Does the Wall Street Journal think the Constitution is suspended on the weekends? Two weeks ago on Saturday, April 15, the Journal claimed on its front page that “the Constitution guarantees a public-school K‑12 education for every child in the U.S.” Then this past Saturday, April 29, the Journal’s usually reliable editorial page deplored the “states’ rampant noncompliance with the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act” and the “lax enforcement of NCLB” by Education Secretary Margaret Spellings.

In both cases the Journal seems to have forgotten that the U.S. Constitution grants no authority over education to the federal government. Education is not mentioned in the Constitution of the United States, and for good reason. The Founders wanted most aspects of life managed by those who were closest to them, either by state or local government or by families, businesses, and other elements of civil society. Certainly, they saw no role for the federal government in education.

Once upon a time, not so very many years ago, Congress understood that. The History of the Formation of the Union under the Constitution, published by the United States Constitution Sesquicentennial Commission, under the direction of the president, the vice president, and the Speaker of the House in 1943, contained this exchange in a section titled “Questions and Answers Pertaining to the Constitution”:

Q. Where, in the Constitution, is there mention of education?

A. There is none; education is a matter reserved for the states.

Not only is the Constitution absolutely silent on the subject of education, but the U.S. Supreme Court has also refused to recognize any right to a taxpayer-funded education. As Timothy Sandefur, author of Cato’s forthcoming book Cornerstone of Liberty: Property Rights in 21^st-Century America, points out, in San Antonio Independent School Distict v. Rodriguez (1973), the Court specifically declared that education, though important, “is not among the rights afforded explicit protection under our Federal Constitution. Nor do we find any basis for saying it is implicitly so protected.” Nine years later, in Plyler v. Doe, the Court held that if a state chooses to give such an education to citizens, it must also offer it to the children of illegal aliens. But it has consistently recognized that taxpayer-funded education is a privilege, and not a right.

And as I wrote in the Cato Handbook for Congress a few years ago, the argument against federal involvement in education

is not based simply on a commitment to the original Constitution, as important as that is. It also reflects an understanding of why the Founders were right to reserve most subjects to state, local, or private endeavor. The Founders feared the concentration of power. They believed that the best way to protect individual freedom and civil society was to limit and divide power. Thus it was much better to have decisions made independently by 13–or 50–states, each able to innovate and to observe and copy successful innovations in other states, than to have one decision made for the entire country. As the country gets bigger and more complex, and especially as government amasses more power, the advantages of decentralization and divided power become even greater.

And that’s why it was a mistake to further centralize the control of our local schools in the No Child Left Behind Act. And why our friends at the Wall Street Journal, who are usually committed to the virtues of federalism and decentralization, should be applauding the several states’ resistance to federal intrusion, not calling for a crackdown.