End the Unconstitutional Federal Involvement in Education
2009-08-22 · Guest: Andrew J. Coulson (Cato Institute) · 53:45
Federal involvement and nationalization of education policy
Bob Zadek examines the increasing federal involvement in education policy, arguing that it undermines the principle of federalism and local control. He is joined by Andrew J. Coulson of the Cato Institute to discuss the history of federal intervention from the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act to modern initiatives like No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, highlighting the lack of constitutional authority and the failure of increased spending to improve academic outcomes.
Topics: Education, Federalism, No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, Constitutional Law, General Welfare Clause, School Choice, National Education Association (NEA)
Speakers:
- Bob Zadek – Host
- Andrew J. Coulson – Director of the Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom
Introduction and the History of Local Education [00:00]
Bob Zadek: Welcome everybody, welcome to the Bob Zadek Show. I’m your host, Bob Zadek, Sundays at noon at Talk 910 KNEW.
Today’s topic is the nationalization of education. For 230-odd years, perhaps 220-odd years, we have had—this country has had—the best educational system in the world. We grew as a result of it, the country prospered, students were educated, the system worked. There was no—underline no—federal involvement. Education was as local as it could get. There were PTAs and parents were involved and teachers were involved, and it was as local as government could be.
Now we are staring down the barrel of the federal takeover of education. This is serious stuff. This is federalism being trashed. My guest to figure out what’s going on and how to stop it—and this is an honor—my guest is Andrew J. Coulson. Andrew is the Director of Cato’s Center for Educational Freedom. I like the sound of those words: educational freedom. Andrew is joining me on the phone from up in the Seattle area. Andrew, welcome to the show.
Andrew J. Coulson: Thank you for having me on, Bob.
Bob Zadek: Thanks for joining me. A little background: I’m a—as Robert Klein had a wonderful album, a comedy album, called Child of the ’50s. And that’s what I am. I went to high school, I graduated from high school in 1958, from a public high school, Jamaica High School in Queens, New York.
And a little story: I went to Jamaica High School, loved it, loved going to high school there, had a pretty good education—wasn’t a great student, but a good education. And a couple of years ago, I went online—I had just got a credit card from BofA. And I went online to be able to transact business online with my new BofA card, credit card. And you know, they ask you all these security questions. And some of them, like “Who was your best friend when you were 11 years old?”—questions you’ll never remember the answer to.
And I couldn’t find the right security question until I found one that would work. And it asked me, “Name your high school mascot.” Well, I went to Jamaica High School, I knew the high school mascot, I would never forget that. So I entered the name of the Jamaica High School mascot and hit enter. And a big warning light popped up. And the warning light said, “You can’t use obscenities in picking a password.” What was my high school mascot? The Beaver. Oh my god. Political correctness run amok.
Well, I went to Jamaica High School in 1958. I went to Junior High School 74, PS 26, all in Queens. I had a great education and a decent relationship with the teachers. And my colleagues got a great education, and people before me got a great education. And there was no federal involvement whatever. Somehow the system worked perfectly. Now what we read about is the educational system is in the toilet. People aren’t getting educated, the school systems are failing, it’s all crumbling around us. My question—the question that I ask myself—is what happened? What happened between those halcyon days of 1958, when I got a perfectly wonderful education, public school education, nothing special, just a great education—we all got into college, we were taught the right stuff, good education—Andrew, that was without federal involvement. And now the country seems to be crying for federal takeover. What went wrong between my graduation in 1958 and today, when it’s all falling apart?
The Shift Toward Federal Control [04:35]
Andrew J. Coulson: Well, it’s actually interesting. The public is not so much the ones that are crying out for a federal takeover. I just recently saw some new poll results on the No Child Left Behind Act, which is, of course, the most intrusive federal education legislation ever passed.
Bob Zadek: By a Republican, allegedly conservative president.
Andrew J. Coulson: Yes, yes, absolutely. He had some bipartisan support from Senator Ted Kennedy, but it was the brainchild of President George W. Bush. And the public doesn’t care for this law. And in fact, when they ask—as often people will be asked about education policy questions and they’re not all that well-informed on federal education policy, and so you might think that it’s just ignorance causing people to be opposed to it—but the pollsters also asked people how much they knew about the No Child Left Behind Act. And the more people knew about it, the more negative they were.
