Why I Applaud Trump’s Plan to Show Teachers the Door
There are not too many areas of policy on which Donald Trump and I agree. One of the few exceptions is on the topic of education policy, where Trump has rightly condemned the Department of Education as wasteful, meddlesome, and counterproductive. While the presidential candidate has waffled back and forth on whether he would eliminate the department outright or drastically scale it back, it’s clear that he has no love for the unconstitutional federal education bureaucracy.
Predictably, progressive groups are horrified at Trump’s proposal, and are scrambling to pull at the heartstrings of Americans, emotionally manipulating them into opposing this eminently sensible proposal. In this vein, the Center for American Progress (CAP) has released a policy paper claiming that eliminating the Department of Education (DoEd) would destroy jobs for nearly half a million teachers.
To which I can only respond: Good!
It’s time to punch a hole in this myth that teachers are some kind of noble, magical unicorns selflessly molding young minds out of the goodness of their hearts. While there are many good teachers who honestly want to help children learn, we need to get over this idea that every teacher is infinitely valuable simply by virtue of their chosen profession. Teaching is a job like any other, but unlike most other jobs, it’s one that has been badly corrupted by politics and government to the point where many teaching positions do more harm than good.
In particular, public school teachers have largely become glorified babysitters, tasked with crowd control, not education. And mandatory testing standards mean that many teachers are simply ”teaching to the test” rather than engaging in a genuine effort to enlighten their students. In some schools, the role of the teacher has been reduced to pressing play on a device containing a pre-recorded lesson plan. Yet these are the brave and noble souls that liberals think deserve special treatment compared to other workers.
Regarding the Department of Education itself, it’s important to note that the U.S. Constitution does not mention education as an enumerated power of the federal government, The Tenth Amendment makes explicit that anything not specifically given to the federal government is the sole province of the states, and the people. The Department of Education is therefore, by definition, illegal. Anyone who uses the argument that “we must uphold the rule of law” must likewise oppose the Department of Education, or risk falling into the fathomless abyss of hypocrisy.
Now that that’s out of the way, let’s take a pragmatic look at what the Department of Education actually does. The Department’s core function is awarding large amounts of money to state and local school systems in the form of federal grants, with inevitable strings attached that hamstring localities’ ability to set their own curricula, standards, or procedures. The massively unpopular Common Core standards are a prime example of the kind of mischief the DoEd gets up to, as states were lured into the restrictive standards by massive amounts of funding through the Race to the Top program, only to discover that any semblance of flexibility was the cost of the grants.
Federal control over local schools makes no sense, as bureaucrats in Washington have no idea what is needed to educate students in Alaska, Alabama, or Maine. Additionally, the money handed out by the DoEd has not resulted in any measurable improvement in education outcomes over the forty or so years of its existence.
If, as CAP alleges, scaling back teachers and funding will be catastrophic for student outcomes, why is it that we have seen absolutely no benefit from the steady increase of both these variables over the past several decades? This is how government operates; it endlessly piles up spending and staff that were never necessary to begin with, and then screams that disaster will occur if they are removed.
This brings us back to teachers. At this point, most people are familiar with teachers’ unions and how they prevent bad teachers from being fired. We’ve all heard stories about hopelessly incompetent or even criminal teachers staying on staff because of their union’s political power. A business that is unable to get rid of its worst employees is always doomed to failure, unless, of course, it is being propped up by endless revenue streams courtesy of the American taxpayer, as public school are. These people don’t care about students; they care about lining their own pockets.
This diversion of funds from the private sector, where people spend money on things they care about, and where they try to find good value for their dollars, to politically favored groups like teachers who bear no responsibility for doing a good, or even acceptable job, is a tremendous waste, not just of money, but of young minds as well. I have no doubt that many of these teachers who are propped up by funding from the DoEd would be much more valuable to society in other roles, where their worth is determined by the services they provide to the public, not the lobbying of special interests.
In summary, children in public schools, especially those under the thumb of the federal government, are not taught, they are controlled. They are not encouraged, they are discouraged. They are told what to think, not how to think. They are brainwashed to obey authority without question, and punished when they dare to think differently. In my view, the fewer people we have engaging in such irresponsible treatment of our children, the better. (For more from the author of “Why I Applaud Trump’s Plan to Show Teachers the Door” please click HERE)
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