Get Rid of Education Department?

Actually, there has been federal involvement in education even before Carter made it a separate agency back in 1979. It was part of what was then called HEW--Health, Education and Welfare.

There has to be an agency to guarantee students have rights to an equal education and so forth. The problem is the agency's mission has been bastardized by privatizers.

Arne Duncan is completely unqualified to run any education organization. He got his job in Chicago through connections, and the same was true with his current job:

Let’s trace his path to the presidential Cabinet. One of Duncan’s childhood friends, John Rogers, appointed Duncan director of the Ariel Education Initiative in Chicago. Duncan’s directorship led to Ariel’s reincarnation as a charter school, following which Duncan was advanced in the Chicago Public School system from deputy chief of staff to chief executive officer. Note that he worked exclusively at the executive level, never stooping to teach classes or learn about schools except from an operational perspective.

As a youth, Duncan spent his free time at his mom’s after-school program. According to Duncan, this experience with African American teens who had limited literacy proficiency served as a central motivator for his educational policies. Of course, I resonate with the goal of helping to improve the lives of dispossessed people so that they can develop the resources to live happy, healthy, and productive lives. And that’s why I vigorously oppose just about everything that Arne Duncan has done in his role as U.S. secretary of education, because he has reduced the incredibly complex process of teaching and learning knowledge that people find useful to an endless series of multiple choice tests. This system has turned teachers into functionaries and turned students into factory workers whose job it is to produce higher and higher test scores in the futile quest for Annual Yearly Progress, in which each year’s students are required to outscore last year’s students, with their teachers deemed incompetent should this year’s students fail to outperform last year’s, year after year, ad infinitum.

Rod Paige was no prize, but at least he had some kind of education background, including overseeing Houston's schools during some rather controversial times. Duncan has nothing.