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.