Joel Klein was able to impose his will on the Microsoft Corporation, much to consumers’ detriment, but he made less headway against the Education Blob. Perhaps ironically for someone who had served as an antitrust enforcer, his first great accomplishment as chancellor of the New York City schools was to centralize control in his own office. Calculating test scores accurately revealed that they barely budged during his eight-year tenure. As for the “rubber rooms,” where teachers accused of gross misconduct sit around for months or years, drawing full pay — made famous in the documentaries “The Rubber Room” and “Waiting for ‘Superman’ ” — Klein got them formally eliminated. But teachers who can’t be fired are now making six figures for doing clerical work. Maybe, in the words of “Waiting for Superman,” Klein changed the system from “rubber rooms” to “dance of the lemons.”

It’s no secret that expelling the U.S. Department of Education is something that a lot of libertarians, and conservatives who haven’t lost their way, would love to do. What’s not nearly so well known is that there are also people on the left who dislike ED. Now, they don’t dislike it because it and the programs it administers clearly exist in contravention of the Constitution, or because its massive dollar-redistribution programs have done no discernable good. They dislike it because, especially since the advent of No Child Left Behind, it strong-arms schools into doing things left-wing educators often disagree with or resent, like pushing phonics over whole language, or imposing standardized testing. Many also truly believe in local control of schools, though often with power consolidated in the hands of teachers.

Case in point is a guest blog post over at the webpage of the Washington Post’s Valerie Strauss. The entry is by George Wood, principal of Federal Hocking High School in Ohio and executive director of the Forum for Education and Democracy. He writes:

Everybody dislikes bureaucracies, but for different reasons. The “right” complains they are unresponsive, full of “feather-bedders,” and a waste of taxpayer money. The “left” complains they are unresponsive, full of people who are too busy pushing paper to see the real work, and too intrusive into local, democratic decision-making. Maybe we should unite all this new energy for making government more responsive and efficient around the idea of eliminating a bureaucracy that was probably a bad idea in the first place.

Remember that the Department of Education was a payoff by President Jimmy Carter to teacher unions for their support. Before that, education was part of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare.

That’s where I propose returning it. Here are several reasons why:

First, the current structure of the national Department of Education gives it inordinate control over local schools. The federal government provides only about 8% of education funding. But through through NCLB, Race to the Top, and innovation grants, they are driving about 100% of the agenda. Clearly this is a case of a tail wagging a very big dog.

Second, by separating education from health and welfare, we have separated departments that should be working very closely together. We all know, even if some folks are loath to admit it, that in order for a child to take full advantage of educational opportunities he or she needs to come to school healthy, with a full stomach, and from a safe place to live.

But the federal initiatives around education seldom take such a holistic approach; instead, competing departments engage in bureaucratic turf wars that, while fun within the Beltway, are tragic for children in our neighborhoods.

Third, whenever you create a large bureaucracy, it will find something to do, even if that something is less than helpful. After years of an “activist” DOE, we do not see student achievement improving or school innovation taking hold widely. We have lived through Reading First, What Works, and an alphabet soup of changing programs with little to show for it.

In fact, DOE has often been one of the more ideological departments, engaging in the battles such as phonics vs. whole language. Who needs it?

Who needs it, indeed!

As I have touched upon repeatedly since last week’s election, now is the time to launch a serious offensive against the U.S. Department of Education. I have largely concluded that because of the wave of generally conservative and libertarian legislators heading toward Washington, as well as the powerful tea-party spirit powering the tide. But this is a battle I have always thought could be fought with a temporary alliance of the libertarian right and educators of the progressive left who truly despise top-down, one-size-fits-all, dictates from Washington. There are big sticking points, of course — for instance, many progressives love federal money “for the poor” — but this morning, I have a little greater hope that an alliance can be forged.

K‑12 school choice programs based on education tax credits are receiving a lot of attention after last week’s Supreme Court oral arguments in the Winn case. SCOTUS is likely to overturn a lower court ruling in Winn that would have hobbled or killed Arizona’s education tax credit program, and that has some folks consternated.

