Abolishing the Department of Education is the Right Thing to Do

Originally posted at FreedomWorks.org.

Eliminating the Department of Education used to be a standard Republican talking point. In 1980, Ronald Reagan ran on abolishing the federal department soon after Jimmy Carter created it. The 1996 GOP platform read, “the Federal government has no constitutional authority to be involved in school curricula or to control jobs in the market place. This is why we will abolish the Department of Education, end federal meddling in our schools, and promote family choice at all levels of learning.”

The Republican Party has since lost its way. George W. Bush championed the No Child Left Behind law—also known as the No Federal Bureaucrat Left Behind law—which has massively expanded the federal government’s role in education. With a few notable exceptions such as Michele Bachmann and Ron Paul, modern day Republicans have backed away from gutting the Department of Education. It has become more common for Republicans to promise that they will eliminate “waste, fraud and abuse” in government programs without giving any specifics.

Republicans need to return to their small government roots. We just can’t solve our budget problems and restore liberty by simply tinkering around the edges. Instead of pledging to “fix” unconstitutional government programs—we need more elected representatives willing to scrap entire departments. Today’s GOP should channel Mr. Conservative himself Barry Goldwater who declared that “I have little interest in streamlining government or in making it more efficient…my aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal them.”

The Department of Education deserves to be on the chopping block. Our children’s education is too important to be left up to a federal centralized bureaucracy. Jimmy Carter created the Department of Education as a political payoff to the teachers’ unions for their 1976 endorsement. We should judge all governmental agencies by their results rather than their intentions. Like virtually every federal department, the Department of Education has only made things worse.

The Department of Education is blatantly unconstitutional, like so much that the federal government does. The truth is that the federal government only has about thirty enumerated powers delegated to it in the Constitution. Education is not specifically listed in the document, which means that the authority over education should be left up to the states and the people. We cannot afford to waste anymore taxpayer dollars on failed national schemes.

Federal agencies always cost more than initially predicted. The Department of Education’s 2011 budget is nearly six times greater than its original budget. It has increased from $13.1 billion (in 2007 dollars) in 1980 to $77.8 billion in 2011. The federal government throwing more money at education has done virtually nothing to improve educational outcomes. Student test scores in math, reading and science have remained flat or declined over the past four decades. The chart below from the Cato Institute shows how increased federal spending has not had a positive effect on educational achievement:

The federal government meddling in education has been a failure to say the least. A group of federal bureaucrats in Washington, D.C. cannot possibly design a curriculum that meets the unique needs of millions of school children across the nation. We need to restore control over education to the local level where teachers and parents are put back in charge. Make no mistake; eliminating the Department of Education is a pro-education position.

More of today’s Republicans need to grow spines and renew the call to abolish the Department of Education. It’s unconstitutional, a waste of taxpayer dollars and has been detrimental to the quality of education in America.

Supreme Court to Hear Arizona School Choice Case

Originally posted at FreedomWorks.org.

On November 3, the U.S. Supreme Court is scheduled to hear oral arguments in a case over Arizona’s popular school choice program. Arizona’s well-known 13 year old Individual Scholarship Tax Credit program offers tax credits to those who donate to fund scholarships for students to attend a private school. Unfortunately, the American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona filed a lawsuit claiming that the program was unconstitutional since many children have voluntarily chosen to attend religious private schools.

For many years, school choice programs have been under attack from powerful teachers unions, some politicians and others. However, the ACLU who claims to protect individual rights should be a main supporter of school choice. These programs allow students to escape their local failing school to attend a better school that meets their individual needs. As a result, parents and students have a wide array of nonreligious and religious schools to choose from.

Under Arizona’s school choice program, residents who donate to any of the 54 school tuition organizations receive a tax credit. Last year, 73,000 residents donated $50 million to fund these scholarship programs. All residents have the option to donate to the many non-religious scholarship organizations. This scholarship tax credit program allows approximately 28,000 students to receive a better education. According to Tim Keller, executive director of Institute for Justice’s Arizona chapter,

Private choice, not government action, controls Arizona’s tax credit program. The entire program is religiously neutral.  Taxpayers and parents have no financial incentive to donate to either a religiously affiliated scholarship organization over a nonreligious scholarship organization or to select a religious over a nonreligious school.

