Letter of Support: The LEARN Act

Dear FreedomWorks member,

As one of our millions of FreedomWorks members nationwide, I urge you to contact your Representative and urge him or her to co-sponsor the Local Education Authority Returns Now (LEARN) Act, H.R. 2394.  Introduced by Congressman Scott Garrett (R-NJ), this bill aims to give states and individual parents more choice in the education of their children.

Rep. Garrett’s bill allows states to opt out of the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and other K-12 education standards.  The federal government would then make an amount of money available to the parents in the opt-out states, equal to what they would have received in educational grants. This returns much more of the control over education to the state and local level and to parents.

Besides promoting local control and school choice, this bill also makes it much easier for states to opt out of the federal Common Core curriculum standards.  The Department of Education has long used education grants to states as a means to essentially bribe states into accepting more federal regulations and centralized standards, and the LEARN act uncouples the regulations from the money.  This will allow more of that money to go to where it is actually needed – schools and students – and not to bureaucrats working at the Dept. of Education.

The federal government has no constitutional authority to fund local K-12 schools, but as long as it persists in doing so, this bill offers a better way to do it than today’s centralized, top-down approach.

The more federal middlemen are taken out from between students and their teachers, the better our education funding will be spent. Thus, I urge you to contact your Representative and urge him or her to support the LEARN Act (H.R. 2394), and to co-sponsor the bill if they have not already done so.

Sincerely,
 
Matt Kibbe
President and CEO
FreedomWorks