It’s Happy Back to School Week nationwide. The Federal government’s regulation of bathroom usage was front-page news in the New York Times on August 22 (“Federal Transgender Bathroom Access Guidelines Blocked by Judge”). This leads me to wonder… why are there locally run schools in the U.S.? If the Constitution gives the Federal government the power to set bathroom policy in schools nationwide (let’s hope it isn’t part of the Interstate Commerce clause!), why not the non-bathroom parts of schools?
You might argue that bathroom use is a Civil Rights issue for transgender American youth. But access to an education of at least some minimum quality should also be a Civil Right, no? (“no” is the California Supreme Court’s answer to this question, actually) Access to a bathroom can be urgent, especially in our Starbucks era. But access to education, or lack of such access, may have substantial long-term effects. The central limit theorem tells us that about half of American children have access to below-average education and that millions attend spectacularly bad classes.
If the Federal government were to take over schools it would be able to ensure adequate resources and minimum standards, regardless of the local tax base. As a bonus, since the schools would be Federally operated, they could have the same policies nationwide with regard to transgendered students.
Could Federally run public schools work? Wikipedia suggests that this is how it is done in France: “All educational programmes in France are regulated by the Ministry of National Education (officially called Ministère de l’Éducation nationale, de la Jeunesse et de la Vie associative). … The teachers in public primary and secondary schools are all state civil servants, making the ministère the largest employer in the country. Professors and researchers in France’s universities are also employed by the state.” Obviously the French are able to do a lot of things that we can’t do, e.g., run nuclear power stations and health care without bankrupting themselves. But given the number of things that the Federales want to control when it comes to our public schools, wouldn’t it be simpler if they just took them over?
Related:
- Transgender Bathroom Solution from the Harvard Club: “Powder Room”
- Transgender Hostility in Massachusetts, the Commonwealth of Love
- How are any of the transgender-locker room laws supposed to work in practice?
- Can women be superior human beings in a transgender age?
- What does it mean for art museums to run single-gender shows in a transgender age?
- New York Times suggests that companies other than the New York Times hire transgender workers
- Rational employees will come out as gay or transgender prior to the next performance review?
Our basic government structure evolved to manage a huge country at a time when communication was slow. I don’t doubt that in many areas this kind of mega-realignment would improve efficiency. For schools in particular I think that reversing the flow of money would be helpful. I mean, rather than pouring money in at the top, disburse funds to schools/districts of about 150 employees. Where there is potential for economies of scale (e.g. each school doesn’t need a committee to do textbook selection), these schools/districts could contract for support services from the “central” entities.
A somewhat less ambitious reform would be to federalize admission to the teacher education system and teacher credentialing. This would enable us to turn our teacher education system toward the Finnish model, would (slightly) reduce costs by de-duplicating teacher credentialing bureaucracies, and should make it easier to balance supply and demand by improving teacher mobility. I think this also fits in with a recurring theme for this blog: disconnecting education and assessment.
If the Feds ran all of the schools, where would our kids learn the truth about Intelligent Design?
Federalism in the US has become a bad joke, but this is another instance where both red state types and blue state types like to pretend this isn’t the case.
My current preferred solution is to reorganize the states into eighteen states, with the least populated having a population of fifteen million. After this is done, then transfer nearly all federal domestic powers to the states. The second step simply won’t work with the present states, many of which have populations smaller than a mid-sized city and with several metropolitan areas split between states. Fifteen million is the population of a mid-sized country, for contrast Australia has a population of twenty-five million, and there is no reason such a state couldn’t govern itself.
Reducing the number of states to eighteen would make the Senate, which after all was designed for a system with sixteen states (the thirteen colonies plus Kentucky, Tennessee, and Vermont) function much better.
The opposite idea, abolishing the states and having Congress act as a state legislature, would in fact be an improvement over what we have now, but in the long term a continental sized country is too big to be governed in this way.
You keep citing that California Supreme Court Case. It doesn’t mean what you seem to think it means.