Saturday, December 15, 2001

By Alan Keyes

House and Senate negotiators reached agreement this week on education legislation that the president is expected to sign quickly. And the House of Representatives, in an overwhelming vote uniting Democrats and Republicans, passed the bill on Thursday. Representatives Tom DeLay and Peter Hoekstra led a small group of the conservative remnant in opposing the $26.5 billion package, which Bush Republicans are trying hard to portray as a prudent implementation of conservative principle. But it is, in fact, the culminating capitulation of the conservative attempt to reform the federal government's role in education.

What I wrote about the bill in September remains true today: Instead of the promised attempt to rein in government domination of education, we have an education bill that ramps-up federal funding, increases federal control and was cooperatively stripped of all elements of support for genuine school choice and local control.

However distracted conservatives may be by the drama of the war against terror, we should not let this moment pass without noticing the comprehensive defeat that Bush education policy, enshrined in the bill, represents.

Apparently ended is the struggle conservatives have waged for decades to head off the nationalization of K-12 education. Constitutional language, American tradition and fundamental principles of self-government all weigh decidedly against any federal involvement in local education. Since the first election of Ronald Reagan, the Republican Party had stood for a rollback of that involvement, even abolition of the Department of Education. Now, at the federal level, we have abandoned the argument with the public about the costs and dangers of federal involvement in K-12 education. The current bill does not artfully advance an incremental version of the principled position of President Reagan. Indeed, it takes us in precisely the opposite direction.

It also utterly and finally reneges on one of the most important of President Bush's education policy campaign promises. Candidate Bush called for cutting funds to failing schools and returning to the parents that money in a limited voucher scheme. The bill about to pass Congress for President Bush's signature will give failing schools more money! And the voucher proposal was jettisoned shortly after the inauguration.

The increase in federal education funding in this bill is staggering – over 40 percent in one year. This is more than the education budgets of an average-sized state, such as Iowa or Colorado. With the money, President Bush has eagerly taken on himself, on behalf of the national government, responsibility for the educational performance of the nation's children. No rhetoric about flexibility and local independence will prevent the inevitable – ongoing torrents of federal money, bilge about federal resolve to "leave no child behind" and ever increasing levels of federal oversight and control.

And what will happen when an extra $8 billion fails to improve our children's learning? And fail it will, because real improvement in government schools is blocked by administrative inertia, obstructionist unions and statist secularism in the professional educational establishment. Sad history and all the data show that these impediments are increased, not diminished, by federal dollars. But still the cry will go up for more money, and a more aggressive federal commitment. What will President Bush say next year when another $8 billion increase, or $12 billion, is demanded to make real reform happen? After all, the federal government can leave no child behind. What next? Shall we pass the "Lake Woebegone Act" and decree that all the children shall be "above average?"

Most discouraging of all is that the new bipartisan federal education initiative is such a distraction from the deepest source of our educational problems – the demise of the two-parent, marriage-based family. The family is the school of character and must be the primary agent in education. No federal spending can effectively energize the real reform we need – reform in which parents get control of their own lives, reassert effective, wise and moral control over the lives of their children, and extend that control finally to the common life of our public schools.

As with most federal welfare, federal education money is a drug that obscures and intensifies underlying problems. The Republican Party used to preach "Just say 'No!'" Now we are increasing the dose and inviting the country to party on. It's a prescription for GOP and national addiction that immeasurably weakens our children's future. Let us pray it does not ultimately cost us our capacity for responsible self-government.

Be sure to visit Alan Keyes' communications center for founding principles, The Declaration Foundation.