Keeping Watch On the Official Education Agenda

Research Study

The U.S. Department of Education has let political agendas influence its education policy. It has collaborated with special interest groups to preserve the federal presence in K-12 education and to block liberty-enhancing alternatives, such as school choice.

This report cites several examples of this politicization, such as:

• The attempt to re-regulate charter schools, which would crush the innovative purpose of these largely independent institutions.
• The Department’s chiming-in with the teacher unions in contending with stunning illogic that vouchers and tuition tax credits should be disallowed because public schools enroll more than 90 percent of schoolchildren. (It’s a monopoly; just leave it alone.)
• DoEd’s joining with the teacher unions in claiming — once again with a lack of logic — that class size reduction must take precedence over school choice.
• The upholding of the National Assessment Educational Programs (NAEP) reading gains as real, though averages obviously were inflated in several states by the growing exclusion of disabled children from the testing.
• The endorsement of 10 fuzzy math programs as the nation’s best, despite the warning of distinguished mathematicians and scientists that they are among the nation’s worst.

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