Is the United States Department of Education currently facing any problems?

Answer 1

The U.S. Department of Education is always facing problems. A good share of those problems are associated with budget, and how to best distribute the U.S. Government's monies to the states to support education programs there. There is a constant battle to generate accurate statistics and to interpret them so that a realistic picture of education in the U.S. can be generated and maintained.

The Department of Education also administers student loans and works to improve educational methods and better equip teachers. A link is provided to the Department of Education website, and the curious person could cruise over and pick up a few slices of information.

In 1979 Jimmy Carter formed the Department of Education under pressure from teacher's unions and National Education Association and funds (your tax dollars) were supposed to go to the poorer states and school districts in each of these states under a program called Title 1 but congress decided that money should be distributed to ALL school districts because they all want a share of that money, doing the poorer districts out of money they NEEDED and the more affluent school districts did not. Here's how it works; you and every worker in your state gives a certain percentage of your federal tax monies to education (never should have left your state) and then the federal government distributes only a portion of that money (approx 80%) back to all school districts in all states and in many districts the money is used to build bigger nicer looking schools and not doing a thing to educate our children. So we spend more and more money and get less results. Letting fed settle education issues and policies not a good idea and the fact that teachers in public schools are union causes problems in that the most important issue in education is a teacher's skill at teaching but if one doesn't measure up they can't be fired (they have a union contract). Unions breed mediocrity in that people who work hard and are good at what they do compete with people who are lazy and are no good at what little they do but get paid the same or in many cases less than the lazy person, I say many cases because the ones that are good at what they do go get private sector jobs where it pays to be good at what you do and the lazy ones stay where they are because they can't compete in the private sector and are protected by the union where they are.