Among the ranks of the tetchy is Kevin Carey of the Quick and the Ed. Jay Greene responds here, and concludes, in essence, that Carey is inconsistently alternating between two criticisms of tax credits whenever one is whacked with a compelling counterargument. Worth a read.

VerBruggen signs off on the tax cut/​government check debate by doubling down on the core issue; he believes that there is no meaningful difference between government spending and a tax cut. I will quote him in full: “If some libertarians want to keep insisting that there’s a meaningful difference between (A) the government spending $500 on something and (B) a person “donating” $500 to that thing and then getting a $500 break on his taxes in return, there’s nothing I can do to stop them.”

In this, he has the company of the 9^th Circuit and the Progressive wing of SCOTUS.

VerBruggen has also rightly asked for a correction to one of the numerous quotes I pulled from his blog posts on tax cuts vs government spending. I thank him sincerely for reading through to the end of my interminable post. The correct quote is below, with the omitted, qualifying language in italics, a new note on charitable giving and government spending, and my otherwise unchanged commentary:

He insists that “much (most?) deducted charity spending does not offset government spending in the slightest,” yet also agrees that “voucherizing the tax subsidies for charity would remove the incentive to donate” to the range of charitable and social welfare activities the government supports. [Note: There is much evidence that government spending on “charity” crowds out charitable giving. And most, not to mention much, charitable giving in the U.S. is devoted to health, educational, social welfare and religious organizations which in turn focus on assistance to the poor, health and educational activities. Needless to say, the government is deeply involved in health, education and welfare spending. See the index of Arthur Brooks’ fascinating book, Who Really Cares, for more details.]

Charity does not reduce pressure on the welfare state? The billions of dollars donated to health, education, welfare … these offset nothing in the public sector? In the absence of tax expenditures for employer-provided health care, how likely is it that the U.S. would have retained a relatively robust private medical market?

The charitable deduction allows the people who earned the money our governments spend on public “charity” to keep some portion of what the government would otherwise have spent on government “charity” or some other wasteful project.

If VerBruggen is concerned that the tax burden will marginally increase on some citizen as the result of another’s charitable deduction then the answer is to balance that lost revenue with a reduction in government “charity,” not to eliminate the deduction.

Perhaps most concerning is VerBruggen’s breezy assumption that all income belongs to the government. He insists that “taxpayer money is already allocated” in the form of deductions for charity, and therefore that “voucherizing the total amount of the deductions wouldn’t change that …”

Really? Tax credits and deductions belong to the taxpayer who earned them. They are not government funds; that is a legal and logical statement. To insist otherwise is to argue that all income is the governments, and what it does not claim is ours. The money that a taxpayer spends is HIS money, not the government’s.

And, as is noted above, voucherizing charitable deductions will convert a huge portion into direct welfare payments and eliminate the core of the charitable act; giving away one’s own money.

I have to say, I never thought I’d read a blogger on NRO endorse the notion that all of the money you earn belongs to the state. I certainly never thought that read it twice in a year. But here we are, again … and I feel compelled to engage in an excruciating debate with Robert VerBruggen of Phi Beta Con.

Question: Is there any substantive difference between the government cutting you a check or cutting your taxes?

VerBruggen agrees with the Progressives on the Supreme Court: Nope, all your money is the goverment’s!

But his odd insistence that government checks and tax cuts are the same began months ago, when he expounded more extensively if not coherently on this same subject.

I attempted to illustrate where he had gone wrong in his thinking by taking his positions to an extreme. To my surprise, VerBruggen agreed with my modest proposal to eliminate all charitable tax deductions and credits and capitulate comprehensively to the welfare state

More specifically: “The feds should eliminate the charitable tax deduction and send out the average (tax-forgiven) amount donated per adult to every citizen in the country to donate as they wish!”

VerBruggen supports a “charity entitlement” over charitable tax deductions. He favors a “social security” model for “kind of a ‘forced charity’” over tax deductions.

