Evidently, the stimulus bill that passed the House today includes $150 billion for education, to be spent over the next two years.
There’s plenty of debate over this kind of huge federal spending, and I really don’t understand enough economics to write coherently about the issue.
However, one quote from this particular story jumped out at me.
But Representative Howard P. McKeon, Republican of California and the ranking minority member of the House education committee, said, “By putting the federal government in the business of building schools, Democrats may be irrevocably changing the federal government’s role in education in this country.”
The federal government paying to build schools will do little or nothing to change their role in education.
Certainly not after the past six years during which their No Child Left Behind train wreck of a law has awarded the Department of Education almost total control of school curriculums and teacher training in this country.
Here’s hoping the feds finally step up. I don’t understand how the Dept. of Education sits by and watches everyone else hash out these discussions about education reform and such. What exactly are they taking responsibility for? How exactly is education in America benefiting by their existence?
It’s fun to delegate lots of little things to the states to decide, but education basically determines what our country will be 20 years from now — we shouldn’t be goofing around and duplicating effort 50 times around the country. At the very least, they should put together a few basic math curriculum that all schools can share…maybe we can’t all agree on how to teach history, or science, but can’t we as a nation agree what topics fall under geometry and what falls under algebra?