Put Fed-Ed to Bed Forever
The fundamental education of children with schools was financed and controlled locally by people who had children. It is the best and the least expensive kind of education.
There is no such thing as educational value in the abstract. The notion that some subjects and methods and that acquaintance with certain facts and truths possess educational value in and of themselves is the reason why traditional education reduced the material of education so largely to a diet of predigested materials.
John Dewey
Foreword
The Constitution gives the national government authority to dispose of federally owned public lands. States have benefited from federal land grants to build education facilities. However, the Constitution and Tenth Amendment together prohibit federal aid to education.
Early History
The Morrill Act (1862) implemented a program of federal land grants to aid education. Even today, some state universities continue operating as land-grant universities or Agricultural and Mechanical (A&M) colleges. Arguably, that was a constitutional program. With the second Morrill Act (1890), Congress began to make regular appropriations for the support of these institutions.
With the Hatch Act (1887), Congress started a direct and unconstitutional federal educational aid program (Fed Ed). Initially, that small program funded “agricultural experiment stations.” After that, aid to additional education programs continued to grow. The Fed-Ed program intensified during the early part of the New Deal with funding for the construction or improvement of school facilities. The educrats sold it as a way to provide jobs and stimulate the economy. Sound familiar?
World War II and the following period brought significant increases in federal aid and new federal controls, and strangling regulations. The federal government began to meddle with the affairs inside the schools. Back then, people had a sense of self destiny and understood the importance of local identity. They resisted the temptation of Fed-Ed funding. Nonetheless, like today, the nanny state sucklings claimed the Leviathan’s aid would not lead to control of the educational process. Big fat lie.
In 1949, the President of Columbia University, Dwight D. Eisenhower (Ike), denounced those who supported federal aid for education. Later as president of the USA, Ike asserted:1
I firmly believe that the army of persons who urge greater and greater centralization of authority and greater and greater dependence upon the Federal Treasury are really more dangerous to our form of government than any external threat that can possibly be arrayed against us.
Sounds good, but Ike found delight in much of the New Deal. Incredibly, on April 11, 1953, the Eisenhower administration elevated the United States Office of Education to cabinet-level status. The administration folded it into the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.
On October 4, 1957, the Soviets launched Sputnik, the first satellite. On November 10, 1957, the United States Office of Education released a study showing that public schools in the Soviet Union were outpacing American schools. Indeed, Soviet communism posed a threat, but good intentions can have destructive consequences. The call to outpace the Soviet threat morphed into the need for massive funding to prop up science education. On January 27, 1958, Ike sent an education message to Congress.
This emergency program stems from national need, and its fruits will bear directly on national security...prompt enactment of these recommendations [is] in the essential interest of national security.
On September 2, 1958, Ike signed the National Defense Education Act. Under the defense banner, the government started throwing moneybags to boost general education. Next up in the Leviathan’s upchuck was President Johnson’s Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. Thanks to the Republicans, the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 was the ninth reauthorization of the original Elementary and Secondary Education Act. According to a 2007 report by the Heritage Foundation:
…. with these funding increases has come an increased administrative burden on state and local authorities. No Child Left Behind created new rules and regulations for schools and significantly increased compliance costs for state and local governments. According to the Office of Management and Budget, No Child Left Behind increased state and local governments' annual paperwork burden by 6,680,334 hours, at an estimated cost of $141 million dollars. ... A number of states have published reports estimating the cost of complying with No Child Left Behind. For example, the state of Connecticut found that the state government would spend more than $17 million in 2007 to comply with NCLB. Virginia estimated that state implementation costs totaled approximately 20 million per year.
None of our esteemed “constitutional scholars” like Obama question this blatant rip in the parchment. The luminaries encourage the pillaging of taxpayers to provide “quality” education. What a laugh.
