Nor do we need them. Exactly my point. If Mississippi and Arkansas and South Carolina don't want to meet the same bar Colorado wants to meet, skrew'm. I know this sounds jingoistic as hell, but it's absolutely true: We put men on the moon before the Department of Education was even created. So why do we need a country-wide homogeneous education expectation?

I looked at the budget for the DOEd and the majority of their funding is tied to secondary education - Pell grants, Federally subsidized student loans, etc. Another big chunk is for special needs education. Not a great deal is for things like teacher salaries or building new infrastructure. So the bulk of K-12 education is left in the hands of the states to administer as they see fit - as long as it is fairly and evenly provided to all and certain minimum standards are met.

That's only a recipe for homogeneity if the states are determined to provide only the minimum required education. Which it seems is the case in many states. The upper middle class and above send their children to private schools and bitch about having to pay taxes to send other people's children to schools. Since these people are also either our legislators or the people who contribute to their campaigns, cutting school spending is a popular pastime with them.

Do you imagine for even one moment that these same legislatures wouldn't cut school spending to the absolute lowest possible amount if the DOEd didn't mandate the floor on educational standards?

You can saw "Screw 'em, they're not my problem", but in a few years they'll be moving to your state to find jobs or rob houses, depending on just how little education their state felt like providing for them.

I don't know that everything the DOEd does is necessary, but enforcing nationwide minimum education standards certainly is.

And as far as Constitutional authority? If ensuring the education of our children isn't promoting the general welfare of the country, I don't know what is.

Well said, RP!

Thanks. I just didn't want to imagine a world where Clothahump and Anacanapuna were on the same side of an argument.

Except, as I posted earlier, the DoE skims about 49% of the funds sent to it to cover it's grotesquely bloated bureaucracy. So even granting that it's a good idea to have minimum educations standards, it's not a good idea to take approximately 50% of all education funds away from students and give it to Washington middle-managers and paper-pushers.

Here's the point of departure for me: Everyone assumes, as Fenris has stated above, "granting that it's a good idea to have minimum education standards ..."

I do not agree. Minimum nationwide education standards did not exist until the 1980s, and that's when the trouble really began. That's like the USDA telling farmers that they have to meet certain crop yields or they can't get FSA loans.

I do not grant that minimum federal education standards are a good idea. They are a bad idea. Let me again point to all of the technological development, all of the art and and literature and music that was produced, all of the medical achievements that were wrought before there were minimum federal education standards. Those standards are not a solution, they are the problem.

IIRC, those standards were introduced because some states were doing a crashingly bad job of educating their citizens.

You do not recall correctly. Japan and Germany did a crashingly good job of cherry-picking results of national education surveys done in the late 1970s, which made the U.S. look like it was doing a bad job. It wasn't.

This is from a piece written by Dr. Peter Smagorinsky, Distinguished Research Professor of English Education at The University of Georgia, published in the Washington Post in March 2012:

If you said the Dept of Ed needs a good housecleaning from top to bottom, you wouldn't get any argument out of me.

There has been more technology, art and medical advancements in the last forty years than in the previous four hundred. Maybe educating more people than just the rich people's kids had a little to do with it.

Just don't throw out the baby with the DOEd.

Being as how I only squeaked through school with the help of grants and loans, hell yes.

What exactly are you thinking of here?

I'm not aware that the US has ever had true minimum nationwide education standards.

That 49% number doesn't seem possible. They list 4400 employees with a budget (in 2015) of $87 billion and change. I might believe they have a bloated bureaucracy, but not to the tune of $43 billion dollars, or a million bucks per employee.

Link to pdf of DOEd budget history, 1981 to 2016.

Maybe they go through a lot of erasers.

Or maybe it's the fact that the pace of technology development worldwide has increased. What's the old saw, the amount of knowledge doubles every XX years? Yeah, I'm betting on that.

As for the rich people's kids, public education was instituted as a matter of course in the U.S. throughout the 19th century. Plus, I came from the poor side of town and got a good education in the public schools in the 1950s and 1960s, then went on to earn two college degrees. DoE has had nothing to do with my education, or any of my classmates.

Because this has already been one massive hijack, I've addressed this point here.