I’m not sure if he’s thought his rather radical and odd argument through to the end point.

Many of the citizens receiving their “charitable donation” check would be low-income. That means they didn’t earn the money they have been given, someone else did. Furthermore, they are qualified for government “charity,” which means they can use their “charitable donation” check on themselves; housing, food, healthcare, addiction treatment, maybe the opera or a class on origami.

What VerBruggen supports is not charity; it’s a massive new welfare program.

And in addition to the new, wildly unrestricted welfare program, he supports forcing wealthier folks to hand money to less wealthy folks to “donate” to things those folks like. What is it that someone wrote on PhiBetaCon about how careful we are with other people’s money? Oh, right, George Leef referenced some guy named Friedman.

And just imagine how one might go about enforcing the use of the voucher in the first place. What happens if a person never donates it? Do we need special accounts from which to spend the money, or should we mandate one donation, with the check signed over to a single registered charity? What does this interesting new program look like?

The citizens who earned VerBruggen’s “charity” money can’t decide how it should be used. The government, in conjunction with citizens who did not earn the money, decides how it is to be used.

VerBruggen claims none of this matters. After all, tax deductions are a subsidy of private charity. “Charity” vouchers are a subsidy too. Ergo, there is no difference between vouchers and deductions. “The better solution,” writes Robert, “End charitable deductions (and most other deductions!) entirely.” I’m curious what deductions he thinks worthy of survival.

VerBruggen’s formulation is a cartoon version of the real world and the issues at stake. And his proposed “solution” would be an unmitigated disaster.

Government is heavily invested in the business of “charity.” The government supports health, housing, parenting, addiction, jobs and retirement programs. It supports scientific research, the humanities, the arts, recreation and of course education at all levels and in every field and stage of life. Federal, state and local governments are massive “charity” machines which collect some people’s money according to their success in earning it, allocate it to other people according to the preferences of still another set of people, as translated through the relevant political and bureaucratic system, who then spend said money on one final set of people. The support of all these people and things is required by the government.

In the libertarian Shangri-La, no subsidies of charity would exist. Let’s say the government collects taxes only for the common defense, policing, the courts, etc. In this state of nature thought game, he is correct that any charitable tax deduction would raise the effective tax burden on those who did not use the deduction. It’s a subsidy, and each non-deducting taxpayer is effectively compelled to support to some degree the donation of a deducting taxpayer.

Of course if every taxpayer takes a deduction, then there is no coercion; everyone benefits and the required increase in the tax rate would fall equally as well. In addition, each taxpayer would be free to direct his donation. In the case of a “charity” voucher, however, each taxpayer would be compelled to support the choice of non-taxpayers and lesser taxpayers. (There is also the minor difficulty of how one might enforce the use, and legal use, of a “charity” voucher sent to every citizen.)

In other words, vouchers require compulsion, and tax expenditures do not.

Much more important, however, the government would not be in the business of providing “charity” itself. In our libertarian state of nature, which would be the least of evils; equal taxation in support of government-provided “charity,” or an equal amount forgone in charitable deductions available to all taxpayers? In the former case, everyone is compelled to support all government “charity.” In the latter, only those not claiming a deduction are compelled to subsidize the charitable deductions of others. Fewer people are compelled to support a particular kind of charity, but those who are compelled pay comparatively more.

But instead of proposing as his solution the elimination of the welfare state, VerBruggen promotes the elimination of the charitable deduction as his preferred state of affairs and the redistribution of charitable donations as an improvement on the status quo.

He insists that “charity spending does not offset government spending in the slightest,” yet also agrees that “voucherizing the tax subsidies for charity would remove the incentive to donate” to the range of charitable and social welfare activities the government supports.

Charity does not reduce pressure on the welfare state? The billions of dollars donated to health, education, welfare … these offset nothing in the public sector? In the absence of tax expenditures for employer-provided health care, how likely is it that the U.S. would have retained a relatively robust private medical market?

