California Sens. Alex Padilla and Adam Schiff are apparently upset with President Donald Trump’s moves to downsize the federal Department of Education.
They joined fellow Democratic senators in a letter to Secretary of Education Linda McMahon. “At a time of massive income and wealth inequality, when 60 percent of people live paycheck to paycheck, millions of Americans cannot afford higher education, and 40 percent of our nation’s 4th graders and 33 percent of 8th graders read below basic proficiency, it is a national disgrace that the Trump Administration is attempting to illegally abolish the Department of Education and thus, undermine a high-quality education for our students,” they wrote.
As an aside, it should be noted that the educational statistics they reference are even worse in Democratic and union-friendly California, where most students in 4th and 8th grade fail to meet the state proficiency standards in English language arts.
We also note that the senators seem to think the federal Department of Education is key to ensuring a high-quality education. The Department of Education was established under President Jimmy Carter in 1979 and has been operational since 1980. Carter pushed for the department in order to secure the support of the National Education Association, the biggest union in the nation.
As the Cato Institute’s Neal McCluskey has noted of the Department of Education’s actual record of accomplishment, “there is little evidence that federal K-12 funding markedly improves K-12 education. This is especially true absent rules that connect funding to testing outcomes, which might reflect more focus on testing than deep learning.”
The Cato Institute has also extensively documented the problems of federal meddling in higher-education, including the fueling of tuition inflation.
Nowhere in the the U.S Constitution is education mentioned as a responsibility of the federal government. Education is a matter best left to states, localities and parents.
Shuttering the Department of Education is the right thing to do. There is nothing the department does that can’t be done by other departments, by the states, and by the private sector. It should never have been created in the first place.