Education

By George Newberry

Our education system is in desperate need of greater assistance. The Federal Government can do this by providing education funding as directly as possible to our local public schools and their students.

The department is tasked to, "establish policy for, administer and coordinate most federal assistance to education, collect data on U.S. schools, and to enforce federal education laws regarding privacy and civil rights."

The policy of setting standardized test requirements for elementary, middle, and high schools can be established by Congress and provided directly to the schools. Testing results can be sent to "The National Institute of Child Health & Human Development (NICHD), which is a National Institutes of Health (NIH) non-partisan federal "think tank" tasked with research and analysis in the area of children's health and education, who could analyze the data and report their findings directly to Congress.

Congress can provide educational funds directly to the States through a formula-based per-student allocation for education funds, thus eliminating unnecessary upper and middle level management costs. Pell Grants should be handed back to the Department of Health and Human Services, where the Department of Education came from in the first place.

Civil rights laws related to education can be handled by the "Office for Civil Rights," tasked to do just that, located within the Department of Health and Human Services. These steps would eliminate a $48.8 billion behemoth infrastructure and allow us to increase the federal funding we currently provide to our students as well as State and Local schools.