Here’s a thought to stir the pot! Congressman Ron Paul participated today in answering questions submitted by readers of the Freakonomics blog. I thought his perspective on the U.S. Department of Education was interesting:

Q: It was mentioned you were in favor of getting rid of the Department of Education. Is this true, and if so, how do you feel this would benefit the country?
A: I do believe in eliminating the Department of Education.

First, the Constitution does not authorize the Department of Education, and the founders never envisioned the federal government dictating those education policies.

Second, it is a huge bureaucracy that squanders our money. We send billions of dollars to Washington and get back less than we sent. The money would be much better off left in states and local communities rather than being squandered in Washington.

Finally, I think that the smallest level of government possible best performs education. Teachers, parents, and local community leaders should be making decisions about exactly how our children should be taught, not Washington bureaucrats. The Department of Education has given us No Child Left Behind, massive unfunded mandates, indoctrination, and in come cases, forced medication of our children with psychotropic drugs. We should get rid of all of that and get those choices back in the hands of the people.

Hmm, interesting. I have actually been having similar thoughts the last couple of weeks since having a discussion on this with some colleagues at the AECT conference. Can someone explain to me, exactly, why we need a U.S. Department of Education and what value this department has to justify its huge expense? I can see that there is some benefit to having continuity between states for students who transfer, but is that worth the cost of this department? I transferred mid-year as a high schooler from a school on semesters to a school on trimesters. You can’t get any more mixed up than that, and I adjusted fine when I jumped brand new into the middle of my new trimester and curriculum.

The other argument might be that we need a U.S. DOE to regulate uniform high quality across all states. But that’s so laughable, let’s not talk about it, since our students uniformly perform very poorly compared with other nations, and it could be argued that the U.S. DOE impedes rather than promotes educational reform and improvement. By dissolving the U.S. DOE and throwing responsibility for education back to the states, education would become an important economic issue: States would want to have top tier educational systems to attract people to their states. Competition would breed improvement. Innovation could be allowed to emerge in some states and the others could then learn and follow positive examples.

Now I could be wrong, and perhaps someone can successfully challenge my arguments here. I admit, I am still thinking these things through. So here’s the challenge: Can anyone give me a solid reason why the U.S. DOE is worth the millions of dollars we give it? A good reason why we should continue to allow it to exist? I’m seriously interested in knowing.