The Department of Education
as a nation we were once able to correct our mistakes; the last evidence I see of that ability dates to 1933
The Department of Education was never a good idea, and still is not, and it never will be, even when judged by its own measurements. Recently James and I watched the documentary Schooling the World; it was the second or perhaps third time for me, but I wanted to introduce it to James. Schooling the World is a 2010 documentary directed by Carol Black that explores the impact of western education on traditional societies around the world. I got angry all over again. If you want to watch it and then come back to read what I have to write, all the better; you can watch it in its entirety, for free, at the link provided. I hope to see you back in 1 hour and 10 minutes.
Power
Welcome back! “Education” is a very, very powerful thing, and as usual the tremendous power of education can be used for good, or against, which is to say for evil. This post is not about teachers, except to say that they are in the same predicament as the rest of us, even worse perhaps. My family is full of teachers, and I have my favorites from those formative years just like the rest of you. Rather, this post is about how education has been constructed and used to enhance state power.
The documentary shows clearly how “western education” is and has been used for evil. It seems to me that the sole objective of the western education system is to build and train (indoctrinate) human widgets; these widgets are intended for use in the economic machinery of the nation-state; the economic machinery of the nation-state is a necessary though not sufficient element in the development of great state power. Plug-and-play, that’s one characteristic the state intends to develop in its widgets. In the end though, state power is what it is all about.
Truth be told, most widgets are not aware of the fact that they are indeed a widget; I wasn’t, and this includes the widgets working in the widget factories to produce replacements in the machinery of state power. After all, going back generations all we have known is to be a widget without knowing we are such; widgetry to us widgets is like swimming to fish; it’s just what we do, and always have done going back at least four generations. But, once made aware of of our widgetness we have a choice; to be, or not to be, slaves of state power.
My Education
I’ll say that my introduction as raw material into the widget factory, K-12 education, was subtle; it was not so much that I was trained to be a co-dependent widget, this was in the 60’s and 70’s, it is rather that I was not educated in any sense for the direct provision of my most basic needs. It was all about making money in some future to buy from other specialists those things that are actually necessities. The track was towards specialization, and university of course, from the earliest days. I received heavy doses of the usual, Reading, Riting, and Rithmatic, the three R’s; some history, written by the winners naturally; chemistry, biology, and so on. The usual stuff, and all good, so far as it went. In the vocational technical school I could have and should have involved myself in more instruction in “the trades,” but did not; that was for the “losers” at the South end of the school, or so we thought then. College was for the rest of us “winners,” and a “career” of abject state servitude, though we did not know that at the time.
I shared this quote in my Newsletter #218:
A commissioner from Virginia made known to the Indians of the Six Nations a fund was created for youth education. He said,
"If the Six Nations would send down half a dozen of their young lads to the college, the government would take care that they should be well provided for, and instructed in all of the learning of the white people.
The appointed Indian representative for the Confederation for the Iroquois tribe responded, 'Our ideas of this kind of education happen not to be the same with yours. We have had some experience of it; several of our young people were formerly brought up at the colleges of the norther provinces; they were instructed in all your sciences; but, when they came back to us, they were bad runners, ignorant of every means of living in the woods, unable to bear either cold or hunger, knew neither how to build a cabin, take a deer, or kill an enemy, spoke our language imperfectly, were therefore neither fit for hunters, warriors, nor counselors; they were totally good for nothing.
We are however not the less obliged by your kind offer, though we decline accepting it. And to show our grateful sense of it, if the gentlemen of Virginia will send us a dozen of their sons, we will take great care of their education, instruct them in all we know, and make men of them.'"
"Remarks Concerning the Savages of North America" (1784) by Benjamin Franklin
As true today as it was in 1784, only more so.
Leaving high school it never even entered my mind that I could be anything but an employee. What more can I say. Never. And of course to get ahead I would need to go to college, just like all the others in my herd of widgets wanting to get ahead. I tried and failed at that in my first attempt at South Dakota State University. Somehow I then decided that I needed more self-discipline in my life and joined the Navy. I was then in the Navy or Navy schools for 17 years. I had become a widget to be admired, a specialist, and yet an exceedingly insignificant part of the military’s machinery, itself a major contributor to state power. The two by the way, economic and military power, are inextricably linked; hence the nation-state’s insatiable need for more widgets in both sectors. (For more on state power, and how it is measured, read The Rise and Fall of Great Powers; you are experiencing first hand the fall of a great power right now, so you might as well know what’s going on in the historical context.)
