Is it really worth it?

I've been asked to come up with a reasonable analogy about the federal government's role in education vs. what states are supposed to do.

See what you think:

Imagine a pyramid. The pyramid represents a state's budget for education - including federal dollars. The top 10 percent of the pyramid represents those federal funds. (Yup, about 90 percent of education spending in most states comes from state budgets, not the feds, which is the rest of the pyramid.)

Now imagine an upside-down pyramid. This one represents the ways in which states and the feds measure just how well students do on standardized tests. If the scores are not so good, states, and now the feds under No Child Left Behind, have ways to get the schools to shape up. A state may label a school as poorly performing or whatever, and the feds have a pass / fail system called Adequate Yearly Progress. That's assessment and enforcement.

Since some states have great enforcement and others are not-so-good, let's split the upside down pyramid 50 - 50 for the sake of argument. In this scenario, the state's part of the pyramid is on top. As you can imagine, an upside-down pyramid is pretty wobbly, but if it's balanced well enough, it might stand up for a while.

With the dollar pyramid, if you lop off the top 10 percent, the pyramid stands just fine. But with the enforcement pyramid, if you cut off the federal half at the bottom, that part of the pyramid falls down. The state part still has enough of a base to work perfectly.

The point?

The feds are responsible for a relatively tiny amount of education funding for any state. But since no state wants to lose even one dime of money, they will obey the dictates of the DC educrats. Think about it: Would you willingly take a 10 percent pay cut or put up with some extra hassle?

But even if a state did take the financial hit, how long would it be before a parent or group of parents in a school district that just lost several million dollars took someone to court? This is especially true because in education the vast majority of federal dollars go toward improving schools in low income areas.

Can anyone say "civil rights lawsuit?"

You don't want to go there.

So, for the foreseeable future, we have a federal education bureaucracy with a Napoleon complex: a little thing with too much power.

This proves the Ed Reformer dictum that giving authority to the federal government always results in the federal government claiming more power than its contribution deserves.