From the Editor: Freedom Works

Big government began intervening in American education in a big way in 1965 with the passage of LBJ’s Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). And at the dawning of a brave new millennium, the Clinton regime seeks to close the deal.

There was no constitutional basis for that massive incursion in the ’60s, just as there is none now for the ultimate takeover being led by the children of the ’60s. Because the Constitution is purposely silent on education, responsibility for schooling the young properly rests, under the Tenth Amendment, with the states—or (better) with the people. But invade the schoolhouses Washington’s paper-pushing, guideline-issuing armies did. Now, after more than three decades of occupation by the federales, the outcome is clear:

  • Bureaucracy won.
  • Education lost.

In 1966, the year after ESEA’s start, the average score on the verbal portion of Scholastic Aptitude Test stood at 466 (on a scale of 200 to 800). With federal influence on curriculum expanding through a network of regional laboratories for “innovation,” SAT-Verbal scores began a descent year by year and stood at a dismal 424 in 1980. That was the year after President Carter started a U.S. Department of Education as a political payoff to the National Education Association. Scores remained flat for the next fifteen years, as the federal presence continued to grow.

For ESEA’s Title I alone, U.S. taxpayers now spend $7.2 billion a year. The objective is praiseworthy: providing compensatory education to help poor children catch up with those better-off. But the results are woeful: A five-year, $29 million federal evaluation recently had to report that Title I has failed to narrow the achievement gap.

Consider also the Bilingual Education Act of 1968. It was going to help Hispanic children, particularly recent arrivals to this land, learn English. Again the purpose was noble. But the program has become an entitlement for multiculturalist bureaucrats who believe freezing children in their native cultures is more important than teaching them English quickly. Hispanic youths now drop out of school at double the national rate. “It is clear,” stated education scholar Diane Ravitch in a recent paper for The Brookings Institution, “that bilingual education has been a dismal failure.”

Children are hurt by repeated failures of Big Education—and yet the reaction of recent Presidents and many Fortune 500 CEOs is, almost unbelievably: Let’s expand government’s role in education dramatically from preschool through graduate school, and indeed through state-directed “lifelong learning.” It is as though Coca-Cola had decided to quadruple the production of New Coke despite the product’s market debacle, or a last-place baseball team had determined to pad its roster with .150 hitters.

The recent decision of Congress and President Clinton to double spending on bilingual education illustrates how impervious to change failed federal programs are. But even worse, the Clinton White House has raised the stakes to the level of nationalization: national goals, national standards, national workforce preparation, national nannyism, national tests—and the looming inevitability of a national curriculum. In 1994, the structure for all this snapped into place with the passage of the Goals 2000 and School-to-Work acts, and the reauthorization of an ESEA made even more interventionist.

School-to-Work is the heart of the agenda. Big Government is orchestrating “public/private partnerships” through which business and statist planners will tell schools what jobs to prepare children for and school counselors will then steer children into state-desired career tracks beginning at the eighth grade, or even earlier.

In the 1930s, Benito Mussolini called his public/private collaborationist schemes in Italy “corporatism.” STW is the key component of a new corporatism, American-style. Some dare call it incipient fascism.

Parental choice—a restoration of education freedom—is the only escape from this impending disaster. Freedom is best, because it works better than the vaunted efficiency of authoritarianism. Home-schooled children score 30 to 37 percentile points higher than their public-school peers across the board on all subjects. Similarly, Catholic schools consistently outperform government schools even though both have similar demographic profiles.

Apart from efficiency, freedom is best because freedom is just. Children are not “human capital,” as the STW gurus assert. They are precious gifts of God, entrusted to parents for proper nurture and development. Reared in love with discipline and direction, they prosper intellectually. It is toward the objective of every child in America being able to enjoy the fruits of educational freedom that this inaugural issue of Crisis in Education devotes itself.

Author

  • Robert Holland

    Robert Holland is a Senior Fellow in Education at the Heartland Institute.

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