Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., condemned President Obama’s Department of Education Tuesday, saying the department has been ‘brazen, deceitful, dishonest’ in implementing the major new education law.
“They’ve been brazen, deceitful, dishonest and unprofessional,” Alexander said Tuesday at The Atlantic’s Education Summit. Alexander’s specific complaint was over the department’s implementation of the Every Student Succeeds Act, signed into law in December 2015 as the first major federal education reform since No Child Left Behind in 2002. “On the very first instance where the Department of Education has a chance to write a rule implementing that law, they get an F.”
When asked if the department had responded to his concerns, Alexander said “No, they responded with a lot of gobbledy-gook.”
The department proposed a rule that would essentially equalize spending at all the schools in a school district. “That is a good idea,” Alexander said. “But the Congress has said, on two occasions, that you can’t require it from Washington… We said in December, in the law the president signed, that the federal government may not require equalized spending. Yet the department precisely did that in its rule.”
Alexander cited a report from the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service that said the department’s rule “appear[s] to directly conflict with this statutory language, which seems to place clear limits on [the Education Department’s] authority… [A] legal argument could be raised that [the Education Department] exceeded its statutory authority if it promulgates the proposed rules in their current form.”
If the department’s proposed rule eventually becomes an official rule, Alexander said, it could lead to “huge transfers of teachers, causing local school districts to have to take money from some schools to other schools, causing whole states to change their school-equity education formulas.”
Jason Russell is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