So it’s really not the case that the public is excited about a federal takeover of education. It’s more a question of politicians having always wanted to fix things. People run for office not because they want to limit the power of the offices they’re holding—nobody wants to make themselves useless—they want to run for office and serve in office so that they can change things, change the world, make the world better. And the way they have always sought to do this is by appropriating for themselves more power.
So the question is, how did we get from a situation, as you described, prior to, say, the 1950s? Education was totally a local and, to some extent, state responsibility.
Bob Zadek: And it worked! It worked.
Andrew J. Coulson: It did work. It did work. I wouldn’t go quite so far as you do to say that it was ideal. There are some problems with it that I could go into, but it definitely worked better than the system we have today. And I can, in fact, give you an indication of how it worked better. Performance at the end of high school today is almost no different from performance in 1970. And that’s about as early as we have test scores going back to that we can really consider consistent across the years. So achievement at the end of high school has not improved in 40 years. But we now spend two and a half times as much per pupil, after adjusting for inflation, as we did then. So we were getting at least as good results for less than half the cost in 1970. And that doesn’t even go back to the ’50s when, of course, we were spending far less than that. So it’s really been a massive takeover by increasingly state government and now federal government, which is producing nothing, which has improved nothing.
Bob Zadek: Does anybody out there think that what the educational system needs is a federal takeover? Because that’s what’s happening. It is a takeover. Now, the federal government will say, “Our spending is only a minuscule amount of the total money spent on education, so we are not taking over education. We are just providing a few dollars to coax the system, to encourage what works.” Well, we will see how profound the takeover is.
Government Funding vs. Government Operation [12:00]
Bob Zadek: Andrew, even if an argument is to be made—and Andrew will help us with this—that our schools are deteriorating, my question, Andrew, a hard question for me to answer is, as a taxpayer, as an American, why do I care if the schools—I live in San Francisco or Sausalito—why do I care if the schools in Boston are deteriorating? What does it mean to me, and should I care, or should the people in Boston be the ones to care and to pay for the fix? So why is it a federal issue, that is the quality of education?
Andrew J. Coulson: Well, in fact, it’s not. If you read the Founding Fathers on this topic, you find that they believed education was a local responsibility.
Bob Zadek: Although very important.
Andrew J. Coulson: Yes, absolutely, tremendously important. And precisely because it’s tremendously important, they felt that it had to be left in the hands of the people who knew the most about each child’s needs. They felt that the parents had to be in primary control of their children’s own education. In fact, there was no debate over this. It was just assumed that everyone agreed that the parents should be primarily in control among the main Founding Fathers of our nation and our Constitution.
And to the extent that the government should become involved in any way, it was always very much at the local level. So even before we had a public school system such as we got in the early 1900s, there were some semi-public schools because people felt that there needed to be financial assistance for low-income families, for instance. And so there would be these semi-public schools which were partly funded by local taxation. So if you were destitute, you could not afford to educate your children, these semi-public schools would provide you with a subsidized education or even a free education if you couldn’t afford to pay anything towards your child’s schooling. But everyone else who sent their kids to those same schools had to pay fees. Because the idea was that it was ultimately your responsibility to see to your children’s education. It was only if for whatever reason you couldn’t manage it that you would be helped out to make sure that every child had access to schooling.
And it went from this very local conception that lasted all the way into the, really, the mid-20th century before people started to think—particularly politicians at the federal level started to think—you know what, maybe we need to start meddling in this area.
Bob Zadek: You know, I look at education as being almost 100% a purely personal economic decision. That is, if you work hard in school, if you get a good education, what it means is you do it for selfish reasons. You get a better job, you get to earn more money. And people are, it seems to me, people are free to make the wrong decisions about how to spend the 24 hours each day that they’re alive.
Andrew J. Coulson: Oh, absolutely. But it’s important to understand that there are indirect benefits to other people’s education. Maybe not for you on the West Coast from people getting a good education in Boston, but certainly from people elsewhere in California getting a good education. They’re voting on state issues; you want them to be able to understand those issues. If they are well-educated, they have a better chance of getting a good job, they’re less likely to become dependent on the state or to resort to crime. So there are these indirect benefits. And just the fact that people generally care about their neighbors’ children and don’t want children to be going without an education just because their families don’t have the money to pay for it.
