Multiple news sources reported that President Trump was going to sign an executive order to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education on March 6th. However, he ultimately decided not to sign it due to concerns about potential backlash and lack of preparation for its rollout.
Reports suggest that his administration faced significant challenges in addressing how such a move would impact critical programs like school lunches and funding for students with disabilities. In addition, eliminating the department entirely would require Congressional approval, which adds another level of complexity to such a move.
But if it’s ever going to happen, now should be the time. There is absolutely no reason to have a federal department of education. No one attends a federal government school. Education happens locally and should be monitored and managed locally. Therefore, a national education department is not needed.
DOE History
The architects of our modern education system often bragged, in public, that their goal was to create a humanist system of education. In 1962, the Supreme Court removed prayer from school. In 1963 it removed the Bible, and in 1980 it removed the Ten Commandments from schools.
The United States Department of Education was created on October 17, 1979, during Jimmy Carter’s presidency. It began operating on May 4, 1980, after the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare was split into the Department of Education and the Department of Health and Human Services.
The U.S. Department of Education launched several initiatives aimed at promoting student achievement, ensuring equal access to education, and preparing students for global competitiveness. They created national education standards, a set of guidelines and benchmarks designed to ensure consistent education across the country.
These standards were intended to provide a framework for educators and policymakers to design curricula, allocate resources, and assess student achievement. Additionally, resources like the Common Core State Standards were written to help prepare students for success in college and careers by providing clear learning goals.
What Standards?
While the U.S. Department of Education is supposed to ensure a cohesive and effective education system across the country, rather than striving for greatness, it seems they have been lowering standards for kids to pass. Public schools, unfortunately, have all been dumbed down to the same level. Test scores indicate that the Department of Education has failed American students.
Since the Department of Education was created, the U.S. education ranking has consistently gone downhill. The following chart shows America’s educational decline. The United States has fallen from the top 5 in the 1980s, to the top 10 in the 1990s, to the top 15 in the 2000s, to the top 20 in the 2010s. Here is an overview of the ranking data, courtesy of US Education News:
It’s become all about control and money
The Department of Education is just one more example of the catastrophic impact that centralized control of anything can have. It may sound good and it may even be more economical, but it soon gets bloated with career bureaucrats who don’t really care, because they’re just in it for their pension.
Taxpayers are constantly hounded to give more money for schools, under the auspices of doing it “for the children.” In reality, plenty of money has been given to public schools, year after year, but after being siphoned off into administrator salaries and benefits, the quality of public education continues to get worse.
We don’t need 10 school board members making $400,000 a year! What we really need is more money freed-up for those boots-on-the-ground educators who are making a difference — life-changing teachers like John Taylor Gatto — not for inflated salaries for administrators who don’t do anything except push papers.
Give some of that wasted money to the teachers (the good ones) and reward them with bonuses for each of their students that pass the state grade level testing. We need to inspire the good teachers and be able to fire the bad ones instead of shifting them around to different schools like we do right now, thanks to the teacher’s unions.
Education vs. Indoctrination
The Department of Education has lost its way and is beyond repair in its current state. Nowadays the schools teach students what to think, not how to think. Teachers push their personal and political agendas onto impressionable children and insecure teens. Public schools are no longer education centers, they are indoctrination centers that teach students to think collectively, not independently.
Instead of being educated, kids are programmed into ideologies that are primarily opposite of the Judeo-Christian ethics of our founding fathers and the majority of our national populace. Schools want the ability to control children, without parents even having a say, which you will find out if you’ve ever been to a school board meeting.
We need to get back to teaching Reading, Math, Critical Thinking, Civics, and American History. We need to put some money back into the Physical Education, Art and Music departments. We need to bring back vocational education like farming, car mechanics, welding, woodworking, and electronics for all the kids who don’t want to go to college. We need to make learning fun again!
Restructuring the DOE
The Department of Education can be abolished without getting rid of school lunches for impoverished families and funding for students with disabilities. By restructuring things, benefits like those can come from other sources, such as the Department of Health and Human Services.
Linda McMahon, who took office as the new Secretary of Education, is supportive of overhauling the Department. She told staff to prepare for a “momentous final mission” to eliminate “bureaucratic bloat” and return education to the states.
“Removing red tape and bureaucratic barriers will empower parents to make the best educational choices for their children,” McMahon said. “An effective transfer of educational oversight to the states will mean more autonomy for local communities. Teachers, too, will benefit from less micromanagement in the classroom—enabling them to get back to basics.”
McMahon highlighted three goals for restructuring the Department of Education:
- Ensure parents are the “primary decision makers” in their kids’ education.
- Focus public education on math, reading, science, and history – not “divisive DEI programs and gender ideology.”
- Establish post-secondary education as a path to well-paying careers that meet the demands of the workforce.
- She also wrote an opinion piece in The Hill expressing support for expanding Pell Grant eligibility to workforce training programs, not just college degree programs.
It’s still unclear how all this will be carried out. “This is not a flip-on, flip-off situation here,” McMahon said. “Practically, there will have to be a process … You cannot shut the doors tomorrow and be done.” But it’s exciting to think of the changes that may be in the works. It’s long past time to overhaul the public school system and make education great again.
If anything, what we need is to empower the parents by providing them with education vouchers. Let parents choose the public, private, parochial, or homeschool education that is best for their child. School choice ultimately forces schools to teach those things demanded by parents, or they’ll lose money because no one will enroll there. Publicly funded education vouchers for all students are the key to ending teacher’s unions controlling the indoctrination of our nation’s children.
