Thank you for speaking up and supporting education.

Knock it off, State Representative Regina Weiss!! The Department of Education does not educate a single child in America. It does not run a single school. It does not pay a single teacher salary. Some people are concerned about eliminating the department and what it would mean for students, despite the fact that they have a terrible track record. It has not improved outcomes. What about protections for kids with special needs. We should note that the education for all handicap children act was was signed into law in 1975. It provides protections for kids with special needs. It predates the creation of the department. That will go nowhere. Spending for the individuals with disabilities education act, that idea would move over to HHS. That would go nowhere. The same would likely happen with Title 1 spending for low income districts. It could be managed by HHS. Data collection? Send it over to Commerce. Let the census bureau handle it. Student Loans? Send it to the Small Business Administration or the Treasury Department. So there are more appropriate receiving agencies where you could keep intact some of the appropriate functions of the department, but not actually have the infrastructure that is that massive bureaucratic boondoggle that Carter created. The most concerning data point in all of that is that, if you go back a little prior to the DOE being created in 1965, when Lyndon Johnson launched the war on poverty, there was a gap of about four years worth of learning between the students from the lowest income, bottom 10% and the top 10% by income. So that is the 90/10 gap. The difference between poor kids and rich kids was four year worth of learning in 1965. Today, it is four years worth of learning. We have not narrowed the gap at all. That was the whole point of the war on poverty. A third of which, Johnson said, would be fought in the classrooms of America. If the whole point was to narrow that gap - it did not happen. Creation of the DOE did not narrow that gap. Ever increasing Federal spending did not narrow that gap. No child left behind did not narrow that gap. NOTHING the Feds have tried to do over the decades had any impact on improving academic outcomes for students. So what have we gotten? A LOT of administrative bloat! We now are in an environment where just 47.5% of all people in school districts are teachers today. I would argue a lot of that is a reaction to having a federal agency, to having to comply with all of these federal mandates and regulations. We have gotten a lot of bureaucratic swell! We gotten a centralized agency for special interest groups like the teacher unions to lobby and unfortunately, bad outcomes for students and tax payers.

No it will not hurt students. The unions, maybe, but not the students.

Which dem voted for this?

Why in the world did a Democrat vote for this? That's very depressing.

So talk about the state of Michigan and what a crappy job our schools are doing. We are in the bottom 10 states. How about that!!