education legislation - ungood!
by Graham Bradley
Published: February 8, 2008
If you still don’t think Big Brother is watching, take a closer look at education in the United States.
Education has two critics: those who say we waste too much money on it, and those who say we’re not wasting enough. Respectively, these are conservatives and liberals. On a federal level, there is nothing in the United States Constitution that says the government should provide public education. That means it’s left to each individual state. States’ rights are part of what’s at stake in the “federal education” argument. In recent generations that has changed little by little, as more and more federal legislation has taken control of state programs. The most recent offender on this front is the No Child Left Behind Act.
Called the NCLB for short, this program, enacted by President Bush during one of his more left-leaning stints, expands the power of Congress over education, exceeding the intended Constitutional scope of that same power per the Commerce Clause. Since the initiation of this program, little has been solved if liberal whining is any indication. There are still complaints about the inadequacies of education nationwide, and often one hears cries about how more money is spent on the military than on teaching our children.
What have we gained then? An expansion of government with no effect on the original problem? Brilliant.
All the while, teachers have heavier burdens placed on them. Not only are they subjected to more rigorous standards of preparation by the NCLB, some in the form of quotas, but they are also required to take charge of extracurricular programs, to say nothing of the hours of personal time they must spend grading tests and papers for their students. A standard work week for a teacher in any given state greatly exceeds forty hours, yet their pay with benefits is only slightly greater than most entry-level jobs in manual labor industries.
So despite the expansion of government and despite matching incremental increases in taxes, we are going where? Teacher salaries have not increased, which means they will not be incentivized to improve the quality of their work, which means nothing will change.
Programs designed to justly combat this problem have been repeatedly shut down. Take school vouchers for instance; you pay your taxes to the government, but you’re not satisfied with your public school, so you want your money back to send your kid somewhere else. Well, you’re more than welcome to do that so long as you pay the government AND the private school. Ultimate fairness, right? That’s why liberals are against it. It’s both fair and limiting to the power of government.
Of course, the bulk of the problems with public education would disappear if the students in the system would be more responsible and if analysts of the system wouldn’t blame all student failures on the schools. Sure, there are schools that aren’t up to par; but how many of these students do their homework like they’re supposed to? How many of them pay attention in class? How many of them, in turn, waste time playing video games or rotting in front of asinine TV shows?
If teachers had the power to discipline kids today like they could forty or fifty years ago, then education would produce better results in the form of higher graduation rates like they did forty or fifty years ago.
Put the power back in the hands of individual states. Cut spending on wasteful projects, balance the burden placed on teachers and above all, put it in the heads of the students that it’s their job to work through school and learn. They have a greater role in gaining their own education than the teacher does.
The bulk of legislation in the education arena has done nothing more than expand government, increase costs, augment the burden on teachers and remove responsibility from the students. At this rate, government won’t have to implement the Orwellian “Newspeak” of 1984; kids will be so dumb they won’t know how to speak correctly and we’ll all be too broke and subjugated to do anything about it.
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