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Senator Max Cleland,
Senator Zell Miller,
Congressman John Linder,
Please take a few minutes to read the excerpts below. They are from the 11th chapter of the Cato Handbook For Congress. This poignant information clearly associates the steady decline in American literacy with increased government spending in education.
Based on your sworn commitment to uphold the Constitution and in an effort to keep government in its proper and constitutional boundary, recommend you immediately draft and sponsor a bill that shuts down the federal Department of Education. If you cannot do this, please advise why; and please explain the authority that allowed President Carter to create this federal polyp on our national backside. I cannot find any constitutional authority for federal government to regulate and fund education. According to the 10th amendment, this is a power that must be left to the states. I find no room for debate here.
Respectfully waiting for an honorable politician to explain where this federal authority comes from. Respectfully waiting for an honorable politician to lead us toward liberty. Respectfully waiting for an honorable politician to reexamine his sworn oath to God and country.
You cannot have it both ways gentlemen. Either you swore to uphold the Constitution and you're confused, or you lied. No double talk please.
Wes Alexander
Excerpts From Chapter 11 Cato Handbook For Congress
To the extent that government does more, parents do less, and thus become less responsible, and education suffers. The history of state involvement in education is marked by an inexorable drift of responsibility from families to small local governments to larger local governments to states and finally to the federal government-all the way from your house to the White House.
Long before the federal government got heavily involved in education, young America had waged a successful revolution against a titanic empire and founded a unique republic based on individual rights and responsibility. Alexis de Tocqueville would describe the ordinary citizens as the best educated in history.
From the early Colonial period through the end of the Civil War, there was no federal involvement in education. In 1930 only 0.4 percent of funding for education came from the federal government, 17 percent came from state governments, and 83 percent came from local sources. By 1997 the federal government provided 7 percent of all funding, state government provided 48 percent, and local government provided 45 percent.
According to the U.S. Census of 1850, 90 percent of Americans were literate. Literacy in 1850 consisted of reading demanding and allusive writers like Walter Scott, James Fenimore Cooper, Washington Irving, and Shakespeare, along with the King James Version of the Bible. In 1835 British statesman Richard Cobden announced that newspaper reading was six times higher in America than in England.
By 1940 the rate of literacy in the U.S. was 96 percent for whites and 80 percent for blacks. By 1992, according to the National Adult Literacy Survey, 15 percent of whites and 40 percent of blacks tested at the lowest level measured. The survey also revealed that--80 percent of American adults--lacked normal high school literacy and quantitative skills. The high end of this group can comprehend short articles, write a letter, and do single-step math problems with a calculator, but most cannot write a paragraph or do multiplication or division. This 80 percent cannot evaluate written arguments or use a bus schedule to determine the best route to take. And, in spite of billions of federal dollars to help millions of people to attend college, a paltry 3 percent of Americans demonstrate the abilities one would expect of college educated adults.
Although SAT math scores have seen a recent improvement, they remained flat throughout the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. Today's SAT test is a dumber version of its old self: students are given an additional 30 minutes of time, calculators may be used, and many difficult questions have been eliminated. In 1972, 2,817 students scored above 750 (800 is a perfect score); by 1994 the number had fallen by 50 percent to only 1,438 in spite of a larger pool and an easier test. That represents a decline among the brightest students.
After adjusting for inflation, education spending has increased 14-fold since it was first measured reliably in 1920-from $535 per pupil to $7,299 in 1997. Since the facts about the education meltdown are many and unassailable, the best that defenders of the federal role can claim is that it has slowed the rate of decline.
Head Start, begun in 1965, is a preschool health and education program for low-income children. According to the General Accounting Office, there is no evidence of any impact. Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, also implemented in 1965, is aimed at boosting the achievement of at-risk students by providing additional funding to their schools. The only longitudinal study conducted on Title I shows all positive effects wearing off by junior high school.
Head Start has cost $44 billion so far; Title I has cost more than $120 billion. The response has been an increase in funding for both programs, and in 2000 both major presidential candidates called for still more spending.
In July 1998 the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigation of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce released a study of federal education programs. The title was "Education at a Crossroads: What Works and What's Wasted in Education Today." It identified no fewer than 760 federal education programs in 39 agencies; those programs cost $100 billion per year.
Following the release of this report, there was a tactical shift by defenders of the status quo to embrace the crisis and use it as a justification for more government spending and programs. That change of tactics worked. Now everyone is a reformer. If we cannot say with confidence that the federal role in education is unconstitutional, then what will we be able to resist? The U.S. Constitution authorizes none of these programs.
No matter where you sit on the ideological spectrum, abolishing the federal role in education is good government. Some states would follow suit and reduce or eliminate their own roles in education. Other states would step in to replace federal programs. The only thing of which we can be sure is that they will not react alike, and before long we could see which approach yields the best results. Education desperately needs less Uncle Sam and more mom and dad.
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