Education Has Clearly Failed Us

The push is on from US Congress and the Obama Administration to develop and implement “national standards” for academic competency and performance as a way to raise the quality of public education in the country. This initiative would presumably seek to establish a floor or minimum standard for what is deemed a "well educated person" in the country. Sometimes, however, well meaning policy initiatives expose embarrassing facts when run through the sausage mill of the legislative process. The education initiative is no exception.

Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, has joined with leaders seeking $23 Billion in emergency funding from Congress. The funding is needed to avoid as many as 300,000 teacher layoffs as a result of budget cuts stemming from the economic recession. One might think that these distinguished members of Congress would recognize the importance of maintaining the infrastructure of the educational system (i.e., teachers) if there is any hope of reaching the goal of implementing national performance standards. That conclusion is not exactly (pardon the expression) rocket science. Yet members of Congress appear to be balking in their support of the funding request. The reasons given are a need for corresponding budget cuts to offset the expenditure, and that such funding would be a “bailout” of education.

(Pause a moment for the laughter to subside.)

Now let us address reality for just a moment. The same Congress has authorized over $700 Billion in taxpayer funds to bail out financial institutions, and it looks like the public will never see even a small fraction of those dollars in tangible benefit. We are told that the expense was worth it because of the damage that might have occurred if the money had not been given away to huge banks and investment firms. The same Congress has authorized the expenditure of more than 50 times the amount requested for education to be spent in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The experts may have been right in their speculation that failure to bail out the financial institutions might have worsened the economic collapse. The cost of such speculation was enormous, and the failure of those institutions to expand lending and increase flexibility in mortgage foreclosure as a result of the bailout – the payback the public was supposed to get from the decision to risk their tax dollars on the bank bailout- renders the wisdom of the bailout questionable at best. Yet it is a near certainty that failure to provide emergency funding relief to education: a) will damage the quality of instruction to the nation’s children, b) will have immediate negative impact on the functioning of the educational system by increasing class sizes significantly and c) will set the goal of raising performance toward national standards back several years. And the cost of a “risky” bailout of education amounts to the mere fraction of the interest that would be earned on the money spent in Iraq and Afghanistan for a year. A person who cannot reason through such an alternative and conclude that the choice to support education in the short and long term interests of the country is a “no-brainer” may well be, in fact, a person lacking a functioning brain. Simple logic and the most rudimentary grasp of the concept of public service would demand immediate aid to education.

It is apparent that these Congressional representatives could not pass any proposed national education standards in math, economics, reading, history or social studies. This is even greater reason why Congress should hasten to support the request for emergency support to education. If our current system produces leadership of such caliber, there is cause for despair unless urgent measures are undertaken to improve the quality of instruction in the country. Imagine a new crop of leaders who are less educated than the current crop....