As if America’s public schools haven’t suffered enough today. This is the day when the Republicans in the Senate, with the notable exceptions of Sen. Susan Collins (R-Me) and Susan Murkowski (R-Ak), voted to approve the least qualified Secretary of Education in our nation’s history.
As if it wasn’t demoralizing enough to teachers across the country to realize that decisions about their profession are going to be made by someone who doesn’t believe in what they do. They will now have to follow the directions of someone who has made it public knowledge that she prefers religious school, private schools and even profit based charters over our public schools.
Now we have to face the reality that some in the Republican Party would like to completely shut down our entire Department of Education.
Good news for our kids, huh?
Kentucky Representative Thomas Massie, a tried and true conservative, filed a bill today to eliminate the entire department. The bill is exactly one page long, which one has to assume reflects the educational level of the Congressman. It simply states that the Department of Education will be terminated on December 31, 2018.
To give some background here, the Department of Education was formed way back in the 1867, but it was quickly downgraded. It wasn’t until 1979, under Democratic President Jimmy Carter that the current Department of Education was formed.
The cabinet level department was created to address the huge disparities between poor states and those with more of an industry based tax base.
See, public schools in this country have traditionally been funded by local taxes. So if a child was born in a poor town, in a poor state, he or she was likely to experience an inferior education.
The Dept. of Education was formed in part to address that problem. It was also intended to answer the claim that the U.S. was falling behind Russia and Europe in terms of educational excellence.
But here we go. The Republican Party had decided that we need to go back to those glorious days of “state control” and “local control.” Those wonderful days when black kids, poor kids, disabled kids were just victims of where they were born.
Woo, hoo, America!
You get to do that wonderful time travel thing. You get to go right back to 1900, before we had a reasonable public education program.
I hope you’re proud of yourselves.
And here you can see the ass•ole we’ve put in charge.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZeeRSM3cvxg
Featured image by woodleywonderworks via Flickr. (CC BY 2.0)
