No Child Left Behind

While touting localism, you see, Trump also has in mind a grand plan devised in Washington, D.C.: the creation of a $250 million national program to help disadvantaged children choose private schools.

For the Feds in the U.S. Education Department, ‘flexibility’ means there’s nothing left to lose.

The Heartland Institute hosted a “Stop Fed Ed” event at the Andrew Breitbart Freedom Center on Wednesday, October 12. The event featured Cora Weber, who discussed her role in the grassroots effort to stop Common Core and (eventually) eliminate the federal Department of Education.

Sponsors of this fall’s presidential debates ought to devote one debate entirely to education, with Common Core being the primary topic.
Trump should be pinned down on how he believes a president could quickly end a program that is not a freestanding federal enactment. Clinton should be made to walk Americans through her game plan for ensuring Common Core’s permanence using a similar strategy as the one utilized by the Bill Clinton administration through the School-to-Work Act of 1994. And by all means, the Libertarian Party candidate, who will be selected Memorial Day weekend, should be included as well and asked to explain how he or she plans to extract the federal government from education entirely, root and branch.

Proponents of the “Every Student Succeed Act” (ESSA) — a bi-partisan, progressive, 1061-page “No Child Left Behind” reauthorization education bill passed by Republican majorities in both houses and signed by President Obama on December 10, 2015 – have argued that the bill is worthy of conservative support, claiming it stops Common Core, reins in Obama’s Department of Education, and consolidates a number of federal education programs.

If you want to know why millions of Republicans voters hate their party politics in Washington, D.C., consider what massive GOP majorities in both the House and the Senate did in December of 2015. Not only did GOP majorities pass the catastrophic Omnibus bill, but they also extended and give new life to the failed “No Child Left Behind” bill signed by President George W. Bush in 2002.