The Supreme Court’s decision will have major implications for other school choice programs around the country. Many states have similar tax credit scholarship programs including Iowa, Georgia, Rhode Island and Pennsylvania. With the fight for school choice heating up in Pennsylvania, the ruling has the potential to hurt countless parents and students.

In a Goldwater Institute report, they found:

a significant number of Arizona families with incomes below $30,000 are benefiting from school choice policies.

In fact, 90 percent of the school tuition organizations reward scholarships based on financial need.  Additionally, Baylor University Economics Professor Charles North found that the scholarship tax credit program saves Arizona taxpayers somewhere from $99.8 to $241.5 million.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the ACLU claiming that the program was unconstitutional. If the Supreme Court upholds this decision, thousands of children would be forced to return to their local public schools. Dr. Charles North also finds that 11,697 students would have no choice but to return to their local public school without scholarship credit. However, the Center for Arizona Policy estimates that number to be much higher:

Since the committee found that approximately two-thirds of the scholarships are awarded to students from low-income families, it is extremely likely that more than one-fourth of the current students receiving scholarships would not be able to attend a private school without the scholarship, so the program results in savings to the State.

In an Institute for Justice video, the Dennard family whose five children receive an educational scholarship says:

We started to have a family and have children and when we did that their quality of education became a major issue. The public schools in south Phoenix are inadequate. Arizona’s scholarship program gave our family the opportunity, gave us a choice, they gave us the opportunity to choose the school that we want in our neighborhood…please don’t cut this program out. It has benefitted my family, my children have a great education, they are going on to college now.

The Arizona school choice program has been a win-win. It saves taxpayers money while increasing parental satisfaction and student achievement. While the Arizona scholarship program is still limited, the Goldwater Institute states that:

scholars have demonstrated… that school choice had led to academic gains at the school level, both in Arizona and elsewhere.

Since parents have a true private choice, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of Ohio’s school choice program in Zelman v. Simmon-Harris in 2002. Let’s hope that the recently sworn in Supreme Court justices also understand that Arizona’s scholarship program has the secular purpose of allowing children the freedom to escape their local failing public school.

GOVERNMENT OVERHAUL OF STUDENT LOANS LIKELY TO ELIMINATE JOBS AND INCREASE TUITION COSTS

Originally posted on March 30, 2010.

Today, Obama signed the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010 which grants government substantially more control over higher education. This legislation overhauls student loans by making the federal government the primary distributor of student grants and loans. In addition, it expands Pell Grants by more than $40 billion and provides billions of taxpayer dollars to community colleges and historically black colleges and universities.

Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) claimed that the government running the student loan business is a bad idea:

“It’s a very bad idea. We now have the government running banks, insurance companies, car companies” and Democrats want the government to now “take over the student loan business.”

The student loan overhaul is expected to eliminate tens of thousands of jobs. Rep. Howard P. “Buck” McKeon (R-Calif.) claims that:

The proposal would eliminate 30,000 loan industry jobs.

Six Democratic Senators, Thomas R. Carper (DE), Blanche Lincoln (AR), Ben Nelson (NE), Bill Nelson (FL), Mark Warner (VA) and Jim Webb (VA), even wrote a letter to Harry Reid that expressed their concern that the student loan overhaul would increase unemployment.

We write to make you aware of our concern with provisions of contemplated student lending reform that could put jobs at risk.

The rapidly rising cost of college is a major cause for concern. College inflation is significantly higher than general inflation, the cost of college rises 6 to 7.5% percent annually. In the 2008-2009 academic year, two-thirds of students were forced to borrow money to attend college. The average student that graduated from college last year borrowed an outrageous $23,186. Therefore, the real focus should be on decreasing the amount that students have to borrow by lowering college costs for all students. Unfortunately, government intervention in higher education often raises cost without regard to the taxpayers.

As an article in the Wall Street Journal states, the price of college is likely to increase under the newly signed the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010:

As for the cost of college, expect it to become even less affordable as the subsidies keep flowing. The main achievements of this new legislation will be to give more power to government, and to transfer more of the costs and risks of college financing to taxpayers.

Neal McCluskey, associate director of Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom, claims that student aid such as Pell Grants can be detrimental to students and is likely to impede economic growth:

The reality is that student aid drives massive, self-defeating college price inflation, creates ugly bloat and waste in our ivory towers, and ultimately cramps economic growth.

Cato Institute scholar Tad DeHaven summarizes key points against federal subsidies in higher education:

Federal student loan and grant programs have been subject to waste and fraud for decades. The Pell grant program (which SAFRA would enlarge) costs taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars per year in fraud. Another ongoing problem is the high default rate on student loan programs.

