The Department of Education has been an tumor in the United States government's side since 1979 when President Jimmy Carter instituted it among the Departments of the President's Cabinet. The Department of Education was created to issue certain education policies to our country's schools. I, for one, think it is heavily bureaucratic and has strayed away from its original mission. For starters, the Constitution does not give the United States government the power to have an entire Department in charge of education.

Now, you could call me against education, but hear me out here. The entire agency has gone through an overall expansion, thanks to President George W. Bush's No Child Left Behind Law. We wonder, as the American People, what we can do, for example, to eliminate our national debt problem. Wake up and smell the money Americans! The Department of Education is spending SIX times their original budget in 1980! In 1980, the budget was $13.1 billion compared to 2011, when it was $77.8 billion! And you would think, well isn't this increased spending maybe showing some reward in better test scores? WRONG! According to The Cato Institute, test scores in math, reading and science have all flatlined or gone down in the past forty years!

My point is that a group of bureaucrats sitting in nice offices with their Italian silk shirts and their fancy Rolex watches who you know have no classroom experience whatsoever shouldn't be telling you who your kids or anyone else's kids for that matter should be learning or how they should be learning it. I am an advocate for education, at any level, and I believe that we should eliminate this waste of a department and return educational standards to the states where they belong and let the people have control over their education systems.