So there are these various reasons why we might care about other people’s children getting a good education—these sort of social benefits or indirect benefits. But the problem arises when you assume, which is what many people have done over the past hundred years or so, when you assume that the only way to achieve those public benefits, those indirect benefits, is to have the government run schools or to have the government even pay for schools. This is a mistake. It’s just an assumption that people have that, for instance, the only way you can ensure universal access to good education is to have the government operate schools.
Well, Adam Smith, as far back as 1776, wrote in The Wealth of Nations that this was not required at all. Even if you decided that the government should be involved somehow in educating children, it could just provide financial assistance to make sure everyone could afford it. It didn’t need to run its own schools.
Bob Zadek: Andrew, that’s exactly the point. And when one talks about federal or governmental involvement in education, the government—there are two roles. There’s being a vendor, being the provider of the service, and providing money so other people can buy the service. If the government is going to put money into education because it’s a valid use of tax dollars—if you’re going to do that, then give the money to the people who buy the education. Don’t give the money to the people who provide the education. It’s as if we gave money to the car dealers and told the consumers, “You get a free car.”
Andrew J. Coulson: Yeah, absolutely. There’s no other field like education. We also don’t want people starving to death because they fall on hard times, and so we have programs like food stamps to make sure that people can get enough to eat. But the government doesn’t run government grocery stores or government restaurants. We provide financial assistance and citizens make the decisions themselves about what they’re going to do with that money for food.
But even at that, even if you agree that we should separate the spending on education from the operation of the schools, you come to these problems with government funding. For instance, if the government funds education and everyone gets to choose whatever private school they want, what happens typically—because there are places that do this around the world—what happens typically is that you start to get disagreement among the public over what schools should get government funding. So, for instance, in the Netherlands, which has had a public-private school choice program for almost a hundred years, some secular liberal Dutch citizens don’t like paying for conservative Islamic schools. So then what do you do? It’s kind of a Catch-22. Either you don’t fund the conservative Islamic schools, in which case law-abiding Muslim citizens are short-changed, or you force secular liberal Dutch people to fund those schools, which they abhor, and then they’re short-changed.
So the question is, can we come up with a policy—and this is what I’ve tried to do in my staff at the Cato Institute have tried to do—is to come up with policies that would ensure everybody can afford to get a good education without the compulsion to pay for things that you oppose.
Federal Bribery and the Round-Trip Dollar [20:41]
Bob Zadek: Now, my problem with federal involvement—and Andrew, after the break we’ll talk about the current Race to the Top measure that Secretary Duncan is proposing and Obama is supporting, this Race to the Top multi-billion dollar program—but here’s why I care. Here’s why you folks out there should care.
If you assume, okay, it is a valid use of my tax dollars, I agree that government should use some of my tax dollars for education—well, the way it now works is through bribery and coercion. And here’s what I mean by that. It’s blackmail. The federal government will increase the income tax and other federal taxes to suck money out of a community to send it to Washington. Now Washington takes its cut for administration, takes some money off the top, and sends it back to the states—the very same states that gave the feds the money—gives it back to the states, less than what they got because they took some money off the top for the administration, with a whole bunch of rules attached.
What’s wrong with leaving the money at the states to begin with? It doesn’t have to go from California to Washington, take off 15% for administration, and send some money back to California based upon political power. It’s the round-trip dollars that I oppose. And the coercive aspect is this: the federal government has no constitutional power to become involved in education. The word “education”—no surprise—is not mentioned in the Constitution. It’s not there because everybody knew it was local, it was not a federal activity.
So how do the feds get the power? Well, the feds cannot, under our system, legislate in the area of education. They can’t do it. So what they do is they say, “Okay, states, we offer money to you as a grant, but the grant is only going to be given to you if you do the following.” So the states can’t turn their back on the money that was sucked out of the states to begin with, so the states have to comply as a condition of getting the grant. That’s the same way the federal government legislated the speed limit on Bridgeway, a small local road in Sausalito. They just don’t give the money to California unless California lowers the speed limits. So the feds, through the coercive power of these grants—which the states need because the money was taken from the states to begin with—through that coercive power, the feds have their way. And that’s exactly what’s going on with the Race to the Top bill. Andrew, is that a fair summary?
