Why Federal Education Programs Fail
The answer lies in the concluding paragraphs of this column by Joel Belz on recent proposals to extend federal education oversight into preschool and daycare programs from the current issue of World Magazine (subscription required):
I’ve said before in this space, and it needs to be said during just about every presidential campaign, that there is something much more potentially terrifying than to watch the government continue to fail in its efforts to prop up education in this country. Much worse than such a continuing failure would be to watch the government succeed.
Shaping the minds and the value system of our children is simply not the proper function of government—almost certainly not at any level, but especially at the distant federal level. (Emphasis added)
If your child’s school chooses never to mention what Jesus calls “the first and great commandment of life”—to love the Lord our God with all we have—all the rest of that school’s education will be as hollow as it is shallow. And even worse will be the effort, so often attempted (and sincerely so), to address some expression of the second great commandment—”loving your neighbor as yourself”—without having dealt seriously with the first one. The first provides both skeleton and heart for the second; the second is impossible without the first.
Society needs to understand, and so do evangelical Christians, that the real problem with state education today (and even with much private education) has nothing to do with teachers’ salaries or funding levels or phonics or curriculum or how many months of the year or hours of the day children go to school. All those things have their significance and are worth discussing at the right time.
But the right time for that is always after settling what education is really about. Until educators get that straight, they’re not going to get anywhere with “education reform.” And they have no business talking about stretching the federal government’s reach into preschool and daycare—where the best they will ever do is to compound their present clumsiness.
Well said.
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If your child’s school chooses never to mention what Jesus calls “the first and great commandment of life”—to love the Lord our God with all we have—all the rest of that school’s education will be as hollow as it is shallow.
?
Why would they think that?
Myself, I’m quite pleased with my children’s public school education (it’s not perfect – too conservative in many ways, but still…), as I was with my public school education. And I sure don’t want the schools to try to teach my kids their version of what they think about God.
I prefer to do that at home and at church, where I know what is being taught.
Lord knows, our teachers have enough to do now without adding religious training to their roster of stuff to cover.
But the right time for that is always after settling what education is really about.
And I wonder what this fella thinks “education is really about…”?
As is often the case, I find what Thomas Jefferson has to say about public education interesting…
A bill for the more general diffusion of learning… proposed to divide every county into wards of five or six miles square;… to establish in each ward a free school for reading, writing and common arithmetic; to provide for the annual selection of the best subjects from these schools, who might receive at the public expense a higher degree of education at a district school; and from these district schools to select a certain number of the most promising subjects, to be completed at an University where all the useful sciences should be taught…
This [bill] on education would [raise] the mass of the people to the high ground of moral respectability necessary to their own safety and to orderly government… I have great hope that some patriotic spirit will… call it up and make it the keystone of the arch of our government…
The less wealthy people,… by the bill for a general education, would be qualified to understand their rights, to maintain them, and to exercise with intelligence their parts in self-government; and all this would be effected without the violation of a single natural right of any one individual citizen…
I… [proposed] three distinct grades of education, reaching all classes. 1. Elementary schools for all children generally, rich and poor. 2. Colleges for a middle degree of instruction… And 3d. an ultimate grade for teaching the sciences generally and in their highest degree… The expenses of [the elementary] schools should be borne by the inhabitants of the county, every one in proportion to his general tax-rate. This would throw on wealth the education of the poor…
As is often the case, Jefferson would be derided as a socialist by some if his actual words were read and heeded. I simply agree that some form of public schooling is a good thing.
I also agree with this author and you, Doug, that I don’t especially want the feds fooling around with it, other than just helping make sure it happens in an equitable manner.
One other question I have:
What federal education programs do you and/or this fella think fail?
As noted, I tend to want public education handled at the local level and keep the feds out of it as much as possible. Having said that, I’m in favor of smart gov’t (which tends to be smaller in the Big Picture) and sometimes, federal programs can do a good job.
One federal program that has been consistently praised as successful by those on the Left and Right is Head Start. Investing money in the poorest of our children (as Jefferson advocated for) in pre-school education and preparation pays off in the long run.
Read info here, if you’re not familiar with Head Start.
So, I am wondering, WHICH federal education programs fail?
Actually, this is Tom’s post, so I’ll leave it to him to respond as desired.
