Bush’s No Child Gets Ahead law is one of the best examples of how the federal government uses the power of the purse to encourage states to sacrifice their constitutional rights.  Now he wants to expand the law.

The Bush administration called on Wednesday for an array of changes to the president’s signature education law. The proposals would give local school officials new powers to override both teachers’ contracts and state limits on charter schools in the case of persistently failing schools.

That is rich.  The federal government is going to allow local officials to override state officials.  I’m no lawyer (if you are and have an opinion, please chime in), but I don’t recall any provisions in the Constitution giving the federal government the authority to usurp the rights of the states, save the explicitly defined rights that are spelled out in the Constitution.

I don’t agree with the states, like New York, that restrict access to charter schools, but it is their right to make that choice.  The federal government should not be able to subvert their decision.

How does the federal government pull this off?  Easy, they just threaten to take away funds if the states don’t comply.  They buy off the states.  Quite frankly, it discourages me that the states allow their sovereignty to be bought and that Americans complacently allow the federal government to take an unholy percentage of our income in order to enable the buy off.

I am, by the way, in dubious company with my opinion:

While allowing for “areas of agreement” with the president’s blueprint, Senator Edward M. Kennedy, the Massachusetts Democrat who is chairman of the education committee, said he was “disappointed that the administration has proposed circumventing state law” with its proposal on charter schools.

I’m a firm believer that the best way to improve schools is not through more government, but through more free market.  As I like to say, I don’t have a problem with government financed education. just government run education.  All of the money that is currently spent on our government schools should be distributed to the parents of children in the form of vouchers.  Parents can use these vouchers to send their kids to private secular, private religious (should the state allow, Maine does not), or government run schools.  Not so claims California Democratic Representative George Miller, who chairs the education committee.

Separately, he rejected the administration’s call for school vouchers. President Bush proposed, as he has every year since taking office, taxpayer-financed vouchers to allow children in struggling schools to transfer to private schools.

“Private school vouchers,” Mr. Miller said, “have been rejected in the past, and nothing has changed to make them acceptable now. They are the same bad idea they have always been.”

Mr. Miller didn’t offer an explanation of why vouchers would be a “bad idea.”  I’ll try to fill in for him.  Most politicians like programs like government run education because it allows the government to control us.  Most parents in this country dutifully send their kids to our government schools everyday where the government has complete control over how and what they learn.  Furthermore, it creates a large constituency of government employees, many of them unionized, whose votes can be bought through well timed pay and benefit increases.  A voucher program would wrest this control from the government and place it with the parents.  Mr. Miller and most of his comrades on the hill don’t want to lose that power.

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This entry was posted by Brian on Friday, January 26th, 2007 at 6:10 am and is filed under Education, Government. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. Please note the copyright policy.