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9 hours ago

The Dept of Education will be the next hair on fire event for the Dems.

Education Time
ROBERT DUCHEMIN SR
FEB 10

Suppose for as long as you can remember you had the best looking yard on your street. One spring one of your neighbors put a tremendous effort into their yard and got it up to the same standard as yours. Several of your other neighbors decided they wanted to get the whole street to look that good so they convinced everybody, all 40 homes on your street, to put $50 in a pool and at the end of September you will all vote on who has the best yard. The winner will get the whole pool of cash. You loved the idea. You have been trying to get everybody else to increase their standards for years.

The contest was such a success in the first year, which you won, that everybody wanted to do it again the next year. You were on the top of the world and looking forward to a steady source of an annual financial reward. The next year, however, your neighbor, Tom, won.

Tom is a friend of yours and you are happy for him but you make a promise to yourself that you will not come in second again next year. By January, you had interviewed several landscape architects and landscape companies, and you decided to hire one comprehensive company to help you with all of the design and care of your yard. Plus, it was a reasonable, almost nominal expense compared to all of the other expenses you had at the time.

The next year you come in third. You discussed this with your landscape company and they told you that they needed a bigger budget. If they got it, they could do a better job. You decide to meet their expectations and triple their funding. The next year you come in fifth.

Your street becomes the talk of the town and everybody wants to move there. All of the houses are looking better but you start thinking that you could do a better job if you did it yourself, like you used to do. For 20 years before the contest started you took care of your own yard and always had the best looking yard on the street. Plus, the landscape company keeps introducing new plants that, to be frank, you and your neighbors do not like.

You discuss with your spouse cancelling the landscape contract and they say, “Not just no but hell no. We have got to do everything we can to get back to the top.” The people running the landscape company that has now taken complete control of your yard are very good at self promotion. After all, they are the experts.

They convince your spouse that you have been taking the wrong approach for the last three generations. Your spouse gives them the approval to hire some landscape consultants at exorbitant prices. They tell you to change everything you have been doing. Everything your parents did and everything your grandparents did because they have a better way. Okay, after all, they ARE the experts.

You are not sure when things got completely out of hand but the landscape expenses increased every year. You haven’t had a vacation in 10 years because you put all of your money into your yard.

After all that, this year came the final straw. Out of the 40 homes, you came in dead last, 40th. Eight of the top 10 yards were owned by people who did their own landscaping, at a fraction of what you pay. Moreover, your neighbors are furious that the company you hired to make your yard into something that nobody likes is continuing to pressure all of them to do the same things to their yards.

You did finish first in one category. You spent more money than anybody else.

If you haven’t figured it out yet, by changing a couple of words, I am describing the actual real-life history of the United States Department of Education (the Department) since it was created in 1979.

We should not blame those who started the Department. Although the USA was still ranked first overall in the mid 1970s, education was not universal throughout the United States. Many districts, especially in southern and western states, were well below acceptable standards and severely underfunded. Wanting to help, the federal government set up the Department and started giving states billions of dollars to improve their education systems.

By the mid 1990s, with the USA already falling in comparison to other developed countries, states became dependent on the “new” federal money. The Department then began making demands that states do certain things, take certain actions, and only teach approved subjects or else an unelected bureaucrat will turn off the federal money. This was the end of teaching civics and ethics in high school.

The Department continued to expand and ended up taking over control of all college loan programs. Banks, the people who are experts at evaluating the risks and benefits of loans, were prohibited from granting student loans.

The Department also gained control of research grants to colleges that previously were controlled by the Departments of Defense and Commerce. Before the Department was formed, college research grants not based on military or manufacturing were granted by the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW). I did some research of those grants, however, and they were almost exclusively based on medical or physical health research. Also, from 1950 until 1979 (when the Department was spun off) the average total amount of annual grants given by HEW was about 12% of the dollar value of the grants handed out by the Department last year. Harvard alone got about $5 billion in federal grants that had nothing to do with manufacturing, medicine, or military applications.

Like most government bureaucracies, the Department of Education has failed to do that for which it was created. Instead, it has been bastardized into a powerful tool for communism and government control. It was a good idea to try it but it would be a horrible idea to allow it to continue.

Mistakes are okay. We need to make some to learn. But when we make them we need to change course and move on. It is moronic to continue down a path that causes things to get worse, not better.

This year, the USA dropped from 38th to 40th overall in the educational results in the 40 most industrialized countries. During its history, the Department of Education has destroyed the one thing that it was created to improve.

The best person to dismantle the Department of Education is somebody who has revived the USA’s space program. He has made many mistakes but, unlike our government, he always learns from them. Heck, he was willing to blow up almost 100 rockets just to learn from his mistakes.

That is why this weekend President Trump ordered Elon Musk to move over to the Department of Education when he is finished at the Department of State.

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In the interim, Elon’s team had four or five hours with nothing to do so they took a peek into the Department of Health and Human Services, the successor to HEW. At President Trump‘s order, they canceled more than 60 contracts, one of which was for an Anthony Fauci memorial.

Yes, it is not a good idea to build a memorial to the man responsible for the deaths of more Americans than anybody else in history.

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