabriel write that ”Mr. Perry participated in a news conference heralding federal officials’ approval of the Texas plan for putting the law in place, providing $400 million for the state. But today he complains of “unfunded mandates” in federal education laws that require Texas, he says, to spend more to meet the rules than it receives in federal dollars.”

The issue of the government and educational system has been an issue dating back to Ronald Reagan’s presidency when he tried to do away with it but had no supporters to help him out. That just lead him to create a bigger cause to support it and fund more money. Why did Reagan give up his stance on education and do the total opposite? Education hasn’t really been a huge topic for the candidates but it’s only a matter of time.

If the government isn’t funding education, which is only getting worse as studies have shown, then how is public education going to work? Government funded education opens the doors for the poor and less fortunate who can’t afford private schooling. In my opinion, I don’t think that smaller, less wealthier states will have the proper funding to give towards education and that will only keep the students behind, cause a bigger issue. Let’s just wait and see what the Republicans have in store for us as far as this issue goes and then we’ll decide.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/09/us/politics/gop-anti-federalism-aims-at-education.html?ref=politics