Friday evening, I travelled to Hepburnville (just north of Williamsport) to attend a candidates forum sponsored by the Lycoming County Pomona Grange. I deeply appreciate their hospitality and their efforts to keep voters informed. Gordon Hiller did an excellent job of moderating the forum, and it was a great opportunity to focus on those areas where candidates differ.

I was asked about the current law governing public education, No Child Left Behind (”NCLB”). In a forum like this, I had less than one minute to respond. What I want to say on this subject requires much more than a minute, so I thought I would take this occasion to share my views on the subject of public education in general and NCLB in particular.

First, let’s specifically address NCLB. I believe that NCLB may have been well-intended, but like so many one-size-fits-all, big government “solutions,” it has hurt the very people it is intended to help. According to The Heritage Foundation, “Under NCLB, states are required to test students annually and demonstrate continual progress toward a federal goal with all students reaching ‘proficiency’ on state-level tests by 2014. Some states have responded to this pressure by changing how their tests are scored to allow more students to pass and to show more progress under NCLB.” In other words, we aren’t making our children smarter, we’re just making them look smarter. In reality, our children continue to lag behind their peers in other industrialized countries, ranking 23rd in science and 32nd in math in 2006 (http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/pisa/pisa2006highlights.asp).

Further, NCLB negatively affects local school districts. It has created more federal control over the education process without providing any additional funds to comply with all of the regulations (”unfunded mandates”). One former school administrator told me that his school district received roughly 7 percent of its budget from the federal government (the national average is around 8.5 percent), but expended roughly 35 percent of its total revenues complying with federal laws.

Additionally, NCLB has hurt teachers. I can’t tell you how many educators I have spoken to about this issue and I have yet to hear one teacher praise NCLB. They tell me that they feel hamstrung, that they are forced to “teach the test” instead of truly educating their students, and that they have been conscripted as government clerks because of the volumes of paperwork involved in compliance. One teacher let me in on the inside joke that they call the law “No Teacher Left Standing.”

For all of these reasons, I do not think NCLB should be tweaked. NCLB should be repealed.

Further, I think its time to revisit President Ronald Reagan’s idea to eliminate the federal Department of Education. Did you know that the federal Department of Education was not made part of the President’s Cabinet until 1979, by President Carter? How did we ever manage without this federal agency?! In truth, we fared better when control over education was left to parents, school districts and states.

Let’s face it, public education is one of those areas where we most clearly see that the more local the government, the better. Control of our children’s education should be returned to the grassroots level.

Indeed, I see this as a Constitutional issue. The last article of the Bill of Rights, the Tenth Amendment, states: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.” The question then becomes obvious… Can anyone show me where our Constitution delegates power over our children’s education to the federal government?