Let's go back to the 1950s, says Ken Buck, GOP candidate for Senator in Colorado.
Buck: He still has his recorder on right there... [points, laughter]
Question: [brief lead-in] What plans do you have to make public education better in America?
Buck: "Let's talk about that [education] folks. In the 1950s, we had the best schools in the world. And the United States government decided to get more involved in federal education. [Pols emphasis] Where are we now, after all those years of federal involvement, are we better or are we worse? So what's the federal government's answer? Well since we've made education worse, we're gonna even get more involved. And what's gonna be the result? It's kinda like health care. We've screwed up health care--Medicare--we've screwed up all kinds of other things, so what are we gonna do? We're gonna get even more involved in health care. What are we going to do? We're gonna get more involved in education.
As Colorado Pols points out in this piece, most of the real federal investment in education came a lot later, in the 60s and 70s. What was the primary feature of education in the 50s (other than Bert the turtle films?).
Is this the "Rand Paul moment" for Ken Buck, folks? Most of the increases in federal funding for education, the federally-guaranteed student loans that Buck so famously wants to do away with, and other federal "involvement," happened in the 1960s, not the 1950s: the federal Department of Education didn't itself exist until 1980. In addition, before the 1965 federal student loan program we know today, which uses private lenders and federal loan guarantees, student loans were made directly by the U.S. Treasury. Is that his conservative vision?
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Of course, there was that little matter of the Brown vs. Board of Education decision in 1954, later enforced by federal troops on a rather unwilling local government in Little Rock. Which would very certainly come under the heading of "federal involvement" in education, wouldn't it? As a matter of fact, wasn't that a big argument about "local control," if you set aside the messy racist stuff?
Yeah, that whole pesky Civil Rights era progress again. Wasn't life a lot better for the Ken Bucks and Rand Pauls of the world before brown people could start associating with them? Oh, and before Medicare "screwed up health care," too. You really need no more proof that women, minorities, and seniors don't really have a part in Ken Buck's world.
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