The Department of Education
As anecdotally evidenced by my own experience, the United States is great at building state power on the backs of its subjects. But I guess winning two “world wars,” rebuilding the West, including our former enemies Japan and Germany in the wake of World War II, and being he first nation to put a man on the moon were not enough; clearly we needed the feds to get further ahead, or stay ahead, or some such nonsense. In hindsight it seems it was bound to happen, and circa 1978 it was decided that a cabinet-level Department of Education in the United States would satisfy the fabricated “need.” Never mind that the power to create such a department is not granted to the feds in the Constitution, we’ve been ignoring the Constitution going way back. Regardless, here is a quote from encyclopedia.com regarding the establishment of “the Department:”
According to the Department of Education Organization Act (1979), Congress set out to accomplish seven things by creating the department:
Strengthen the federal commitment to ensuring access to equal educational opportunity for every individual.
Supplement and complement the efforts of states, local school systems (and other instrumentalities of the states), the private sector, public and private educational institutions, public and private nonprofit educational research institutions, community-based organizations, parents, and students to improve the quality of education.
Encourage the increased involvement of the public, parents, and students in federal education programs.
Promote improvements in the quality and usefulness of education through federally supported research, evaluation, and sharing of information.
Improve the coordination of federal education programs.
Improve the management and efficiency of federal education activities, especially with respect to process and procedural funds, as well as the reduction of unnecessary and duplicative burdens and constraints, including unnecessary paperwork, on the recipients of federal funds.
Increase the accountability of federal education programs to the president, the Congress, and the public.
In developing its own mission, the Department of Education identified its own basic responsibilities:
Establish policies relating to financial aid for education, administer distribution for these funds, and monitor their use.
Collect data and oversee research on America's schools, and disseminate this information to the public.
Identify major issues and problems in education and focus attention on these problems.
Enforce federal statues prohibiting discrimination in programs and activities receiving federal funds and ensure equal access to education.
Let’s summarize the seven objectives of the department that I highlighted in italics: strengthen, supplement, complement, encourage, promote … yada, yada, yada, ad nauseum. As should be expected, the first four objectives involve the actual doing of nothing. And who in their right mind goes to the federal government to improve or increase coordination, management, efficiency and/or accountability, items 5, 6, and 7 respectively? No one in their right mind is the correct answer.
Now, let’s try to draw a line between what the department’s heads saw as their “responsibilities” and what the legislators saw as the department’s objectives. Key words I see; establish, collect, oversee, administer, identify, enforce. Hmmm…no connection so far, as again should have been expected. Here is what the department itself decided it was to do, and they even listed it as job one; the department will distribute money taken from taxpayers, after skimming a bunch to pay their own salaries. Period. End of story. It really is that simple. Which begs the next question; have they wisely invested our money, or simply flushed it down the toilet through a bunch of bureaucrats?
School Performance - Let’s Have a Look
If we take what the establishment wants us to believe at face value, should we be impressed with the return on our investment?
ED's (U.S. Department of Education) mission is to promote student achievement and preparation for global competitiveness by fostering educational excellence and ensuring equal access.
The “why” it seems to me, is “preparation for global competitiveness;”
“promote student achievement” and “fostering educational excellence” are the same thing from where I sit, and they constitute the “how,” together with
“ensuring equal access.”
I learned something significant at the now defunct Saturn: Let’s say you have a goal, “global competitiveness” in this case, then at every lower level in the company (the state bureaucracy in this case), measurements should be defined and directly support accomplishment of this goal. I challenge you to find anything that links “ensuring equal access” to “global competitiveness” on the ED’s website. I can save you the trouble, it’s not there; we are “ensuring equal access,” whatever that means, for its own sake.
You can read about the “2022 Agency Equity Plan related to Executive Order 13985,” or not, you won’t learn a damn thing. They do cite an “early accomplishment” however:
On January 20, 2021, fewer than half of K-12 students were learning in person. Similarly, many postsecondary institutions either delayed the start of their spring semesters or began the terms with virtual instruction. Just a year later, nearly all students are back in school and learning in person with caring teachers, faculty, staff, and administrators. Across the country, K-12 and postsecondary institutions are establishing new programs and supports to address the impact of the pandemic on students’ learning and mental health.
As if the Department of Education had anything to do with getting kids back to school. And those would be the same kids that the feds said shouldn’t and couldn’t be in school; now they take credit for getting them back in school, and dealing with the negative impact of their Covid policy prescription on “learning and mental health.” You cannot make this stuff up.
But aside from that complete nonsense, let’s have a look at “student achievement,” or “educational excellence,” which at some level are prerequisites for achieving global competitiveness.
https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/
That’s from the front page of the Nations Report Card. These are the Department’s own numbers. And it doesn’t look good, but hey, it’s a relatively short-term assessment; the Department has been around since 1980, let’s look further back.
There is simply no argument to be made that the Department of Education has improved anything with respect to “achievement” or “excellence.” Ever. Maybe, if you squint real hard, the top 10% went from 300 to 305 (+1.6%) in Reading, and from 310 to 320 (+3.3%) in Math over 40 years, but that’s not even measurable on an annual basis. And look at the bottom 10%; they are close to 30% lower in achievement than the top 10% on the same scale, and the gap has not been closed one iota, in fact the gap is bigger 40 years on!
