This article is copied by permission of its author, Kevin Craig. Mr. Craig is the Libertarian candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives, 7th District, Missouri.
Federal Education Promises Never End
On this day, April
6th, 1972, President Richard Nixon addressed the Annual Convention
of the National Catholic Education Association in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He said,
Inner city schools seem less and less capable of providing
education for the poor and for the racial minorities who more and more make up
their enrollment.
Nixon questioned the effectiveness of then-trendy busing
programs to end racial segregation, in which 2- and 3-hours of bus rides were
added to the school day of select students who were taken to black schools if
they were white, and white schools if they were black, to increase their
"educational opportunities." He then touted the benefits of "The
Equal Educational Opportunities Act of 1972":
Our new legislation would increase [spending] by over 50 percent-- on the
basis of encouraging experimental evidence that assistance in excess of $300
per pupil constitutes the "critical mass"-- the very minimum--which
begins to produce the results that smaller amounts have failed to achieve.
Now the question comes: Can I guarantee this new approach will work? If $200
didn't work, will $300 or $350 work in breaking that barrier in producing
better education? We can't be sure. But the evidence in our judgment is strong
enough to indicate that we ought to try it. What we are sure of is that the old
ways have failed and, therefore, we must move to a new way.
The "old way" was a little government
spending; the "new way" is MORE government spending.
That was nearly a generation ago. Inner city schools -- and all other
government-run schools, are worse than they were in 1972: more violent, more
illiterate.
When our incumbent Congressman was first elected to Congress in 1996, the Republican
Party Platform repeated the promises made when Ronald Reagan campaigned for
President:
As a first step in reforming government, we support elimination
of the Departments of Commerce, Housing and Urban Development, Education,
and Energy, and the elimination, defunding or privatization of agencies which
are obsolete, redundant, of limited value, or too regional in focus. Examples
of agencies we seek to defund or to privatize are the National Endowment for
the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Corporation for Public
Broadcasting, and the Legal Services Corporation.
Instead, our Congressman has worked to increase federal control and federal
spending in all of these areas. Concerning Bush's "No Child Left
Behind" program, James Bovard
observes:
Bush promised that his No Child Left Behind Act would permit
children to transfer out of dangerous public schools. But the states’
definition of “persistently dangerous” schools ensures that hardly any child
can escape violence. For example, a Colorado school with a thousand students could have more than 150 homicides in a single
year and still not be classified as “dangerous.”
The 20th century has proven that more federal control and
more federal spending brings more of the problems the federal government claims
to be solving.
As Majority Whip, our incumbent Congressman boasts of his leadership abilities,
in that he leads reluctant republicans to rally behind President
Bush's proposals for increased federal control and spending. But a true
leader is one who will lead America away from failed socialist policies toward the truly new way of parental
choice in education. (And as is so often the case, that which is
called new is actually very old.) Government control of education has proven to
be a massive failure. When will Southwest Missourians stop voting for failure?
I am revising my campaign webpage
on education, and your comments are appreciated.
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