RESOLUTION ON A SEPARATE DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION

Throughout its history the American Labor movement has recognized the primary importance of a system of public education to the advancement of a free and democratic society with a modern industrial economy. Labor was a major force behind the original idea and has consistently worked to expand the offerings of the public school system. In more recent years the AFL-CIO took up the cause of federal support for the schools and was instrumental in the passage of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act in 1965. It has continued to press for needed increases in federal education funds.

Labor endorsed the increases for education reflected in the first Carter budget and is pleased that the President and Congress reached agreement on the value of further increases. We welcome the energy that is now being devoted to rethinking education's needs and priorities.

We are disturbed, however, by the possibility that serious reflection on these issues will be diverted from sub­stance into more superficial questions of form and structure Voices in the education community and in Congress have called for a Separate Department of Education headed by a Cabinet-level Secretary. Considerable media attention has been devoted to this issue even as the public continues to rank school discipline and quality among among its 7top concerns.  As consumers of the educational product American workers will be the first to lose if substantive improvement is sacrificed in a wasteful debate over structural change.

There are several reasons why creating a Separate Department of Education is a bad idea.

The present combined administration of health, education and welfare encourages a comprehensive examination of these domestic priorities in relation to one another. Rather than encouraging the traditional go-it-alone tendencies of many educators by setting education's administration off by itself, we should launch a coordinated health, welfare and education approach to major problems our nation faces- poverty, equal educational opportunity, welfare, youth unemployment and health security. Labor has been instrumental in building coalitions around these issues. A fragmentation of their administration will only encourage narrow thinking and a fragmentation of the political voice that now speaks on all of them. The fiscal impact of federalizing welfare on state and local school budgets; the hope for implementing immunization and other health programs through the schools; and the need for early childhood education with health and welfare components are all creative ideas mandate comprehensive, integrated approaches rather than isolated, independent ones.

Adding a new Department to the Cabinet will increase the pressure coming from other groups to follow suit by demanding their own separate department.  As misguided as such a trend might be, once education had successfully moved on such an equation, it is almost inevitable that others would take up the argument. And, the more departments there are, the more difficult it will be to gain agreement on approaches that may affect more than one area.

If departments proliferate, it is more likely that the administration of programs will be fragmented and that their delivery will overlap. We can also expect that they will be conceived and implemented in more parochial terms.

The merits of consolidation have been recognized by Congress in its committee structure which reflects the importance of relating programs and exercising broad authority-the Senate Human Resources Committee, Senate Labor-HEW Appropriations Committee, House Labor and Education Committee The AFL-CIO successfully opposed an effort to split the House Labor and Education Committee in 1974. Since Congressional decisions will still be made in consolidated form it makes little sense to detach the administration of education programs from the logic of the Congressional pattern.

It is folly to equate the creation of a Separate Department of Education with the likelihood of expanded federal funding. This Administration must surely increase the federal commitment to education. But the urgency of this demand can be demonstrated best through the building of political alliances within the education community and between education and the labor voices supporting welfare reform, health reform and expanded employment. The structural isolation of education will solve nothing. It can only divert our attention from the substance of real education progress.

RESOLVED, that the AFT oppose the creation of a separate Department of Education. (Executive Council)