Eliminating the Education Department is the key to restoring American culture

Since the US Department of Education’s inception in 1980, the agency has proven itself to be incompetent at its principal task: teaching American children. Adding insult to injury, the agency has also earned a big, fat F when it comes to fiscal responsibility.

Despite this reality, headlines announcing the Trump administration’s newly streamlined Department of Education cast a somber tone.

Layoffs “gutted” the Education Department, reports the AP. Democratic attorneys general are suing over “gutting of Education Department,” echoes the New York Times. The cuts will “decimate” the agency that “compiles ‘Nation’s Report Card’ and measures student performance,” laments ABC News.

Cutting, gutting, decimating. It would be as drastic as it sounds if these cuts were aimed at our nation’s servant-leader schoolteachers. But what these sensationalizing headlines ignore is the fact that the Education Department is bloated, corrupt and unnecessary, nothing new for a federal agency. What makes the broken DoEd system particularly egregious, though, is how it punishes children in ways that are ruinous to them and our whole culture.

“Most Americans believe K-12 STEM education in the United States is either average or below average compared with other wealthy nations,” Pew Research found last year. Maybe that’s because most Americans (about 82 percent) attended government-run schools or send their kids to one now. No matter. Data shows their instincts are correct. The 2023 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, for example, showed American students falling behind peer countries and exhibiting “sharp, steep declines.” Other performance reviews reflect similarly dismal trends.

So much for DoEd’s mission “to promote student achievement and preparation for global competitiveness by fostering educational excellence and ensuring equal access.”

And speaking of sucking at math, the United States Government Accountability Office found in 2022 that, “Although the Department of Education originally estimated federal Direct Loans made in the last 25 years would generate billions in income for the federal government, its current estimates show these loans will cost the government billions.” Instead of generating $114 billion in income for the government, these loans, back in 2021, were estimated to cost the government $197 billion.

They say those who can’t do, teach. And apparently, those who can’t teach become bureaucrats.

Let’s cut the Education Department some slack on these points, though. After all, what government agency hasn’t failed at a mission or two and wasted billions of dollars? What makes the Education Department a real overachiever is, as I noted, its ability to seep its poison into every facet of our lives. Not only are our future leaders ill-prepared to lead fulfilling lives and contribute to the economy, but a lot of them will also emerge from the public-school system turned off from even wanting to contribute to a society they’ve been brainwashed to believe is bigoted.

Eliminating “harmful” diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives has been at the core of the DoEd cuts so far. Doing so, the agency declared, was “the first step in reorienting the agency toward prioritizing meaningful learning ahead of divisive ideology in our schools.”

Last month, DoEd announced it had terminated “over $600 million in grants to institutions and nonprofits that were using taxpayer funds to train teachers and education agencies on divisive ideologies. Training materials included inappropriate and unnecessary topics such as Critical Race Theory; Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI); social justice activism; ‘anti-racism’; and instruction on white privilege and white supremacy.” (No wonder these kids have no time for phonics!)

The Heritage Foundation reminds us, too, that, “The agency spent three years trying to change the Education Amendments of 1972 to the Civil Rights Act, replacing ‘sex’ in the law with ‘sexual orientation and gender identity.’”

Research groups affected by other contracts DoEd has deemed worthless argue that “the accuracy of national-level data on the condition and progress of education,” as well as “student learning and development,” will be harmed. Yet what has tracking “the condition and progress of education” accomplished other than tell us “student learning and development” is abysmal?

The Department of Education should never have been created in the first place. According to Martin West, academic dean at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, its very inception was based in corruption:

It was created in an attempt — ultimately unsuccessful — by the late Jimmy Carter to win the 1980 presidential election. Carter had promised a cabinet level education department in his 1976 campaign. He did that in order to win the support of the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teacher’s union. And in fact, the NEA responded to that commitment by issuing its first ever endorsement in a presidential contest.

Upon coming into office, President Ronald Reagan referred to the agency as, “President Jimmy Carter’s new bureaucratic boondoggle,” and he called to abolish it. Dismantling the Department of Education, responsible for the miseducation of several generations and for squandering untold amounts of taxpayer dollars, makes even more sense today. Empowering states to enact education choice policies that continually prove to be academically superior, preferred by families and fiscally savvy is a no-brainer that will leave children, parents and every single taxpayer better off.