North Carolina Rep. David Rouzer (R) has introduced a second bill in the House that seeks to eliminate the U.S. Education Department.
According to a press release on Rouzer’s website, H.R. 1510 “proposes a responsible dismantle of the Department of Education by reallocating its billions in funding to be proportionally distributed to the respective states to be used for any education purpose as they see fit.”
Taxpayer funds returned to the states would be in the form of grants.
Examples given of state uses for the funds include “teacher pay raises, new school construction, investment in technology, and more.”
“Given the challenges and special needs that all teachers and school administrators continually face, we can get far more out of the tax dollars currently being spent on education by dismantling this billion dollar federal agency and returning those resources back to the states,” Rouzer said in a statement.
A portion of the bill states:
Congress finds the following:
(1) Principles of federalism embodied in the Constitution of the United States entrust authority over issues of educational policy to the States and the people and a Federal Department of Education is inconsistent with such principles.
(2) Tradition and experience dictate that the governance and management of schools in the United States are best performed by parents, teachers, and communities.
(3) The education of the Nation’s students is suffering under a managerial government.
(4) The Department of Education has weakened the ability of parents to make essential decisions about their children’s education and has undermined the capacity of communities to govern their schools.
(5) In the 34 years of its existence, the Department of Education has grown from a budget of $14 billion to almost $65.7 billion in annual discretionary appropriations administering around 100 programs. Meanwhile, education performance for 17-year-olds has stagnated since 1971.
(6) The Department of Education has fostered over-regulation, standardization, bureaucratization, and litigation in United States education.
(7) The Department of Education expends large amounts of money on its own maintenance and overhead. While the average national salary for public school teachers is $56,103 the average salary for a Department of Education employee is $108,571…
The bill has one co-sponsor, thus far, Utah Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R), who is also a co-sponsor of H.R. 899, a bill introduced by Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie (R) that consists of only one sentence and also calls for the abolition of the U.S. Education Department.
Massie told Breitbart News in February that he had his bill prepared since December. He said:
As we received more and more phone calls from people who wanted me to vote against Betsy DeVos – and I had to explain to them that it is the constitutional role of the Senate to advise and consent, not the House – they would then ask me to do anything I could to oppose her nomination. And, so, this bill seemed like the obvious answer to their question: What can I do to oppose her nomination?
Massie also has developed some ideas on how to devolve the federal education department in an orderly fashion, and hopes his bill will encourage debate on how to end the department.
“I like to point out that there are 4,500 bureaucrats in the Department of Education, and their average salary is $105,000 a year,” the congressman continues. “I’ve seen that irritate a lot of people back in Kentucky who have to have bake sales to buy copier paper for their classrooms.”
“Regardless of what happens to all of the various programs, what my bill unambiguously does is to free up that money that would be going to all of those bureaucrats,” Massie says. “And the money that’s wasted there is not the worst part of it. The worst part of it is they control 10 percent of education funding, but – through that 10 percent of education funding – they control the curriculum and what and how our teachers are teaching.”
Massie’s bill currently has nine co-sponsors.
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