An idea whose time has come

Photo by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash

Unless you’re brand new around here, you probably already know my feelings about the Department of Education.

Yeah…not a fan.

While the federal government may have been involved in education for decades, the Department of Education only dates to well within my lifetime. It was a thing that should never have existed, but if it did and it did its job well, I might be willing to ignore it.

The problem is that it doesn’t.

While it was intended to improve education in this country, test scores have stagnated.

Now, more and more people are talking about shutting it down, including at least one person reportedly being considered for Secretary of Education.

As President-elect Donald Trump privately storyboards his cabinet choices, one top state official who is rumored to be on the shortlist for secretary of education is releasing his game plan for shifting the department’s duties to states and parents, Fox News Digital has learned.

In a memo to Oklahoma parents and school administrators, Oklahoma Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters will state that the federal agency has "hijacked our education system using taxpayer dollars to impose harmful policies and control what’s taught in our schools."

Some issues Walters said he is bringing to the fore both in the memo and what he is calling a Trump Education Advisory Team to be announced Monday.

…

In a Friday interview, Walters said the team will organize priorities for schools to be in line with Trump administration education policies, based on what the president-elect has signaled that he will do in that regard.

With the prospect of a shuttered Department of Education, Walters said that he will plan out how to fill any holes left by federal programs and develop legislative recommendations.

At an October rally in Indiana, Pennsylvania, Trump said he is "going to close the Department of Education and move education back to the states."

"And we’re going to do it fast. We’ll get somebody great [as secretary]." He namedropped former Rep. Lee Zeldin, R-N.Y. who had accompanied him, as well as Ohio entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy.

This is an idea whose time has come.

If you needed reasons, let’s start with the staggering number of teachers who have been recorded absolutely railing against Trump and Trump supporters, for one thing. Teacher’s unions are little more than Democratic PACs pretending to be something else.

But that’s just a tip of the problem, and it’s not one that some people will respond to. After all, aren’t teachers people? Don’t they have the right to have their own opinions? Sure, they shouldn’t act like that, but they have a right to dislike Donald Trump.

And they do have that right, but these are just the ones that got caught.

Anyway, besides that, though, let’s think about how much we spend on education in this country. Let’s start with this graph:

There have been slight dips from time to time in 2024 dollars, but that wasn’t because spending didn’t increase so much as inflation nerfed it to some degree.

Yet let’s also remember that test scores have been basically the same throughout this time, as they have been for decades before.

So where is the money going?

Sure, part of it is that teachers get pay raises, so that’s a small part of it. There was also a push to shrink classroom sizes, which means more teachers overall, and that’s another part of it.

But that’s only a tiny amount.

A 95 percent increase in administrative staff and a nearly 40 percent increase in principals and assistant principals.

These aren’t people who are directly involved in student education. We could argue that the increase in principals and assistants has something to do with the push for small class sizes, which might be possible, and we can account for the 10 percent increase in teachers for that, but the rest is bizarre.

And much of this is driven by the Department of Education and their need for documentation regarding compliance. In other words, they need a virtual army of administrators just to show they’re spending the money correctly, but in the process, they’re spending a lot of other money on something that doesn’t really benefit students.

Plus, as I’ve already noted, the increase in spending hasn’t correlated with better test scores or student outcomes.

Despite that, we’ve seen legions of teachers over the last handful of years showing us the many problems with public education. I highlighted some recent ones above, but we’ve seen how DEI and CRT keep showing up in the classrooms. We’ve seen how teachers fight to include sexually explicit material in school libraries even as local school boards silence parents who read from those books because it’s too explicit. Over and over again, we’ve seen how public education is a black hole into which we pour money and expect nothing in return.

So dismantling the Department of Education is a good thing.

“But public education will vanish!”

No, it won’t. First, if it did, it wouldn’t be a bad thing in the least, but it’s not going to. Public education long predated the DOE and will outlast it.

Further, state constitutions require states to provide for people’s education. That’s likely to continue being public schools, at least in most places. In other places, it might be private schools paid for via vouchers, but that will be available for every child regardless of anything else. It might be funding for homeschooling.

But regardless of what happens in the states, the Department of Education was an experiment that failed. It’s time to cut our losses.

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