In a Washington Post op-ed, former education secretaries Rod Paige and Bill Bennett call for a federal education testing regime. States that don’t like the idea would be free to keep their own standards, but only under the “rules and meddling of federal bureaucrats” that already takes place under the No Child Left Behind law (NCLB). What they’re saying to states is this: why don’t we replace those NCLB handcuffs – that you might slip out of anyway – with a nice new straightjacket.”
In trying to sell this idea, they acknowledge that the Constitution makes no mention of education – and hence, by the 10th Amendment, leaves power over it in the hands of the states and the people – but then dismiss adherence to that Amendment as “a naïve commitment to states’ rights.” It is federal officials like these, keep in mind, who would oversee the standards and tests in question. I can see it now. “Guess what I learned in school today, daddy: ‘The Bill of Rights is for wussies!’”
Even more puzzling, the secretaries acknowledge the virtues of competitive education markets in their double plus ungood argument for central planning. As a champion of the Western literary canon, surely Mr. Bennett has turned the pages of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, which begins by explaining that markets depend on specialization and the division of labor. Imposing a single set of federal standards and tests would crush the diversity that markets require.
Most short-sightedly, the secretaries’ simply assume that a new federal standards and testing regime would necessarily meet with their approval. They make that gross assumption at a time when their own party’s control of congress is in doubt, and after acknowledging that “most states have deployed mediocre standards.”
In a nutshell, it’s a bad argument for a bad idea.
Remind me again, which of the two major parties stands for limited government?