Education Monopoly?

The federal government does not own our children. Yet we act as if it does by letting it decide when, how, and what our children will learn. We have turned their futures over to lobbyists and bureaucrats.

I support giving educational control back to parents, who know their children better than any politician in D.C. ever will.

The federal government has no constitutional authority to fund or control schools. I want to abolish the unconstitutional, wasteful Department of Education and return its functions to the states. By removing the federal subsidies that inflate costs, schools can be funded by local taxes, and parents and teachers can directly decide how best to allocate the resources.

To help parents with the costs of schooling, I have introduced H.R. 1056, the Family Education Freedom Act, in Congress. This bill would allow parents a tax credit of up to $5,000 (adjustable after 2007 for inflation) per student per year for the cost of attendance at an elementary and/or secondary school. This includes private, parochial, religious, and home schools.

Another bill I have sponsored, H.R. 1059, allows full-time elementary and secondary teachers a $3,000 yearly tax credit, thus easing their financial burden and encouraging good teachers to stay in an underpaid profession.

Many parents have already shown their desire to be free of federal control by either enrolling their children in private schools or homeschooling them. And students enrolled in these alternatives have consistently performed better and tested higher than those in state-run schools.

Years of centralized education have produced nothing but failure and frustrated parents. We can resurrect our public school system if we follow the Constitution and end the federal education monopoly.
-Ron Paul