When Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) revealed a 5-year plan to reduce the federal deficit, it included the total elimination of four federal departments, including the Department of Education. Paul claims that the plan would result in budget surpluses by 2016 which could be then applied to the debt, while his opponents called it “extreme,” “draconian,” and “crazy.”
Yet would eliminating the Department of Education (D0E) really be that horrible for the future of our youth and education in America? The DoE was established by President Carter in 1979 and became active in 1980. In that time, the spending on public education by the federal government has seen a continuous, rapid increase while test scores have shown either no growth or in some case may have gotten worse.
In 1980, the Department of Education’s budget was $20 billion. This year it is almost $90 billion. Over the last thirty years of the DoE’s existence, spending adjusted for inflation has doubled for public education. Since the 1960s the US Government has spent more than a trillion dollars on education. Between 1972 and 1992, the combined math and verbal scores on the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) fell from an average of 937 to 899.
Andrew Coulson at the CATO Institute provides the shocking proof in graph form: (image above to right)
Recently, President Obama’s Secretary of Education reported to congress than 82% of the public schools in the United States were likely to miss the standards of the No Child Left Behind plan. Sam Dillon writes in the New York Times:
Clearly, the spending and the department are both seem to be failing to achieve their goals of superior education. In other words, cutting a failed, vastly expensive department is not extreme, crazy, or draconian, it is eminently logical and proper when tackling a federal budget of over $3 trillion dollars.
Even if the Department of Education was showing some degree of success, the fact is the US Constitution grants congress no authority over education in the states, and as the nation plunges into astoundingly deeper and deeper debt, we just cannot afford the DoE these days.
It has been a failure in bringing better education to students, it has cost hundreds of billions of dollars, maybe it is time for that department to be ended.
For the children, of course.
