Education

Education should be handled without intervention from the federal government. I tremendously value education. I believe that, for most people, education is the key to a higher standard of living. However, I do not believe that education should be part of the role of the federal government.

The current education system is not working well-at least not for Georgia. The State of Georgia ordinarily spends over half of its budget on education. The system is very weak.

Under the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution, the power to oversee education is reserved to the states. According to the CATO Institute, former Secretaries of Education Lamar Alexander and William Bennett have stated that the Department has “an irresistible and uncontrollable impulse to stick its nose into areas where it has no proper business. Most of what it does today is no legitimate affair of the federal government. The Education Department operates from the deeply erroneous belief that American parents, teachers, communities and states are too stupid to raise their own children, run their own schools and make their own decisions.”

According to a September 24, 2007 article by Neal McCluskey of the CATO Institute, concerning the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB): “Improvements on National Assessment of Education Progress math exams have slowed under NCLB, and reading outcomes have either stagnated or declined, depending on the grade. . . . This makes it easy to understand why NCLB is failing, and why since the beginning of the 1970s – the earliest period from which we have continuous data – achievement has stagnated even though inflation-adjusted school spending per pupil has more than doubled. . . .Washington needs to get out of education altogether.”

The most important things in educating a child are: (a) the attitude and ability of the child; (b) the attitude of the parents (which often impacts the attitude of the child); and (c) the quality of the teachers. For better or worse, most education is provided by public schools. Consider that in some places in Georgia you have the following governments involved in education: The federal government, the state government, the county government and city government. Too many cooks spoil the broth (and waste a lot of taxpayer dollars in the process).

The federal government needs to focus its attention on national defense and relations with other countries, the interstate highway and transportation systems, and environmental protection. Accordingly, the U.S. Department of Education should be dismantled, and federal involvement in education should be eliminated altogether.