Survey after survey shows Americans know less than they think about their Constitution—as damning an indictment of U.S. public education as any government “metric” or middling outcome
on an international test. But the most damning indictment of all may be
the belief that education is, or ought to be, a constitutional right.
Infact, the Constitution—which we celebrate on September 17, the day the
framers signed the new document after months of careful if contentious
deliberation—says nothing about public education. Not a word. And it’s a
good thing, too. The Constitution defines and limits the power of
government, a fact barely understood today.
That education isessential to good citizenship cannot be denied. That public education
should be micromanaged through the supreme law of the land is another
matter entirely. Comprehending why education appears nowhere in the
Constitution is a key to understanding why the American experiment in
self-government is at once so brilliant and so fragile.
The 39brave, farsighted individuals who gathered in Philadelphia in 1787
crafted a constitution to establish a strong central government
empowered to do certain jobs that the states could not manage
effectively on their own. These duties included making sure to provide a
common defense, for example, and to ensure that a contract signed in
one state is binding in another.
But the framers also understoodthat there were many more jobs the federal government could not do
better than the states, and hence should not do. Education was foremost
among them.
Education is necessarily a state and local concern.Most states, in fact, include education among several rights guaranteed
in their constitutions. But even if the subjects of education are the
same everywhere—two plus two equals four in Anchorage, Alaska just as it
does in Bangor, Maine—the needs and the character of any given
community are often quite different from others’. We elect school boards
because we believe local oversight is better than deference to
far-flung bureaucracies. And parents know what their children need
better than officials in distant capitols. Even if we accept the need
for state academic standards, that doesn’t preclude the need for local
accountability.
If people are now seeing education as more of ajob for the federal government, it may be because the schools have done
such a poor job of educating people about their rights—and about the
limits the Constitution places on government. A recent poll by the
American Revolution Center in Philadelphia, for example, found more than
half of those surveyed misidentified the system of government
established in the Constitution as a direct democracy rather than a
republic. (The question appears on all U.S. naturalization tests.)
Evenmore troubling were the latest results of the National Assessment of
Educational Progress in civics, which found most of the nation’s high
school seniors had only a “basic knowledge” of American government and a
“limited understanding” of how it works.
The result of such alimited understanding is an accumulation of power in Washington, DC at
the expense of state and local authority and responsibility.
Twodecades ago the nation’s central government contributed approximately 5
percent of the funds devoted to public education in the United States.
Today it’s closer to 19 percent and growing.
The Obamaadministration envisions a federal bureaucracy soon developing national
tests and certifying public schools’ curricula, for the first time ever.
Federal bureaucrats would dictate what children all across the nation
will read and how long they will read it. Local school administrators
would become mere federal apparatchiks, regardless of who signs their
paychecks. Locally elected school boards would be obsolete. Parents
would have fewer and fewer choices for educating their kids.
Andthis massive accumulation of power without accountability would occur in
the absence of any explicit constitutional authority.
Too manyAmericans, and their elected leaders, labor under the belief that there
is no problem the federal government cannot “solve.” In reality, the
problem of public education only worsens the more federal bureaucrats
interfere. If Americans revere the Constitution as much as we’d like to
think, we’ll put a stop to this usurpation of state and local
accountability—and soon.
Ben Boychuk (bboychuk@heartland.org) is managing editor of School Reform News.
Written By: Ben Boychuk
Published In: School Reform News
Publication date: 09/16/2010
Publisher: The Heartland Institute
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