Sometimes the most telling things can be found in the most unexpected of places. A recent example is the high dudgeon of Mr. Dan Domenech over a failure of the Trump administration to provide a “national plan for reopening schools.”
As the executive director for the American Association of School Administrators, Mr. Domenech should know better; administration of school systems is a quintessentially local affair, despite the tendency over the past few decades for state governments to usurp this control, drawing questions of funding, curriculum, pedagogy and even discipline ever more firmly into the statehouse’s orbit. This centralizing force has been driven by four factors: lawsuits to level districts’ budgets, based on state constitutional guarantees to provide “equal” education to all students; concern over increasingly uneven educational outcomes and an unhealthy obsession with high-stakes testing; parents who demand politicians provide desirable outcomes, without considering the role that they themselves have to play in obtaining these results; and educational administrators tired of trying to square the circles they have been given, and only too happy to be able to blame anyone else for poor educational outcomes. But his complaint that the Administration has not involved itself directly in administrative decisions of the nation’s nearly 15,000 separate school districts strikes an important Constitutional reef.
The Constitution itself contains no provision for the government it creates to be involved with educational administration. Go read Article I, Section 8 which enumerates Congress’ specific powers if you don’t believe me. Then read the tenth amendment, just to be certain. Read that one twice for good measure. Then ask yourself why Dan Domenech and others demanding a thousand variations of Federal decision-making on local issues are doing so, when the decisions are clearly a local responsibility.
Two possibilities suggest themselves to me: such complainants either want Federal funding to follow Federal decision-making, which is to say that they want you to pay for their bad decisions; or they want to avoid responsibility, preferring that someone else be blamed for problems they likely had a hand in creating. It’s a game as old as politicians, and just as rotten.
Nevertheless the plaints have their supporters, mostly those who have either forgotten or never learned the reasons our Federal form of government was established – and those who couldn’t care less about government structure, as long as they can use it to get theirs from their fellow-citizens. Both would be wise to read James Madison’s “Federalist #39,” in which he warned about the need for a central government bound to “enumerated” powers only and intervening levels of state and local government with differing responsibilities, all serving as barriers between a “central” government and its citizens. Without such a structure, he presciently warned, “…a national Government involves in it, not only an authority over the individual citizens; but an indefinite supremacy over all persons and things…” Including emptying your pockets to bail out the New York public pension system.
There are also those who seek to expand Federal powers in a crisis, that they may be retained afterward in a sort of “creeping centralization.” Beware these especially, because they have an itch not for coin, but for power. They want to smash the intervening authorities between citizens and central government flat, so that when they take control of the latter they may dictate to the former at their whim. “Infinite supremacy,” in Madison’s words. To the benefit of themselves alone.
