Letter: Government vs. education

Yesterday I wrote to our two U.S. Senators and the Representative for our district and asked them to support phasing out the U.S. Department of Education over the next five years. Please don’t immediately assume that I am against the best education for our young people, since the opposite is true. What I am against is intrusion by the feds into areas best managed by local and state authorities. School boards, monitored by a state agency, can best handle what is basically a local problem. Billions have been spent by the feds since the U.S. Department of Education was created with little or no improvement to our educational system. It is time to acknowledge that idea is a failure and should be abandoned.
Anyone agreeing with this proposition should contact our representatives in Congress. Making this happen will require a long hard fight, since once a federal agency is created, eliminating it is very difficult. Reducing the size of the federal government should have the support of all U.S. citizens.
Dick Prosence
Meeker