Should Education Be A Right?

Al Sharpton has decided that part of his Presidential platform will be to support a Constitutional Amendment to guarantee the right of a "public education of equally high quality." I appreciate his desire to see the level of educational quality in this country raised, but I think that he's going about it the wrong way.

Specifically, I disagree with his reasoning for wanting the Amendment. I also disagree with his concern about the "privatization" of education. I seriously disagree that education is or should be a federal problem. And finally, I think that there are some pretty worrisome measurement issues that would come up here.

Sharpton claims to want the Amendment to create an equal quality of education. That's a very noble goal, but is it really attainable (I'll come back to measurement in a few minutes.)? And is it really what Sharpton is after? Or is he only interested in this because he might be able to effectively play the race card later on?

The idea seems to stem in part from a Decatur, Ill., case in which the elder [Jesse] Jackson focused attention on the suspension of several African-American students expelled for fighting at a football game.

In 2000, U.S. District Judge Michael P. McCuskey dismissed the claim that the students were being denied equal protection under the Constitution.

That certainly puts Sharpton's interest in a different light. I'm fairly confident that there have been more than a few white kids suspended for fighting after football games. This has probably been happening as long as there has been high school football. Why is it only becoming an issue now? The kids screwed up and they were given a penalty to pay - a penalty that should have been laid out to them in their student code of conduct. They broke the rules - Equal Protection says that they should be required to pay the same price as everyone else.

Now Sharpton also claims that he is supporting the Amendment to counter the "privatization" of education. He says he wants everyone to have an equally high quality of education, yet his plan seems to be to dumb down the standard by eliminating the high quality opportunities that currently exist so that the inferior programs look attractive again. The only reason that vouchers, homeschooling and other measures are so popular is because the public school system as it currently exists is failing. Elimination of the vouchers and homeschooling is only going to make matters worse, education-wise, as the already overburdened system will be completely inundated with students they can't afford to educate. It would, however, be a boon for the people who are most likely to benefit from a massive increase in education spending - the teachers union - which just happens to be a core Democratic constituency.

Teachers will love this idea because it put education firmly in the purview of the federal government. That would create several significant benefits for them. On, the sheer amount of money flowing to the school systems, money that would ultimately be controlled by the NEA and its ilk, would increase exponentially. Second, it would be easier to ram through a new educational social engineering as they would only have to convince the federal government instead of fifty state governments. And third it would solidify their "position" as the sole group that knows enough to be able to dictate what our children need to learn and how they need to learn it.

In short, by making education a federal initiative, we would greatly increase the funding, while simultaneously removing any real oversight of the system.

Education has suffered, not because it is decentralized in the fifty states, but because the real power and authority has become centralized in the fifty statehouses. In Florida, we have 67 individual school districts. When the system was set up, if you wanted to effect a statewide change, you had to convince 67 separate school boards of the value of that change. As time has moved on the primary control of the educational system has moved from the county school boards to the state government. As a result, if some organization wants to launch an experiment of Florida's kids, they only have to convince the State Department of Education. And this process has happened in every state. Control has become centralized in one state department. This amendment would serve to further centralize control and would put our children even more at risk of being manipulated or misguided by a poorly designed idea.

But my biggest problem with Mr. Sharpton's idea is that it is immeasurable. What objective standard is going to be used to determine the success or failure of the "equally high quality?" There is really only one objective standard: standardized testing. But it has already been demogogued as being biased against minorities and is also subject to the dumbing down of results, as evidenced by the recentering of the SAT scores. Grades can't be used, as many school districts are already succumbing to grade inflation and if that were the standard, even more would do so. An annual review by an appointed panel would be both extremely cumbersome and extremely costly. With standardized testing being out of the question for racial political reasons, there really is no other way to measure success or failure against this Amendment and as such, there is no way to enforce it or to ensure compliance.

This really looks to be a grandstanding position for Mr. Sharpton. From everything I've ever seen of him, he is not a dumb man. I'm guessing that he knows that this Amendment is unworkable, but it's worth beaucoup political points and he can probably pin its demise on those evil and uncaring Republicans.

As a political play, it's pretty good. As policy, it would be a terrible, terrible mistake.