Where in the Constitution does it in any way give the Federal government any role in education, much less in a train wreck like the "No child too far ahead" legislation?
Maybe the most controversial sentence in the entire constitution at the time of ratification. The infamous "Elastic Clause" which says in Article 1 section 8 Clause 18:
"The Congress shall have Power - To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof."
This is why I believe the constitution is mostly irrelevant in the creation of laws. It controls the way government should be structured, but even that has been changed by more recent government (See direct election of senators). But the constitution is very contradictory as far as how much power the federal government has: One one side, you have the 10th amendment, which which gives the Federal government NO power beyond the original constitution, then you have the Elastic clause, which gives government all the power in the world.
So that is where the Federal government gets its role in intruding into education at a local level. It is also where government gets the right to control your health care, break up corporations, and control social security.
Even at the time the federalist and anti-federalist argued intensely over what that meant. But it is why government has been able to grow beyond what the constitution specifically allows over time. This clause was obviously the most heavily debated at times like the Hamiltonian bank and the New Deal eras.
Just as an off-topic aside related to the Constitution and education, I believe that further you are from a problem, the less you care about it and the less effective you are in dealing with it.
This holds especially true for education. The further you get from a school system the less you care about and the less competent you are to deal with its problems. State level educators rarely are as invested in a school systems needs and success as those at the local level. This is even more true at the Federal level, yet we cede more and more control of our education process to the Federal government.
Well, until George W. Bush came into office, abolishing the Department of Education has been part of the Republican platform. Reagan and the Bush 41 just didn't have the votes in congress to actually do it. I think Bush 43 helped push federal intrusion into local education a more mainstream Republican party position.
I agree with that assessment to a certain extent. With that being said, I believe the Federal Department of Education being created in 1979 can be traced back to only 4 words in the Brown decision: "with all deliberate speed."
Well, certain states decided that their "deliberate speed" was going to be "NEVER."
After 25 years of unsuccessfully trying to get the states to do something that the federal government couldn't really force them to do, the federal government decided they would intrude. The original intent of the Department of Education was to deal with civil rights and dole out federal funding for Education. Really, only since No Child Left Behind has the federal government been involved in setting standards or curricula.
Although I agree that state governments need to have more control over standards and curricula, they have been known to wildly abuse that power. The Scopes trial and the recent Texas textbook controversy have shown that federal government could be a good way to ensure that states stay as neutral as possible in their education.
The Texas textbook controversy was wildly overblown in the liberal media. But what worries me about it is that those standards that only Texas set, will be in every textbook in the country when the next set of textbooks come out. So essentially, Texas controls the curricula of the entire country.