Andrew J. Coulson: Yeah, absolutely. And it’s just not the case that you can find in the Constitution a power to do this. It requires mental backflips in order to interpret the Constitution in such a way as to allow the federal government to commit extortion on the states, particularly in the area of education, which, as you say, isn’t mentioned in the Constitution.
The NEA and the “Right” to Education [28:25]
Bob Zadek: Just to show you what we are up against. I don’t consider myself to be on the right. I’m a libertarian; I don’t know if I’m right or left. I don’t use that label; I don’t find it helpful. But I do know who’s on the left. And the National Education Association, which is the largest or second-largest teachers union in the country, is on the left. That I know for sure.
And I went to their website and I was reading some material written by Van Roekel, who is the head of the NEA. And just to show you what we’re up against, the NEA says, “Since all men are created equal”—quoting from the Declaration of Independence—he says, “The disparity in education is fundamentally unfair.” And then he says, “Every student has a right to a great public school. They should not be subject to what he calls geographic roulette.”
My question: what is exactly the source of this right you have to free education? Is it because the NEA determines you have a right? You know, the dictionary defines a right as, quote, “something to which one has a just claim.” Where in the world, while we should educate our kids, what is the source of this right? That’s what we are up against.
And we then have Secretary of Education Duncan at the DOE website saying, “Education is not just an economic issue, it is a moral issue.” Moral issue? Good god, what makes it moral? Duncan goes on to say—get this—“It is the civil rights issue of our next generation. We have an obligation to give every child in America an education that helps them succeed.” What? So now we’re responsible to make sure everybody succeeds in the world. They don’t have the responsibility—they being the students or the parents—we, me, Bob Zadek, I have the responsibility. Darn it, I got enough to do in my life without worrying about every school kid in America getting a good job. Andrew, what’s the source of this “rights” stuff, “civil rights issue”? What’s going on?
Andrew J. Coulson: Yeah, from a legal standpoint, it’s complete rubbish. And it was understood to be rubbish all the way through the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. And in fact, during Roosevelt’s presidency in 1941, a book was published by the US Printing Office and jointly by Congress and the administration. And this book was about the adoption of the Constitution by the several states and kind of a history book meant to educate kids about the origins of our system of government. And there’s actually a little Q&A in that book. And the question is, “Where in the Constitution is there mention of education?” And the answer provided by this FDR-era government book…
Bob Zadek: General Welfare, I bet.
Andrew J. Coulson: …is “There is none. Education is a matter reserved for the states.” This was under FDR. Under his administration, it was still believed, at least by the functionaries lower down the political chain, that there was no federal role, there was no federal right to an education.
Constitutional Interpretation and the General Welfare Clause [32:38]
Andrew J. Coulson: And it’s only after FDR and after his—I may have discussed this with your listeners on another occasion—but after his effort to twist the arm of the Supreme Court into approving his New Deal, which he eventually succeeded at doing, that a virtually unlimited power for the federal government to legislate was created in the General Welfare Clause. Basically, it was a reinterpretation of the General Welfare Clause of the Constitution that said the federal government can assess taxes and duties in order to promote the general welfare, among other things.
Now, prior to FDR, the overwhelmingly upheld interpretation of the General Welfare Clause was that it was a general preamble to the specific powers that the federal government was given in the rest of the Constitution. So it was just a sort of setup for the actual list of powers, the enumerated powers.
Bob Zadek: Enumerated powers.
Andrew J. Coulson: Exactly. But after Roosevelt, this new interpretation held sway. And it was basically that the general welfare was its own power. Anything the federal government did that the legislators claimed was going to help people, that was absolutely constitutional. And so there is now, effectively, no limit on what the federal government can do. It’s only because of this wild interpretation of the General Welfare Clause that we can even have a federal Department of Education, that we can have a No Child Left Behind Act or a Race to the Top, which is the current proposal by Obama and his Education Secretary Duncan. If it weren’t for this misinterpretation of the Constitution, none of this would be legal. It would be overturned by the Supreme Court instantly.
