Kevin Schmeising reviews a new book for the Acton Institute, titled The Department of Education Battle, 1918-1932, by Douglas Slawson. This book tells of the National Education Association’s early efforts to create a federal education department. The NEA had to settle for something less than a Cabinet level department until 1979, but by then federal funding and regulation were long-entrenched.
The logical extension of the NEA’s effort to federalize, standardize, and bureacratize schooling, and make life difficult for non-public education, has gone beyond what the NEA would have wished for public schools. Under No Child Left Behind, public schools and public school teachers have been forced to accept a monster federal education law. But as Schmeising points out, NCLB is the natural extension of early NEA efforts to level and standardize all schooling, public and private.
If the NEA hoped to gain regulatory control of the private school sector, this is not at all what has happenend under NCLB. Instead, public education is under the federal regulatory microscope, and the NEA helped pave the way for the regulatory giant they now abhor. In a telling sentence, Schmeising notes “The power of the leviathan appears seductive until it has passed out of one?s own control.” Exactly.
