Just when we thought the summer of discontent had reached its ignominious end, President Barack Obama yet again managed to rile people up. Obama spoke to the nation’s students last week in an attempt to inspire them to stay in school and work hard to graduate. Innocent in and of itself.
Enter the U.S. Department of Education and its recommended lesson plans for before and after the speech. Recommended activities included asking pre-K to 6th grade students to “write letters to themselves about what they can do to help the president.” Their responses were then to be collected and “redistributed at an appropriate later date by the teacher to make students accountable to their goals.”
Another assignment included discussing what “the president wants [schoolchildren] to do.” One can easily imagine the outcry had President Bush asked students to discuss what he wanted them to do or how they could help him. The media and groups like the ACLU would have demanded that the lesson plans be retracted and would have accused Bush of trying to indoctrinate students into supporting the War in Iraq or his tax cuts.
Unsurprisingly, these groups are all either silent or vocally supporting President Obama as he attempts to ask students to support him in his various initiatives. This isn’t President Kennedy declaring “[A]sk not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.” Obama is putting this on its head and basically saying, “Ask what you can do for your president,” which is a very different formulation.
The lesson plans were later changed and the speech went on without a hitch. Still, Obama’s school address is a reminder of the growing federal role in education, a trend that began three decades ago when President Carter established the Department of Education.
Nowhere in the Constitution is there a reference to education or the need for a federal Department of Education. But it’s for the best, right? Well, no. Since the Department of Education was created in 1979 to fulfill a campaign promise Carter made to the NEA, SAT scores have dropped by an average of seventy points, despite a 966 percent increase in federal education expenditures over the same time period. And, according to Citizens Against Government Waste:
National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) tests show that average reading scores for high school students over 20 years have improved only one point, from 286 to 287 out of a possible 500. Writing scores during the same period, on the same scale, fell seven points from 290 to 283. On a standard percentile scale (where students answering 60 percent of the questions correctly receive passing grades) these reading and writing scores would receive failing grades. The scores have real-life consequences. Only 40 percent of American 12th graders are reading proficient. The other 60 percent of American students will find it difficult to hold jobs or attend college after graduation.
This information should immediately make one question the necessity of the Department of Education, yet it still persists despite all criticisms against it. As the federal government increasingly involves itself in our lives and expands beyond its natural boundaries, nationalizing car companies, insurance corporations and banks, and now attempting to nationalize health care, we need to be wary of the power that government exerts over our schools.
Let’s go back to the beginning. Our public school system has its intellectual roots in the philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who believed that children are the property of the state, not of their parents. And as Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn relates in his book Liberty or Equality, American founding father Benjamin Rush saw public education as a means to establish “a more uniform, homogeneous, and egalitarian nation.”
We have been able to avoid the natural conclusion of public education for a time. In some areas, standardization is still being resisted, but for the most part, schools teach to the middle, harming both the gifted and those who need extra instruction. But if anything accelerated this process, it was the creation of the U.S. Department of Education.
Anthony Dent is a frequent contributor to The D.C. Writeup.
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