Fed-ED and Teachers Unions
The teaching (programming) unions love Fed-Ed. The two prominent unions are the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the National Education Association (NEA). From its beginning in 1916 to the present, the AFT lives up to its reputation as a collectivist organization. It uses propaganda and politics to control teachers, thereby gaining power. AFT never achieved nationwide status; however, it has strength in its grip on education in eastern cities, including the Big Apple.
AFT’s influence on public education in the U.S. has been enormous for two principal reasons:
During the critical period of the 1930s, AFT members included such people as John Dewey, George Counts, and Norman Thomas.
The rivalry between the AFT and the NEA helped induce the NEA to adopt the socialist tactics of the AFT.
Bella V. Dodd (1904-1969), in her riveting book, School of Darkness, page 72, details her personal experience with the Communist infiltration of the AFT during the 1930s in New York City:
Soon I was invited by a number of communist teachers to attend meetings on lower Fifth Avenue where I met top executives of the so-called Class Room Teachers Association. Ostensibly this was a grass-roots movement of teachers, but they were being taught the techniques of mass action and were carefully organized on the basis of the class-struggle philosophy. They were a disciplined band secretly associated with the Trade Union Unity League led by William Z. Foster.
The Class Room Teachers had two tasks: to convert a considerable number of teachers to a revolutionary approach to problems and to recruit for the Communist Party as many members as possible. Some of these teachers were also members of the Teachers Union Local 5 of the American Federation of Teachers and therein they formed an organized minority opposition to the prevailing noncommunist leadership.
Like all Red unions of the early thirties, the Class Room Teachers Association helped give publicity to the bread-and-butter problems acute at the time. There were many unemployed teachers in the city and a large number of substitute teachers who were hired by the Board of Education at a low daily wage year in and year out. On such issues. the Red organization capitalized while the conservative organizations were too inept to act.
The Class Room Teachers sent mass delegations to the Board of Education. It issued attacks against the officials of the city and jibed at the then-respectable Teachers Union under the leadership of Lefkowitz and Linville. Teachers such as Celia Lewis, Clara Rieber, and Max Diamond emerged as leaders of the Red minority within the A. F. of L. Teachers Union. By organizing the unemployed teachers and fighting to have them in the Union, it became clear that before long the Teachers Union would be controlled by the Reds.
Organized in 1862, the Nauseating NEA started as a professional education organization. Congress bestowed it with a federal charter in 1906. Headquartered in the District of Columbia, the NEA initially published information helpful to classroom public schools. They worked to improve teaching quality. However, by the mid-1930s, the NEA followed in the footsteps of the AFT and transitioned into a post-modern collectivist cauldron. Full throttle ahead, and by the 1960s, NEA gained its reputation as a Soprano-like thug forcing public school teachers across the nation to join its cult-like ranks.
In that same decade, presidential administrations selected many NEA officials for critical positions in the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. Effectively controlling the Education Administration, the NEA has the gift that never stops; Fed-Ed money for education projects. More what a laugh.
Thanks to Jimmy Carter, on May 4, 1980, the Education Administration departed the welfare hive and became the United States Department of Education (ED). Ronald Regan attempted to eight-six the ED, but it marched on and stood ready at attention. ED sure does not have E.D.! We all get the shaft with the Deliberate Dumbing Down of America, perverted taxes, and the hidden tax of inflation.
NEA partners with monopolistic unions, tax-exempt foundations, woke organizations, the Nefarious National Council of Churches, and collectivist groups. It lobbies for court decisions and big-spending federal programs. For example, Biden’s 2023 Budget request is for 88.3 billion. It includes funding for children with disabilities (IDEA), pandemic recovery, early childhood education, Pell Grants, Title I, and work assistance, among other programs. Rest assured, this big Matzo Ball budget has a lot of earmarks to benefit the NEA-ED-FTA circular money pit.
