Washington, D.C. – Congressman David Rouzer (R-NC) has introduced House Bill 1510 – the States’ Education Reclamation Act of 2017 – which would return taxpayer dollars used to fund the federal education bureaucracy back to the respective states in order to increase teacher salaries or to be used for any other purpose that a respective state chooses to enhance education.
Rouzer proposes a responsible dismantling of the Department of Education by reallocating its billions in funding to be proportionally distributed to the respective states to be used for any education purpose as they see fit, such as teacher pay raises, new school construction, investment in technology and more. Taxpayer dollars provided to the Department of Education from each state would be returned to the states in the form of grants.
The Department of Education was created in the early 1980’s with the intention of reversing stagnating education performance amongst Americans. Since 1980, the Department’s budget has ballooned from $14 billion to approximately $87 billion while failing to vastly improve students’ performance in math, science and reading. Meanwhile, the Department expends large amounts of money on its own maintenance and overhead – paying its general services employees an average of $109,924 per year. In comparison, teachers in North Carolina take home an average salary of $47,931.
“Given the challenges and special needs that all teachers and school administrators continually face, we can get far more out of the tax dollars currently being spent on education by dismantling this billion dollar federal agency and returning those resources back to the states,” said Rep. David Rouzer.
House Bill 1510 also takes into account the importance of, and the need for, certain Department programs, such as the job training program, special education grant program, Federal Pell Grant program, and federal student loan programs. Under this bill, those entities would remain intact, but transferred to other government agencies.
