Kill the Federal Department of Education
Among the encouraging elements of the second Trump administration are more serious efforts to pare back the size and role of government than we’ve seen in decades. Whether everything the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is doing is by-the-book and likely to come to fruition depends on the outcome of political tussling and court challenges, but at least there’s a shot at shrinking Leviathan. And while it will almost certainly take an act of Congress to succeed, plans to deep-six the Department of Education, a useless bureaucracy born as a political payoff, would be an important step in the right direction.
A Department Born as a Political Favor
“As a presidential candidate in 1976, [Jimmy] Carter promised the National Education Association that he would push for a separate education department, a goal the NEA had sought for a century,” Mark Walsh detailed for EducationWeek in December 2024 after the death of the 39th president. “In return, the nation’s largest teachers’ union made the first presidential endorsement in its then-117-year history.”
The new department was broken off the old Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, so its formation didn’t introduce a federal role in education. But it created a whole bureaucracy dedicated to what had traditionally been (and remains) primarily a state, local, and family issue. And while most education funding is still sourced far from D.C., the new department brought the not-so-subtle clout of federal bureaucrats to nudge what and how children are taught in directions they prefer—generally with the support of the teachers’ unions who had lobbied for the creation of the Department of Education.
“Eliminating the department, National Education Association President Becky Pringle said this week, was equivalent to ‘giving up on our future,'” the union huffed in a press release. “Americans did not vote for, and do not support,” Pringle added, “ending the federal government’s commitment to ensuring equal educational opportunities for every child.”
Actually, it sounds like a great idea. Getting government out of the business of telling children what and how to think is wise, and the level of government most distant from families and children
Article from Reason.com
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