Bob Zadek: The person who had the most profound effect upon education in America today and the federal takeover was Lee Harvey Oswald. Had he not killed JFK—JFK was, of course, a moderate. He would have been a Republican by today’s political standards. So JFK was a moderate. Lyndon Johnson, of course, was a flaming liberal. Kennedy’s death, which is the only way that Johnson got to be president, created the 1965 legislation, the first real meaningful federal foray into education. And Lyndon Johnson said in 1965, quote, “This is a new day of greatness in the American society.” He said that when the bill, the first federal bill involving education, was signed. Well, we are still waiting for this American greatness.
Andrew J. Coulson: Yeah, you know, as you quote him, I’m looking at some charts that I have up on my computer screen, and they are charts of the performance of 17-year-old students on a variety of tests that have been administered to nationally representative samples all the way back to 1970. And it’s just incredible to see that they’re flatlines. And it’s not just a question of the overall averages being flat at the end of high school. If you look at the specific things that the Great Society education programs were supposed to achieve, which was narrowing the achievement gap by race and by income, it’s failed in those regards too.
If you look at these breakdowns by race, by income, by parents’ level of education, you find that, for instance, the kids of college students and the kids of high school dropouts are about as far apart academically today as they were when the Great Society programs were enacted. Well, that was the central aim of those programs. It was the central aim of those programs to close the gap so that kids from lower-income families where the parents were not well-educated would be able to do better in school. It failed. So even the whole justification for these laws is the General Welfare Clause. If it’s supposed to promote the general welfare, well, it’s not promoting anything. It’s not promoting anyone’s welfare. It’s basically just been a bamboozle.
Bob Zadek: And it’s just been the accumulation of economic power in Washington and then using that power to impose its will upon local school districts. You know, I live in a small town. I live in Sausalito, 7,000 people. And nothing goes on in that town that doesn’t escape our scrutiny. And if the city council does something that we citizens don’t like, in about 48 hours, steps are taken to fix it, including schools.
Andrew J. Coulson: Right. And it’s absolutely impossible to do that at the federal level. I’m sure your listeners would be horrified to learn that since Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society education legislation was passed, the federal government has spent $1.85 trillion on education.
Bob Zadek: During such time and during that period of time, the education system has, as I said in my opening comments, deteriorated. And now they are saying we just need to spend more money, more federal money, do it our way. We are talking about the federal takeover of something which is so local, it breaks my heart to lose this control.
Race to the Top and National Standards [42:08]
Bob Zadek: Andrew, in a few words, we’re staring down the barrel of Race to the Top. What’s that all about?
Andrew J. Coulson: Well, it is what you described: an effort to extort the states into doing a variety of things that Secretary Duncan and President Obama think will help improve education. And the teachers unions. And the teachers unions, yes. But the number one thing, really, the most important thing at the core of this effort is that they are insisting that states, in order to be eligible for this money—or not insisting, but if states want to be considered for this money, they will get extra attention, they’re more likely to receive it if they support national curriculum standards.
Bob Zadek: You’ve written about national standards, Andrew. Tell us about those.
Andrew J. Coulson: Well, basically the idea that Secretary Duncan has gone around the country promoting is that math is the same in Colorado as it is in California as it is in Vermont, and therefore we should teach math the same way, at the same time, at the same grade. And this sounds great when you don’t think about it too carefully. But when you start to think about it pretty carefully, it falls apart. Because while it’s true that mathematics is the same, it is not true that every child in a given grade learns math at the same pace. I have two brothers and a sister, and I can tell you that we learned math and reading and science and history at very different rates from one another, and we’ve gone into different fields. We always had different strengths and different weaknesses.
Well, if that’s true in a single family, you can just think about your neighborhood. Think of all the children you know in your own neighborhood. Does every 10-year-old you know learn arithmetic at the same pace? No. What Duncan and Obama are saying is that they want every 10-year-old in the entire country to be studying the same things at the same time. Well, of course, this totally short-changes kids who are bright in a particular subject. They don’t want to be taught arithmetic when they’ve already mastered it and they’ve mastered algebra and they’re ready to start learning calculus. And it also short-changes the kids who are behind because they don’t have the requisite skills to learn the things that Obama and Duncan want them to be taught. So you really short-change everyone, both the kids who are advanced of this mythical average and the kids who are behind it. What you really need to do is stop grouping kids rigidly by age and centralizing the curriculum and let them learn at their own pace.
