Hostile Takeover: Resisting Centralized Government's Stranglehold on America by Matt Kibbe

Author:Matt Kibbe [Kibbe, Matt]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Politics
ISBN: 9780062196019
Amazon: 0062196022
Goodreads: 13239649
Publisher: William Morrow
Published: 2012-06-18T22:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 10

A TEACHING MOMENT

Why can we afford wars and Wall Street bailouts but our education system is broken?

—Occupy Los Angeles Banner

I ATTENDED GROVE CITY COLLEGE, A PRIVATE LIBERAL ARTS SCHOOL in Western Pennsylvania that accepts no federal funding. By the time I had enrolled, the U.S. Department of Education had already initiated legal action against the college for having refused to sign a Title IX “Assurance of Compliance.” Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 requires that “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.”1

Oddly, this costly legal action was aggressively pursued by the federal government, despite the fact that Grove City never violated Title IX—there was never any suggestion by anyone in or out of the federal government that Grove City had in fact broken either the spirit or the letter of the law. Grove City did not discriminate against women or anyone else. It was a coed school, and had been since its founding in 1869. Half of the student population at GCC was female, and so were many of the professors.

Grove City is where I met my wife, Terry. Thank goodness for coed institutions.

The case made its way to the Supreme Court, which in 1984 ultimately sided with the Department of Education in its argument that Grove City students accepting financial aid through the Stafford Federal Loan Program (now called Pell Grants) constituted federal funding, even though the school had always refused direct federal funding. In his concurring opinion, Justice Lewis Powell notes that the Department of Education “has prevailed, having taken this small independent College, which it acknowledges has engaged in no discrimination whatever, through six years of litigation with the full weight of the Federal Government opposing it.”2 The decision was limited, however. “According to the Court’s decision, only the financial aid/admissions office was subject to federal regulation, not the entire College,” according to David Lascell. “The program receiving federal assistance was subject to regulation, not the entire institution.”3

CONTROLLING THE CLASSROOM

NOT SATISFIED WITH THIS COURT-IMPOSED LIMIT ON THE FEDERAL government’s reach into the operations of private educational institutions, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Ted Kennedy put the Civil Rights Restoration Act of 1988 on President Reagan’s desk, and then the Democrat-controlled Congress overrode Reagan’s veto of the legislation. Kennedy’s legislation to “restore” civil rights was a congressional response to a case where no civil rights were actually broken based on the government’s own standard. But the net result was more federal control over higher education.

For me, the Department of Education’s legal mugging of my alma mater was a teaching moment. Maybe federal control of education wasn’t about educational quality at all? It certainly wasn’t about civil rights. Maybe more government involvement in education is always all about the protection of the power of insiders, quality be damned?

How is it that a small college in Western Pennsylvania

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.