I will say that we managed to send a man to the moon without a federal education department, so I’d love to see that removed to shrink the fed’s fingers in local school issues.
I will also note some irony in Jefferson’s words.
and all this would be effected without the violation of a single natural right of any one individual citizen…
Wonderful, except…
This would throw on wealth the education of the poor…
I wonder if keeping the fruits of one’s own labors is, in Jefferson’s mind, a natural right or not. I tend to take Jefferson’s words with a grain of salt. Brilliant man, no doubt, just some … interesting … combinations of views.
I think my (personal) main issue with government schooling is that kids wind up spending much more time there than with their parents, and the values taught there (or the “values free” education, as I’ve heard some teachers say it is, which is an impossibility) are what the kids, therefore, get more of and which make the Christian parent’s job that much harder.
Case in point: Our first child did public school for a few years before we decided to home-school up to high school. One of the reasons was a movie about inappropriate sexual situations these 3rd graders might find themselves in. Aside from the fact that this was 3rd grade, my wife asked to see the movie. Well, they would only let her see the Reader’s Digest version, hitting the highlights. She understood what it was trying to do, but the essential message was “If it doesn’t feel good, don’t do it.” This is a value system, plain and simple, with it’s corollary being the pervasive cultural norm “If it does feel good, do it.”
The problem with taking religion out of school is that they can’t use the term “right” and “wrong” in a sentence, when discussing something other than plain fact, and sometimes not even then. They’re left with emotions and feelings, that, to a 3rd grader, seem appropriate, and they become indoctrinated.
Now, of course, we exercised our option to have our daughter sit that one out and dealt with it ourselves. This meant that she got singled out and brought to the library until the movie was over and then brought back as some sort of oddball. She didn’t like the resulting type of attention that brought on her, and it’s perfectly understandable.
So without a value system to work from, schools, in this regard, can do more harm than good. And when schools ask the kids to not tell the parents what’s going on, it shows where removing that value system has put us.
Not to mention how, as we get more outcome-based education, we get lower and lower math & science scores, the question is not so much which federal programs fail, but why we have the feds involved with curriculum at all. I will say that the high school my 2 oldest are in now is great, and I’m glad we moved into this district. With others, they’d probably still be home-schooling.
Dan,
I’m not really in favor of any federal education program. As with many federal programs, they fail much more often than they succeed. If government is to be involved in education at all it is, in my opinion, more effectively done at the state and local level.
By the way, I don;t think Jefferson was arguing for federal involvement in education but rather for state and local governments to be involved.
My apologies, for referring to this as Doug’s, not Tom’s post.
The problem with taking religion out of school is that they can’t use the term “right” and “wrong” in a sentence, when discussing something other than plain fact, and sometimes not even then.
Well, I don’t know about where you are, but in our schools we discuss right and wrong all the time in our schools. I was a teacher (briefly) and I know that I did, as well as other teachers I’ve met or that my children have had. This is just not a reality in the public education with which I’m familiar.
And yet, it IS a dicey cauldron when you’re in a public school. Right and wrong according to whom? For instance, my children have had teachers who have talked about the Righteousness of war and that’s not a value that we teach at home or at my church. So, I am well aware that sometimes when schools DO talk about morality, there will be conflicts.
But I view that as a good thing. We teach our children our values at home and at church, I don’t really expect or want the schools to get too deep into teaching values, beyond the values that are necessary for schooling (ie, respect each other, respect teachers, polite discourse, etc), which ARE taught. It’s a red herring to suggest that values aren’t taught in school.
So, I’m still left with the questions I raised earlier:
Why would this author think that, “If your child’s school chooses never to mention what Jesus calls “the first and great commandment of life”—to love the Lord our God with all we have—all the rest of that school’s education will be as hollow as it is shallow.”?
And:
I wonder what this fella thinks “education is really about…”?
And as I noted earlier, I tend to agree with both of y’all that I don’t especially want the feds involved in public education. I object to Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” because I think it is a failed approach to education and an example of federal busy-body-ness.
But, Tom, what of cases like Head Start? Studies and research consistently suggest that it does help our poorest children succeed in school and, by decreasing additional intervention and drop-out rates down the road, actually saves school dollars.
Assuming that to be the case, would you support that particular federal program IF it did indeed work as intended? IF it saves taxpayer dollars and IF it helps students to succeed, are you okay with it?