During the 1975 NEA national convention, executive secretary Terry Herndon said:
Our ability to back political commitments have been noted in every state and the halls of Congress. NEA members this year directed their money and talents to the political process in unprecedented numbers. Through NEA-PAC [NEA’s political action committee] teachers invested $225,000 in political action. … We are going for bigger stakes in 1976. We...need more responsive congresspeople and senators.” The NEA and its state and local affiliates have spent more money, engaged in more political activity, and become increasingly militant and powerful with each passing election. Although Americans were becoming aware of its actual, radical nature, it was evident by the 1988 elections that the NEA had more than achieved this objective of predominant political power--at the state and federal levels.
Quite the figures for 1975! The Internal Revenue Service has never revoked NEA’s tax exemption despite blatant political lobbying.2 But in a bow to the NEA, in the 1960s, IRS quickly denied tax exemption to many private schools set up by parents. Work hard to set up private (good) education and get shafted, effectively forcing children out of private schools into the crummy dummy public mental programming system.
The NEA initially claimed it was not a union by opposing teacher strikes. However, by 1968, the NEA president proudly proclaimed that his organization and its affiliates participated in more teacher strikes and walkouts than the AFT. In 1979 NEA President George Fischer said:
We will put the fear of God in politicians all over the country. We plan to make it political suicide to vote against kids and education.
Students, good teachers, parents, and hardworking Americans are all victims of this political machine. It is a system that takes money out of taxpayers’ wallets and gives it to union bosses, who put it in the pockets of politicians.
Control and Decline
With the increase in aid, federal controls multiplied. Despite the gross amount of money, education has declined in quality. The ED now finances a giant hand in controlling American educational institutions. This heavy-handed program is at all levels, from kindergarten through graduate schools in the universities:
Paying the tuition of specific college students and helping deliver the salaries of teachers, college professors, and administrators; telling schools and colleges what percentage of what kinds of students they must enroll
Telling teachers and students what they must do and not do in classrooms; telling children where and how they must go to school, no matter the cost or consequences
Directing the selection of textbooks, planning of curriculum, teaching techniques, and the context of classroom instruction
Rendering school officials and local law enforcement ineffective in controlling the violence against persons and property in the schools
The machine touts Federal aid as the only means of providing enough money to give children the “right” (leftist) kind of education. Yet, ever since the early 1940s, when federal assistance became a conspicuous factor in education, the quality of public education declined. When real money was hard to come by, schools dealt with the fundamentals of education:
Teaching children to understand and use their native language to acquire learning by reading and communicating ideas by speaking and writing
Teaching them the principles and use of arithmetic so they could handle routine calculations generally required of everyone
Equipping children with the essential tools of learning by teaching them about the great civilization and national traditions which produced society
Pointing children in the right direction so that they can acquire such learning as they desire or are capable of and pass on to posterity our rich cultural heritage
The fundamental education of children with schools was financed and controlled locally by people who had children. It is the best and the least expensive kind of education. As the influence of organized propaganda and government forces have poured ever-increasing federal money into the schools, the machine took control further away from the parents who furnished the children and the money.
It is no wonder that education has steadily deteriorated with vast sums spent on social experiments, laptop computers, electronic notepads, curriculum, and lousy “textbooks.” In place of giving students a real education that inspires thought and analysis, we get fuzzy math, values clarification, equality, and earth worship. Today, the “instructional” rage includes but is not limited to LBGTQ “plus,” secret trans wardrobe changing rooms, Critical Race Theory, 1619 Project, Black Lives Matter, anti-racist math, social justice, sex (pornography) instruction, anti-police, male biological students in girl’s sports, progressive protesting techniques, multi-culturalism, etc. No time remaing for Johnny to memorize the times tables.
Professional mind-meld educationists have plenty of money for experimenting with children. The Washington bureaucracy uses force, and the result is nothing short of national mass psychosis. Higher education institutions and public schools lower their academic requirements and behavioral standards to accommodate the lowest common denominator. Many schools have dropped advance track classes as the notion of honor students is an insult to the collectivists. And there is more. Oregon shows us the progressive way by suspending graduation testing requirements.
