The question was direct: If there was one federal agency that I could dispose of what would it be? Without ado: The Department of Education (DOE) as evidence for its abolishment is overwhelming.
The “Nation’s Report Card” — the National Assessment of Educational Progress long-term trends exam — found that the average 13-year-old student’s math scores ranked the lowest in more than three decades. The number of high school seniors who did not read a single book on their own in the last year nearly quadrupled between 1976 and 2021-2022. Moreover, only 20% of students nationwide read proficiently, and four out of five are struggling to meet basic educational standards.
Still not convinced?
According to two international tests: Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) and the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS), American fourth graders scored 18 points lower in 2022-2023 than in 2019, the year before the COVID closures. Fourth graders delivered the lowest science scores since the TIMSS test was first administered in 1995, while eighth graders’ scores dropped by 27 points. In all, 26 countries scored higher than Americans in math. Sweden kept their schools open during COVID-19 and ended remote learning in 2020 and moved up ten slots above the U.S.
The establishment of the DOE by President Jimmy Carter in 1979 was supposed to close the achievement gap. Instead, it has spent over $1 trillion with worse results ensuring that children stay academically, economically and socially handicapped creating a legion of Democrats in its wake. The DOE budget for fiscal 2025 is $238 billion.
The DOE is nothing more than a Democrat gift to teachers’ unions.
The Biden administration’s direction of the DOE focused on woke indoctrination, including transgenders in girls’ sports. Students have been divided up by being either “victims” or “oppressors.” Merit is suppressed and social and sexual pathologies dominate a curriculum where teachers are powerless to enforce any discipline.
The teachers’ unions, and special interest groups colluded to attack concerned parents. Biden’s Department of Justice labeled those parents who spoke up at school board meetings, “domestic terrorists.” The Southern Poverty Law Center branded them “anti-government extremists.” Before Elon Musk owned X, PayPal froze their accounts blocking them from a bounty of financial donations.
Anti-American activists, debased teachers’ unions, and an army of bureaucrats have imposed lethal educational policies that threaten the very foundation of what makes America exceptional. The core subjects of math, reading, science and history have been shelved in favor of contentious Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and gender identity agendas that target the most vulnerable among us – children. Besides leveraging tax dollars to force ideological curriculums on the states is a DOE specialty, they remain the lapdog of the National Education Association.
President Ronald Reagan promised to shutter the DOE back in 1981, and in 1996 Republican candidate Bob Dole promised the same. President Trump has said he wants to eliminate the department, but that move likely won’t happen as he does not have the needed legislative support.
Education control and funding must be returned to the states and local communities who respond to citizen concerns more readily than the federal government ever will. If this is impossible, perhaps the paradigm lies with that once army of Catholic nuns who accomplished so much with so very little.
The educational-industrial complex that comprises the DOE needs to join Jim Crow in the ash heap of history. The education of our children has become secondary to propping up teachers’ unions that have been failing our children for decades. Most are D students. The only Bs and Cs they get are in hepatitis.
The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 highlights the only role the feds should play: “The federal government should confine its involvement in education policy to that of a statistics-gathering agency that disseminates information to the states.”
If accountability and achievement are truly the goals, the DOE’s monopoly must end. Abolishing the DOE is the necessary step in reforming the American education system and underscores how there must be consequences for abysmal results. Returning education to the states emphasizes how parents are the stakeholders when educating their children – the next generation of American citizens and leaders.
Education got us into this mess. Education can get us out.
