Recent outrage over the Trump administration’s efforts to “gut” the Department of Education reflect a misplaced panic. The panic has intensified in the wake of Trump’s signing of an executive order last week that would all but close the department. Many commentators fear the worst.
The results of the move will be far less dramatic than feared—and they are long overdue. Outright elimination of the department would require an act of Congress, but dramatically shrinking it, as Trump intends, will allow for greater local control. Many of the department’s programs can be transferred, with little disruption, to other parts of the federal government better equipped to administer them.
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For decades, I led big-city school districts across the country. I’ve seen firsthand how the Department of Education’s bureaucratic expansion—in Republican and Democratic administrations alike—yielded little in terms of student achievement.
Both sides have experimented with education policy. President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind initiative instituted uniform math and reading standards and mandated that 20 percent of all poverty funds go to federally approved private-tutoring contractors. President Barack Obama’s Race to the Top program tied additional funding to compliance with top-down priorities. States and school districts were essentially required to use the Common Core curriculum and testing companies preselected by the department.
The Biden Department of Education advanced the teachers’ union’s radical agenda, which went beyond supporting schools to strengthening the union’s education monopoly, even at the cost of undermining parental choice. Without any input from public charter schools, the department attempted to revamp the $440 million federal Charter Schools Program to reduce its funding significantly and to empower itself to act as a national charter school board, limiting charters through overregulation and red tape.
Most egregiously, the Biden DOE showed no urgency in pressing for the reopening of public schools amid the Covid-19 pandemic, in defiance of both science and the experiences of private schools that had reopened. And the department then deliberately and blatantly discriminated against these same private schools by giving them a fraction of the money to which their student populations entitled them.
If the goal in creating the Department of Education was to improve public education and narrow the academic achievement gap, it has failed miserably. The gap between students at the highest and lowest ends of the economic spectrum has remained largely unchanged since the department’s creation. The 2024 Nation’s Report Card shows that fourth- and eighth-grade reading scores remain at 1992 levels. Taxpayers spent nearly $200 billion in federal education funding during Covid only to have American children suffer from unprecedented—and likely permanent—learning losses.
Some Department of Education supporters cite the doubling of students attending college as evidence of success. Massive student loan programs are the primary driver of this increase, however. The cost has been high, saddling millions with long-term debt and driving up tuition bills. Since 1980, college costs have grown more than 1,200 percent, far outpacing the Consumer Price Index. Meantime, preoccupied with boosting college attendance, we overlooked the importance of vocational and technical education—to the detriment of low-income families and the economy.
Almost 50 years and trillions of dollars into the Department of Education experiment, in other words, we are little better off than when we started.
Abolition of the department does not mean getting rid of its essential functions. Trump should return the administration of education grant programs to a renewed Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. (Created in 1953 under President Dwight Eisenhower, HEW was split in 1979 into the Departments of Education and Health and Human Services). Block grants to states, with clear guidelines on their use, would give state and local decision-makers greater discretion in using education funds.
Likewise, the Department of Justice is better equipped to enforce civil rights laws than the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights. The U.S. Treasury can better manage and oversee federal student-loan programs.
Ironically, the same teachers’ unions now warning of disaster if the Department of Education gets eliminated once aggressively opposed its overreach. Unionized teachers even teamed with conservative suburbanites to block the Obama administration’s efforts to tie teacher evaluations to student test scores.
Union anxiety is notably absent when it comes to the dismal performance of U.S. students. The unions have ignored or minimized declining results on international assessments like the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and the recent Nation’s Report Card scores.
The Trump administration’s winding down of the Department of Education won’t spell disaster. It will return decision-making power to the states, where it belongs, and let local leaders decide how to allocate resources. After more than 40 years of failed federal interventions in education, it’s long past time to admit that Washington is part of the problem.
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