Despite the positive image that the “education” unions project with public service announcements, we have many functionally illiterate students. We, the USSA, have the most extensive and expensive educational system. Students cannot spell, write a correct sentence, work a simple arithmetic problem, or read with understanding. Gone are the fine arts of real history, literature, sentence diagramming, times tables, cursive writing, home economics, civic, and ethics.
Analysis
With the above backdrop, it is now easy to see how the conversion of our constitutional Republic occurred. It is now an authoritarian, inefficient socialist welfare state (Dumbocracy). With slanted secularist textbooks, the educrats molded our children to be citizens of a one-world socialist government. Individual excellence is now a bad thing. For the ultimate in Gastly Gaslighting, call people who question the machine with terms like xenophobia and nationalism to make them seem like Nazis. The American educational establishment caters to collectivist extremists, perverts, and degenerates. The government’s “equality standards” force this practice.
It is little wonder that the National Commission on Excellence in Education declared, in its 1984 report on the state of education in the United States:
If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war. As it stands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves. We have even squandered the gains in student achievement made in the wake of the Sputnik challenge. Moreover, we have dismantled essential support systems which helped make those gains possible. We have, in effect, been committing an act of unthinking, unilateral educational disarmament.
Many public schools are cesspools of crime and violence. Schoolteachers and administrators serve as wardens, vainly trying to protect themselves and most children from muggers, drug pushers, rapists, extortionists, and vandals. Even vicious criminals are difficult to expel because of the equality requirements of the federal courts and bureaucracy. Many students from kindergarten to graduate school are obedient leftist puppets beholden to their “teachers” and mesmerized by the collectivist “news” media. The notion of a biological mom and dad is considered to be a Western form of slavery.3 The inane and cowardly leftist tactic of “I’m threatened” works like a charm. As such, parental input in educational matters is now relegated to a form of domestic terrorism or white supremacy.
People supported federal aid to education because getting “federal money” would help pay for schools. That would supposedly ease the local tax burden, but the opposite occurred. As federal taxes increase to pay for increased federal aid, the increased federal aid creates more expensive educational systems, with financing supplied mainly by local taxes on real estate or retail sales. All taxes are rising because of the costly (and unconstitutional) federal programs.
Afterword
As a real-time example of the grotesque use of federal money, in 2021, a local school district near Your Author received a 1.5-million-dollar Fed-Ed “Covid relief” grant. That funding included a rider that the school district shall require masks for students to mitigate Covid. Agree to mask the kids to get money for pet projects. Now we know: leaky bacterial collecting face coverings ending up as litter is all about money. Great for the environment.
Also, in 2021, the schools collectively engaged in blatant politics illustrating their symbiotic relationship. The Biden Administration Education Secretary Miguel Cardona personally requested the now-famous letter from the National School Boards Association calling parent activists domestic terrorists. Later, the NEA sent a letter to social media companies encouraging them to crack down on “propaganda” surrounding Critical Race (conspiracy) Theory and other education concerns raised by parents. Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity will one day DIE.
An ED study finds the regular system is failing. Nevertheless, the same Biden Administration department seeks to block alternatives (charter schools). For the bottom line, get a nice cup of coffee before checking out this fantastic ED video:
If that does not cause E.D., nothing will. Maybe an ED “stimulus E.D.” package would be in order.
Sources
Online
Books
Additional Reading
Cogent author and publisher, Frederick R. Smith
Eisenhower won the election to his second term on November 6, 1956. Freed Smith’s mother voted for Ike on the way to the hospital. She gave birth to Your Author early the following day.
Also, see Frederick R. Smith Speaks Logan’s Lesson, Collectivist of the Year Award, and The Outcast
SUPPORT H.R. 899 AND S. 323 TO ABOLISH THE DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION https://jbs.org/alert/support-h-r-899-and-s-323-to-abolish-the-department-of-education/
A note of gratitude goes to the teaches who resist this crapola.