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Today's Poll: Should the U.S. Department of Education be eliminated?

By Howard B. Owens
Mark Brudz

Education should be a State/Local proposition, Since the inception of the Department of Education in the 70's our education system's results have declined measurably. In fact, the more we move away from the States and toward the federal government in almost all categories, the more bureaucratic and inefficient everything becomes.

This is not an anti-government position, what has been happening in the US since the late 1960's is that as the federal government assumes more, state and local governments loose more and more control over issues and ultimately expenditure. It leaves us in the position of having to cut services to balance budgets and replaces local and regional control with a massive bureaucratic jungle of one size fits all government.

The next sequence is balancing local taxes against state and federal taxes and a system that is indeed upside down, We send money to Washington and big Washington for our money back, it seeds politicians with impetus to bring back the bacon as opposed to legislating issues.

The biggest mistake we most often make, is starting with local taxes and expenditures in our quest for efficiency, while on the surface it makes sense in the end all that it truly does is empower the beast of an ever growing State and Federal money suction machine

Jan 29, 2014, 10:29am Permalink
Robert Brown

Eliminate "State" from your solution set and I'm 100% with you on this one Mark. There is little good and a whole lot of awful that is inherent in the NYS education system. Genesee County is big enough and not too small to run our own programs, including options for private and home schooling. When it makes sense, we can elect to partner with neighboring counties ala the GLOW BOCES model. Local control would eliminate tiers of non value added bureaucracy and related expense. There is plenty of technology available to enable savvy educators to share and leverage good practices and curricula without bowing to the mandates of out of touch career administrators who have no accountability for the investment made in education or the net results locally.

Keep the dollars local. Make the choices locally. Invest and educate for local success. Take back responsibility - stop yielding everything to broad government.

Jan 30, 2014, 2:51am Permalink
Mark Brudz

The only real place where "State' government should be involved is in higher education, Community Colleges and Four State Colleges Community Colleges are more a regional asset. Four year Colleges are more a State asset until you cross over into the Higher End Universities which are and pretty much should be privately controlled.

All primary and secondary schools should be local as you pointed out earlier exactly Like the GLOW/BOCES model. Maybe we are at 95% agreement, maybe not but getting the Fed and State out of our Elementary and Primary Schools I am sure we agree on.

Jan 30, 2014, 9:49am Permalink

Authentically Local