We definitely need to reign it in, and a stem-to-stern housecleaning definitely is in order, but the Department of Education (ED) is a necessary evil that we need to keep for three reasons.
First, the department generates a lot of valuable statistics, such as the annual National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Often called “the nation’s report card,” the NAEP is how we know that “Zoom School” didn’t work as scores still have not returned to those of pre-COVID-19 days. It is the NAEP that tells us that nearly a quarter of fourth graders can’t identify odd numbers and that about a third of eighth graders can’t make the basic reading benchmark.
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Yes, I have problems with the way that ED tabulates some of its statistics, and it’d be nice if they could be presented in a manner that parents could more easily understand, but at least it is there for a parent to print out and drop onto a Superintendent’s desk. Or to hand it to a member of the school board—or for a school board member to look up. Likewise, the stuff in the Educational Information Resources Clearinghouse (ERIC) database—all of this is freely available at ed.gov, and we need to keep it freely available for parents to find.
This is because parents are inevitably told that their school system is the best in the world and they kinda know that it isn’t. Parents are told to shut up and just give the schools more money—we’ve been doing that for forty years and it hasn’t worked. Hence, the second legitimate purpose of ED is to be the disinterested (not uninterested) outside an observer calling the balls & strikes. The national teacher’s unions, the NEA & AFT, have so much money that they control most state governments, and on the local level, the teachers vote en masse, silencing anyone who dares question them.
Hence ED is really the only entity that can publicly state that many of these uber-expensive suburban schools actually suck—yes, in more nuanced language and with supporting documentation, but it’s true, and I say this as someone with a Doctorate in Teacher Education & School Improvement. I say this as someone who has actually been a classroom teacher—and school bus driver. Shouldn’t the taxpayers paying for all of this largess know what they aren’t getting from all their tax dollars?
This goes to the third legitimate purpose of ED—to pound on the bully pulpit. Someone is going to be speaking for K-12 education on the national stage, and I’d rather it be Linda McMahon than Randi Weingarten. Without ED, it will be the teacher’s unions who speak about national educational policy and that would be a lot worse than what we have now.
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Diane Ravitch claims that he never said it, and she well may be right, but the quote often attributed to the late Al Shanker of the AFT is that he would start representing the interests of the children when the children started paying union dues. Reality is that the teachers’ unions have a fiduciary duty to the teachers. Not to the children, not to their parents, not to the taxpayers, and not to society as a whole—they have a legal fiduciary duty to the members of their unions.
And how many graduate degrees in education do you need to point out that nearly a quarter of fourth graders don’t know what an odd number is, something that most of us knew in the first or second grade? What K-12 really needs is someone asking questions because the whole thing is a Potemkin village.
Image: Lyndon Baines Johnson Department of Education Building by ajay_suresh on Wikimedia Commons