Bob Zadek: As determined by their teacher and their school system.
Andrew J. Coulson: Absolutely. And of course, in order for that to really work, you have to make schools compete for the privilege of serving kids. It’s not enough to just say, “Well, we’ll let kids learn at their own pace.” You want schools competing to say, “Look, I am better at teaching the things that you care about than my competing school across town, and so you should send your kids here because just look at how well our graduates do. Look at the great colleges they get into, or our graduates get into, look at the great jobs they go on to hold.” You want schools competing for that privilege of serving children. And when they do that, you get much better results.
The Failure of Centralization and the Path Forward [46:52]
Bob Zadek: I mourn, I mourn over this erosion in local control over our lives and this devolution of power from localities to Washington. We’ve become so accustomed to it, the population is just deadened by it. They don’t even—we the people don’t even know that it’s happening. And it’s always with “Do it this way and you get some more money,” but the money is denied localities to begin with by federal tax policy. They’ve learned how to do it. They suck the money away and then give back our money, but with strings attached. Just leave the darn money with us to begin with and let us solve our own problems.
Andrew J. Coulson: And I’m sure that some people would be willing to trade their liberty for a little academic achievement, to paraphrase Ben Franklin. But in fact, it doesn’t work. That’s the ultimate joke of these interventions: they don’t work. We’re spending far more, both at the federal level and at the state and local level, than we did a generation ago or two or three generations ago, and results haven’t improved. In fact, in some areas, our results are worse than they used to be. The high school graduation rate is lower today by 4 or 5% than it was in 1970. And yet we’re spending more than twice as much on our schools. How is it possible that academic achievement could be stagnating, graduation rates going down, and we’re spending so much more? And the problem is quite simple: we don’t have a competitive enterprise system in education like we do in every other field where results do get better over time.
Bob Zadek: And we have to just say no—to quote Nancy Reagan—just say no to federal intervention. It is enough. Leave the money with us and leave the policymaking to us. It is not the business of the federal government to even care whether Detroit educates its kids. I don’t care if Detroit educates its kids. That is a purely economic issue. And if Detroit doesn’t educate its kids, its elected officials will pay at the ballot box, as it should be. And if people are at all on the fence on this issue, if they don’t know whether or not they think the federal government should be in charge, they should definitely tell their Congresspeople not to support Race to the Top, not to support No Child Left Behind, because these are one-way tickets to central control. It is very difficult to unwind a federal power once it’s been claimed by the federal government. So if you’re even slightly unsure about the validity and the value of doing this, do not support this kind of program, this kind of centralization, because it is so difficult to undo once it’s done.
Bob Zadek: It’ll never be undone. People get accustomed to it. And these programs always start small. The Department of Education formed in 1980 started small. But nobody ever closes up an agency and says, like the Lone Ranger, “My work is done here, I’m off, let’s go, Tonto.” They never ride off into the sunset. Their power grows and grows and grows. And education is so local and so personal, people should—and it’s purely economic—people will decide by moving, at the ballot box, by punishing election officials, they will decide if they are happy with education. Try undoing an education policy that’s formed in Washington. Who do you even call? Do you call your customer service rep in Washington? There’s nobody to call.
Andrew J. Coulson: And one of the things that people can do, though, a positive thing that they can do now is support school choice programs at the state level that make it easier for families to choose between public and private schools. And when you get that opportunity to choose, the constraints that the federal government is layering on public schools become less of an issue because you can get out from under them. You can move your account to a different school and let that school fail. There you go.
Bob Zadek: Andrew, thanks so much for providing us with this great insight. You’re doing God’s work over at the Cato Center for Educational Freedom. We have to keep the federal government out of education, out of our lives. This is not anti-government; it is pro-local government, anti-federal government. This is Bob Zadek, Libertarian Talk Radio in the Bay Area and around the country. Bob@BobZadek.com, 800-345-5639. I’ll be back next week. Thanks so much for joining me.