American Values understands that in order for children to succeed, power must be taken away from the government and given back to parents. For too long, government bureaucrats and teachers' unions have dictated education policy from Washington, omitting children's most important advocates, their parents. As a result, our children's learning has taken a back seat to increasing bureaucratic control. Currently, the U.S. Department of Education is a hopeless bureaucracy that wastes millions of dollars and does little to improve children’s learning. Federal education funding increased 10-fold between 1965 and 2001 and has more than doubled since 1990. In the end, we must decide to whom should schools be accountable? The federal government? States? School boards? Or Parents?

When it comes to education, the federal government must become more results-oriented. Congress must set appropriate federal spending priorities rather than reflexively and unflinchingly raising education funding levels annually. Federal programs should be reformed and consolidated to deliver better services more efficiently. We must increase the caliber of American education by funding programs that concentrate on core educational purposes and that advance methods and content based on rigorous research. It is inappropriate to divert funding to lesser priorities or peripheral projects, such as a liberal social agenda like that of the Women’s Educational Equity Act or a special-interest program like the “Educational, Cultural, Apprenticeship, and Exchange Programs for Alaska Natives, Native Hawaiians, and Their Historical Whaling and Trading Partners in Massachusetts.”

Lack of money is not the problem. Increased funding has not led to increased achievement. Over the past three decades, per-pupil education spending has doubled, but test scores have remained stagnant. The real problem is a broken education system that prevents resources from getting to teachers and students. We need to fix that by making sure more dollars reach the classroom, by streamlining federal education programs and by giving parents more education choices.