The effect of subsidy programs, in part, is to impose taxes on blue collar workers—who have not attended college—to pay for the tuition of future white-collar professionals. Why should the government subsidize future high earners at the expense of average working people?

Federal student aid programs transfer wealth from taxpayers to academic institutions. That’s because the rise in student subsidies over the decades appears to have fueled inflation in education costs. Tuition and other college costs have soared as subsidies have risen. College cost inflation induced by federal aid probably hurts low-income families—the people that federal aid was supposed to target—more than others.

Ideally, all qualified students should be able to attend an affordable college. It is shameful that an intelligent and high-achieving college student might be forced to drop-out based on their inability to pay the college’s sky-rocketing tuition costs. However, Obama’s plan will not target these rising costs. Massively subsidizing college tuition through taxpayer money only gives colleges less of an incentive to reduce costs and tuition is likely to continue to rise at unprecedented rates.

Unfortunately, Expanding Pell Grants Likely to Increase College Tuition and Fraud

Originally posted on February 2, 2010.

In Obama’s proposed 2011 fiscal budget released yesterday, he calls for a massive expansion to the Pell Grant program. The Pell Grant, given to undergraduate and some graduate students that can demonstrate financial need, will be expanded to approximately $35 billion.  It’s no secret that tuition costs are soaring particularly at public colleges and universities. According to College Board:

most students and their families can expect to pay, on average, from $172 to $1,096 more than last year for this year’s tuition and fees.

The rate at which college tuition costs are rising is astounding. The average price of a private four-college is $26,273, an increase of 4.4 percent from the 2008-2009 school year. The average cost of a public four-year college this year is$7,020, an increase of 6.5 percent. The average price of a two-year public college, typically community colleges, has increased 7.3 percent within the last year to $2,544.

All college students and their families are affected by these high and escalating college costs. In order to make colleges more affordable for all students, it’s vital to analyze the reasons why colleges have become so expensive within recent years. In a Cato Institute’s published policy analysis “Making Colleges More Expensive: The Unintended Consequences of Federal Aid” Gary Wolfram states:

One result of federal government’s student aid programs is higher tuition costs at our nation colleges and universities… the empirical evidence is consistent with that- federal loans, Pell grants and other assistance programs result in higher tuition for students.

Dr. Wolfram explains that the unintended consequences of Pell Grants are hurting college students:

The federal government’s financial aid programs cause higher tuition costs, reducing the ability of some students to go to college and causing others to attend a college that is not their first choice. Basic economic theory suggests that the increase in demand for higher education brought about by the system of grants and loans will increase the price of higher education.

Judith Lee of Harvard University found that the Pell Grants are responsible for skyrocketing tuition costs:

private four year college increased listed tuition prices by more than two dollars for each dollar increase in Pell Grants, and public four-year colleges increased tuition by 97 cent for every dollar increase.

In addition, it is reported that hundreds of millions of dollars is susceptible to fraud and abuse in the Pell Grant program.  According to John Boehner (R-OH):

The federal government needs to do a better job of ensuring the rights of needy students are protected against abuse and fraud in the Pell Grant program.

Despite the high cost and fraud, Obama plans to increase the program by billions of tax-payers dollars:

The Obama budget will also propose making the Pell Grant an entitlement program like Medicare and Social Security. As an entitlement, the full grant would be guaranteed to anyone eligible, and Congress would be obliged to fund the program for all who qualify.

By drastically expanding Pell Grants, college tuition prices will likely significantly rise for all while fraud will become more widespread. Unfortunately, it is likely that increasing Pell Grants will only worsen the problem of outrageous college costs.

On the other hand, The Heritage Foundation has suggestions on how to make college more affordable for all students:

These trends have the potential to dramatically lower costs and pop what some observers have called the “college tuition bubble.” This presents policymakers and the private sector with a better strategy to solve the college affordability problem.

• Lower costs by improving efficiency. Colleges and universities should improve efficiency for students by lowering costs–such as by offering online instruction and credit-by-exam options.
• State governments can encourage innovation. States with multiple public postsecondary institutions could expand course offerings throughout the state through online learning or even offer content online for free–allowing people from all walks of life to benefit from the state’s higher learning offerings. States could also expand credit-by-examination options at its state universities.