Downsizing the Department of Education won’t fix what's wrong with our schools. We should mobilize state and local leaders to tackle its problems. Nobody is better qualified to lead such an effort than Lamar Alexander.
Shrinking, or even closing, the U.S. Department of Education would certainly shift power out of Washington. That would be a good thing.
But we shouldn’t assume that an invisible hand will then suddenly materialize and orchestrate all of the fixes American education needs. Reforms of systems are important, but reforms of substance don’t always follow.
There’s a historical fact to bear in mind: American schooling was far from perfect prior to the 1979 creation of the Education Department. There were numerous reports and indicators in the 1970s showing that things were badly off track. The panel that penned the A Nation At Risk report was commissioned in 1981; they were responding to conditions decades in the making, not caused by a federal agency approved 18 months earlier. The Department of Education didn’t singlehandedly cause our education struggles; ending it won’t end them.
Continue reading the entire piece here at Governing
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Andy Smarick is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Follow him on Twitter here.
Photo by Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call