Sec of Education - Holy Moly
- Thread starter IUclover
- Start date
Right. I believe the “brain trust”, Musk and Ramaswmay are recommending it should be eliminated anyway.
I agree with them wholeheartedly.
The Dept. of Education has been a massive failure. Education is clearly an issue better handled by the states, or even better by local jurisdictions.
f*cking immigrants.
Wow. There goes our #13 ranking down the tubes.
Education Rankings by Country 2024
Oh, so she was on your short list as well. Top 5? 10? 1000?Wow. There goes our #13 ranking down the tubes.
Education Rankings by Country 2024
www.datapandas.org
Is the Repub goal to make government seem even more illegitimate?
Wow. There goes our #13 ranking down the tubes.
Education Rankings by Country 2024
Hard to see this helping…
It's the Jerry Springer meets Honey Boo Boo and has baby government.
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Hard to see the secretary of education having any impact although The Obama administration managed to muck up discipline and responsibility with his attempts to break the school to prison pipeline found in many blue cities.
Meh. Sec of Ed’s in the past plucked from the education industry haven’t exactly improved things.
Yes we all remember you. The failed 'scientist'.
What username number is this? You in a battle with Farva?
I've been for eliminating the DOE for a long time. This is one I hope gets accomplished.
Man, I always heard only democrats elect celebrities. I heard it a lot when Obama ran.
So the 12 ranked above us have decentralized the responsibility for education standards, curriculum, licensing, etc.?Wow. There goes our #13 ranking down the tubes.
Education Rankings by Country 2024
What it would mean to eliminate the U.S. Department of Education
Calls to abolish the U.S. Department of Education have been around nearly as long as the department itself. Now the 2024 campaign is breathing new life into an old idea.
www.chalkbeat.org
It’s one of those issues where many people equate the existence of a federal bureaucracy with the degree to which we value its portfolio.
Ie, if you oppose the existence of a federal Dept. of Education, then you must oppose education. Why do you oppose education?
Most of those countries better resemble one of our states than our entire nation. If European countries were ceding control of education to Brussels, we might have a better analogy.
I don’t know. While I believe central planning of some important government functions is inefficient, wasteful, and ineffective, there is a lot more wrong with US public education than this. That said, I’m a big believer in school autonomy and I think ginormous school districts are a problem.
Also, Germany is one of the countries ranked above us. Public education in Germany is pretty much entirely remanded to their 16 city-states and area states. I don’t think their federal government plays much, if any, role in these things you’ve mentioned.
Seems like a larger political talking point than any change in federal govt involvement, which is already pretty minimal. And a waste of time since it won't happen anyway. Elimination of a cabinet level department has about as much chance of occuring as cutting retiree benefit plans.
I think this issue is much more complicated than just thinking local=good, centralized=bad when it comes to education. Re Germany, I'm not sure any of us have enough knowledge of the German system to be able to say it's a more localized system than the US's. But even if so, that doesn't support your notion that the best unit of govt to handle education is a localized district like a school board.
And the UK has a national system and they have 68 million people. Much bigger than any US state. And they're doing better than the US on that scale.
Of course, the averages here might hide a lot of what is causing this and what is salient. The fact is, we don't have the same demographics as those other countries, the same wealth disparities, social welfare opportunities, etc.
I don't think it's a matter of local v. centralized on many education issues: it's a matter of picking the right curriculum, focusing on educational methods as opposed to idealogy, and tracking kids appropriately. An example: the SAT and the AP courses are nationalized evaluation methods, and the AP courses have created a nationwide standard curriculum for US high school students with a lot of rigor. I think they're also highly successful.
A consideration: if you are in a locality with a good school system, you have a tendency to believe it must be due to local decisionmaking, and so that should be the way. If you are in a locality with a poor school system, you might think much differently.
And this isn't an unheard of problem. What typically happens in a circumstance where a local school system is deemed to have failed, it's taken over by the state -- not the feds. And that makes sense to me.
Of course, I've long been an advocate of giving parents stipends and the choice of where to use them for education, too. That's kind of a different issue, but kind of not as well.
I just think, in general, that the federal government should focus its resources and energies doing things that clearly fall within its purview....not simply because of the constitution's framework (although that's not unimportant), but also just as a matter of practicality. It has taken on so much, and I think that's part of the reason that it is so ineffective and inefficient. Focusing on those things it should focus on would have a positive impact not only on the functions it delegates, but also on the functions it retains.
This question -- what matters are best served where -- was central in Philadelphia. And the older I've gotten and the more I've experienced and observed, the more I understand why it was.
I don't agree with you that federal involvement in education is well-described as minimal. But I do think that what involvement it has is, on balance, unhelpful...if not detrimental.
You're probably right about your second point. But a guy can dream.
A lot has changed since the 1787. Not sure there are any universal maxims in this area.
That’s certainly true. But the question of what civil and social functions are best served in which hands will always be important.
I’m not saying we have to have the same answers to those questions today that they had then. But we should still be pondering them.
And, to me, there just isn’t a good case to be made that the function of education is well-served in federal hands — even in an oversight role.
