But increases in federal education spending have been huge. Bush has grown the Department of Education from $35.7 billion in fiscal 2001 (President Clinton's last budget) to $57 billion this year.

 Even under Republican leadership, primary and secondary education in America has remained essentially a socialist enterprise: Government owns the major means of production.

 As in all socialist regimes, this one redistributes wealth in perverse ways. America's education bureaucracy takes money from working and middle class families who sacrifice to send their children to religious schools (because they prefer the values and perspectives taught there to those taught in government-owned schools) and spends it for the benefit of those rich families who don't mind sending their children to the government-owned schools in their neighborhoods.

 Parents who struggle to scrape together the tuition to send their children to religious schools are now doubly taxed -- locally and federally -- to support government-owned schools they do not like and do not use.

 When "moderate" Bob Dole was the Republican presidential candidate in 1996, he ran on a platform calling for abolition of the federal Department of Education because the Constitution does not grant the federal government a role in primary and secondary education.

 Conservatives in Congress should fight to kill Bush's new federal education spending plan and return to the principles of the Dole platform and the U.S. Constitution. If every American family cannot instantly be given sole ownership of their children's schooling, at least they shouldn't have to pay twice for the schools the government insists on owning.