The charitable deduction allows the people who earned the money our governments spend on public “charity” to keep some portion of what the government would otherwise have spent on government “charity” or some other wasteful project.

If VerBruggen is concerned that the tax burden will marginally increase on some citizen as the result of another’s charitable deduction then the answer is to balance that lost revenue with a reduction in government “charity,” not to eliminate the deduction.

Perhaps most concerning is VerBruggen’s breezy assumption that all income belongs to the government. He insists that “taxpayer money is already allocated” in the form of deductions for charity, and therefore that “voucherizing the total amount of the deductions wouldn’t change that …”

Really? Tax credits and deductions belong to the taxpayer who earned them. They are not government funds; that is a legal and logical statement. To insist otherwise is to argue that all income is the governments, and what it does not claim is ours. The money that a taxpayer spends is HIS money, not the government’s.

And, as is noted above, voucherizing charitable deductions will convert a huge portion into direct welfare payments and eliminate the core of the charitable act; giving away one’s own money.

In merciful conclusion, VerBruggen is confused and incorrect on a long list of issues.

With the Constitution — and its limits on government — playing such an outsized role in Tuesday’s elections and American political discourse generally, this would be a good time to mention a new program that teaches high school students about our founding document. 

My sometime co-author Josh Blackman, who is the founder of the Harlan Institute (a constitutional education non-profit for which, full disclosure, I serve on the board of directors) recently launched this year’s version of Fan​ta​sySCO​TUS​.org, a Supreme Court fantasy league that was featured (along with Harlan) in yesterday’s Washington Post. In FantasySCOTUS, students learn about and make predictions for pending Supreme Court cases, including recent headliners Snyder v. Phelps (the funeral protest case) and Schwarzenegger v. EMA (the violent video game case). The project, among other Harlan Institute initiatives, is already being used by teachers in over 100 schools across the country, and is growing rapidly. 

Anyone interested in getting involved should consider participating in the Harlan Institute’s “virtual mentoring program.” On November 11, Harlan Institute will be holding the inaugural SCOTUS Skype-Teach-A-Thon:

As a complement to Fan​ta​sySCO​TUS​.org, the Harlan Institute has trained a group of Mentors to to deliver virtual lectures to classrooms using Skype video chats.

If you are an attorney or law student interested in volunteering with us, please fill out this form. The time commitment would probably be about 1 hour on November 11. Our mentors consist of attorneys, law professors, and law students who are all committed to raising awareness of the Constitution and the Supreme Court.

For an entertaining and informative testimonial about Harlan and FantasySCOTUS, see this clip:

Over the last couple days I’ve been arguing that the time might be ripe to start pushing the case in Congress to get Washington out of education. Educationally, fiscally, and constitutionally it is the right thing to do, and the negatives of being smeared as “anti-education” or “anti-child” could be countered by very powerful voter sentiments against big, wasteful government.

Well, it seems new Tea Party-type Congress members might get a chance to use education to prove their bona fides very early. In his post-pummeling presser yesterday, President Obama mentioned education as one area in which he could see bipartisan accomplishments being made, and several articles today — including on Politico and in The Washington Post — suggest that education might indeed be a Kumbaya issue.

That could be right, because presumptive House Speaker John Boehner (R‑OH) was a lead force behind the No Child Left Behind Act, and the Obama administration has made a lot of noise (if just the opposite in terms of concrete action) about taking on teachers unions and fighting for charter schools. In other words, there seems to be some bipartisan convergence on education, with Republicans now favorable toward federal control and Dems willing to at least talk critically about mega-potent unions. That NCLB is far passed due for reauthorization only bolsters education’s chance of being used as a fence-mender.

That said, there are a lot of obstacles in the way of this happening, with the ideological fissures among congressional Republicans likely to be one of the biggest, as well as divisions among Democrats. But if the leadership in both parties see education as a place where they can all hold hands, the time to make the unapologetic, uncompromising case for getting Washington out of our schools will definitely be upon us.