You can go into all the detail you want at: https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/data_tools.aspx
So What?
This is where I go back to a fundamental assumption that I think I got wrong for a long time, the assumption being that these bureaucrats are either stupid, incompetent, or both. It just can’t be so, I’ve come to realize. So what? That means they know exactly what they are doing, and it is not “to promote student achievement” and it is not “fostering educational excellence.” In the face of this institutional failure to satisfy two parts of its mission, we are doubling down on what doesn’t work, as indicated by the President’s 2024 budget request:
Continues to make significant investments to raise the bar in public education, working to address longstanding inequities that students and educators confront every day in under-resourced schools and institutions of higher education by proposing $90.0 billion in new discretionary Budget Authority, a$10.8 billion or 13.6 percent increase from the fiscal year 2023 enacted level (less rescissions). No programs were eliminated or consolidated.
No programs eliminated. No programs consolidated. No improvement. No change. No good. How is that “raising the bar” working for you, or your children, or grandchildren? And that damnable word “inequities” raises its ugly head again. But it’s not about that either, as shown earlier, or we would by now have closed the gap at least to some miniscule extent between the high and low-achievers. The elite do not care about the inequities, and never have. Let’s be honest, it’s all smoke and mirrors.
The average employee salary for the United States Department of Education (ED) in 2022 was $106,971. This is 54.2 percent higher than the national average for government employees and 47.6 percent higher than other federal agencies. There are 6,917 employee records for United States Department of Education (ED).
https://openpayrolls.com/federal/united-states-department-of-education
Let’s put that $106,971 in perspective; in terms of the average teacher salary of $66.745 reported by the National Education Association (NEA) in April of 2023, the bureaucrats’ average wage is 60.2% greater than the teachers’ average. So, we have underpaid teachers, and we have almost 7,000 overpaid federal employees blowing through $90,000,000,000 annually to absolutely no positive effect on “student achievement” or “educational excellence,” call it what you will. Let that sink in.
What’s Really Going On?
We have to assume that the leadership of the Department of Education are not complete idiots. It’s hard I know. What are they really up to?
The first goal and primary function of the U.S. public school is not to educate good people, but good citizens. It is the function which we call - in enemy nations - 'state indoctrination.'
Compliant subjects is what they are up to creating, aka, widgets. Largely kept ignorant of what is actually going on. Born to serve the state in some capacity. Let’s go back to the mission: “preparation for global competitiveness;” how might we measure that, and how our we doing against that measurement?
According to the Economics Help web page titled International Competitiveness, there are many factors that contribute to international competitiveness, but, “Education determines worker skills and labour productivity.” That seems like a good place to go next.
Finally, upward trends are to be found! And here we have proof that the bureaucrats are indeed not idiots, and are getting exactly what they want; ever increasing labor productivity, while at the same time paying less and less for that productivity. That includes the aforementioned teachers. The widgets have been well trained and indoctrinated, including the widgets (teachers) training future widgets (the rest of us) for employment in the economic and military machines.
And that my friends, is why we are spending $90,000,000,000 per year and employ 7,000 widget-bureaucrats; in preparation for global competitiveness. That is the only part of the Department of Education’s mission that matters to the elites, and as should be expected it is the only measurement that is improving in the long term. The elites could not care less about “student achievement” and “educational excellence,” unless and until they see labor productivity in a persistent downward trend. More GDP means more military power, more economic power, and more state power. And power, is what it is all about.
Maybe, I’m just thinking out-loud here, maybe we should dismantle the Department of Education, reclaim its entire budget, and invest the savings instead in our 3,650,000 teachers? If we did that, the result would be a $24,657 raise for every K-12 teacher in the classroom in all 50 states. That’s how much we are wasting on the Department of Education, a bureaucracy that is serving its own interests, and those of its parent, not those of the citizenry. If the NEA would get behind the effort, we could have the Department dismantled in a matter of months. I’m not going to hold my breath.
Correcting Our Mistakes
The mistake I was writing of at the outset was Prohibition. We prohibited alcohol with the 18th Amendment in 1919; seeing the error of our ways we repealed the 18th with the 20th Amendment in 1933. Since then we have allowed numerous program and policy failures to persist, including but not limited to the War on Poverty, the War on Drugs and of course, the Department of Education.
Reagan campaigned on eliminating the Department of Education; that’s been 40 years ago now, and had he not backed down we’d be the better for its absence. More are calling for its abolition today. The department by its own measurements is and always has been a complete failure when it comes to improving the education of our children, as shown above. The “ED” and all of the programs it administers should be ended today; the money we are spending, if left to the states, localities, families and individuals, would have a much more positive effect.