Local Control of Education

“Local control will attract teachers and
increase teacher pay and flexibility.”

I attended public schools, attended and taught engineering in public colleges, published papers and articles on education, received grants and awards for educational innovation and now direct two educational organizations while teaching two online courses for a Christian school and educating four boys at home with the help of my wife Lynn.

I fully understand and appreciate the work that public school and college teachers and administrators are doing. They are doing a job which has become more difficult over the years as result of school curricula transitioning from local parental control to federal and international agenda control with the resultant demoralization of the curricula.

When the U.S. Department of Education was forming in 1926, J. Gresham Machen (1881-1937), Professor of New Testament at Princeton Theological Seminary, and founder of both Westminster Theological Seminary and the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, presented a Joint Committee of the United States Congress with important reasons for not forming the U.S. Department of Education. He explained that standardized education is based on the assumption that people are essentially machines and can be mass educated; similar to the mass production of automobiles in a factory. However, since people are not machines; but created by God to love and serve Him and others, standardized education functions to significantly limit education.

Dr. Machen testified that,

“The department of education, according to that bill, is to promote uniformity in education. That uniformity in education under central control it seems to me is the worst fate into which any country can fall…It is perfectly clear of course, that if any such principle of Federal aid in education is established, the individual liberty of the States is gone, because…money given for education, no matter what people say, always has a string tied to it.”

For North Dakota public schools to fulfill their Constitutional role, they must return to local control. This is practical and can be accomplished through incrementally disengaging schools from federal funding. Imagine public schools where the ND constitution and US Constitutions are the governing documents with incrementally fewer legislative constraints. Teaching would be fun and efficient again because teachers would be free to creatively communicate content and less property tax dollars would be required to support bureaucracy.

But how can one state senator get this process going? This can be done by finding one public school board that is ready to return their school to local control as the founders of our country intended and who will read one book on how to interpret state constitutions.

Private and home schools are also to be encouraged in every way because they demonstrate how greater local control brings more liberty for the teachers and students to excel in their unique areas of interest and how less tax payer money is needed to accomplish better results. After all, private schools and home schools were the main stream methods from the 1630s to the 1860s. Those methods produced great men like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and John Adams.

Teacher and staff salaries along with teacher shortages and school consolidation issues can be resolved by reducing the costly legislative burdens on the schools. This fact can be understood by noting that home educating families spend $500 per year per student on educational expenses as compared to $8,000 per year per ND public school student. More local responsibility and less regulation leads to proportionately lower costs, more efficient use of funds and improved learning, leaving more money available to pay teachers and more flexibility to address local issues.

John Taylor Gatto, New York City and New York State Teacher of the year stated in his book on the history of American Education that it is “time to take our script from this country’s revolutionary start…We became a great nation from the bottom up. That is the only way to rebuild…”

Frequently Asked Questions about Local Education
Challenges to the ND Education Association

Other References: 1 2 3

"Thomas Jefferson warned that "the natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground." American elementary and secondary education shows how right he was. Two centuries ago the founders rejected federal participation in education and even rejected George Washington's plans on establishing a national university. It should be of little surprise, then, that the term "education" appears nowhere in the Constitution. Few early Americans would have considered providing education a proper function of local or state governments, much less some distant federal government. Federal control of the nation's schools would have simply been unthinkable. This view was the prevailing one well into the 20th century. In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan campaigned, in part, on a proposal to close the federal department of education. How things have changed in a few short decades. Today, every state requires children to attend school, and most dictate precisely what the children will learn. Parents, in contrast, are able to make very few choices about their children's education.

And what role does the federal government have now? It has drilled deep into almost every public classroom in America. Washington can now tell public schools whether their teachers are qualified, their reading instruction acceptable, and what they must do when their students do not achieve on par with federal demands. At the outset of his presidential administration, for example, George W. Bush pushed for the largest federal encroachment in education in American history. Through his No Child Left Behind Act, the federal government can dictate what will be taught, when, and by whom, to most of the 15,000 public school districts and 47 million public school children. Why the change? Is it a change? What's the cost to the taxpayers? What are the benefits to public school students? To public schools?

Today, with the almost-complete consolidation of education authority in the hands of policy makers in Washington, the last of our educational liberty has been pushed to the brink of extinction. Thankfully, there is still hope: Over just the last decade-and-a-half, school choice - public education driven by parents, not politicians and bureaucrats - has become a force to be reckoned with. Feds in the Classroom will challenge much of the conventional wisdom surrounding federal involvement in education. The author considers all federal activities-legislation, funding, regulations, and judicial oversight-and then makes a cost-benefit and constitutional assessment." Feds In The Classroom: How Big Government Corrupts, Cripples, and Compromises American Education by Neal P. McCluskey, 2007