Prolonging Education's Race to the Bottom

Heritage Foundation

In perhaps the President Obama's most stealth campaign to date, the federal government has been slowly tightening its grip on the education sector to little fanfare. Rather than working through the democratic legislative process, this Administration has circumvented Congress to enact an ill-conceived education agenda that will weaken accountability, reduce transparency and minimize choice while only adding to the national deficit.

For close to four decades, the federal government has operated under the seemingly simple premise that increased spending on education will translate into academic achievement. This line of thinking has resulted in inflation-adjusted federal expenditures on education increasing 138 percent since 1985. Per-pupil expenditures have ballooned to over $11,000 per student, and are even higher in most urban areas including the District of Columbia where the government spends $14,500 on each child. Billions upon billions of dollars have been poured into our public school system because the federal government, backed by powerful teachers unions, is convinced that it is best suited to administer our country's education system. Unfortunately, this approach has been a miserable failure.

The high school drop out rate continues to skyrocket and academic achievement continues to be stagnant despite decades of increased federal spending and involvement in education. Of course, the consequences for our failures threaten our future as we hopelessly watch other countries outpace us in math and the sciences.

Unfortunately, President Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan remain impervious to the education crisis and are committed to strengthening the federal stranglehold over our country's education system. Just months after taking office, President Obama signed into a law the gargantuan stimulus bill stuffed with wasteful spending adding to the federal government's girth. The Department of Education received an unprecedented $100 billion in additional money through the stimulus. But months after the bill's passage, two things are clear: the stimulus bill is not growing our economy and more federal money towards education is not improving our schools.

Undaunted by the obvious, liberal lawmakers in the House are planning on making yet another push this week to include an additional $23 billion dollars for emergency education spending to prevent "catastrophic" public education layoffs. But for decades, states have continued to bloat their staff rolls, particularly non-teaching staff positions. Since 1970 for instance, student enrollment in public elementary and secondary schools has increased just 7 percent, while public elementary and secondary staff hires have increased 83 percent. Another bailout from Washington could exacerbate states' fiscal problems by creating disincentives for states to tackle out-of-control spending and make the difficult budgetary decisions necessary to produce long-term education reforms.

But unlike the federal takeover of the banking and health care industry, this time around Obama and his liberal allies are shrewdly avoiding another public fight by moving their education agenda forward without even going through Congress. The administration is supporting a move to implement national education standards, using the $4.35 billion Race to the Top grant program to secure those ends. National standards will give the federal government not parents more power over education. Now, instead of petitioning their local schools boards for curriculum changes, parents will have to trek to Washington to lobby D.C. bureaucrats for input in the content taught at their children's school.

Progressive' dreams of making us more and more dependent on big government has never looked so promising after Obama victories in widening their hold in health care, banking and now education. If this past year and a half is any indication of what's to come, two things are clear: (a) we will see more and more of our freedoms diminish and (b) the girth of our federal government's waist-line will surely grow.