Donald Trump’s executive order on Thursday didn’t shut down the Education Department. The Trump EO didn’t shutter it or dismantle it or shoot it into the sun.
Regrettably.
Overheated Twitter rhetoric and breathless headlines aside, Trump’s executive order is better understood as a memo to Linda McMahon to do what she’s already been busy doing under her authorities as secretary of education: reduce bureaucratic bloat and headcount where prudent; scrap grants and programs where judicious; and develop a plan to work with Congress to formally and finally close up shop on Jimmy Carter’s 1979 carbuncle.
Americans — even many conservative Americans — have been taught to believe that the Department of Education is somehow responsible for the education of America’s youth. It isn’t. The federal Education Department employs no teachers. It doesn’t administer a single school. It doesn’t set a uniform national curriculum or implement nationwide education standards.
At best, it’s a mechanism to deliver supplemental funding to schools; at worst, it’s a regulatory drag and a meddlesome, troublemaking apparatus that makes life immeasurably more difficult for the parents, teachers, principals, legislators, and school-board members who actually do the educating in this country.
Something like 85 percent of spending on K–12 education in the United States is funded by state and local governments. The feds do send money to low-income schools and allocate money to special-education programs. But what the department mainly functions as is a gigantic student-loan bank with a regulatory agency layered on top.
Every last function of the department that Americans like can be better housed in already extant sections of our government — as they all were before 1979.
The Department’s Office for Civil Rights should be housed in the Justice Department — which employs prosecutors with the powers to sue those that injure students’ civil rights.
The student-loan program should be reformed and then transferred to the Treasury (if not abolished entirely, allowing the free market to do its job and getting the taxpayers off the hook). Treasury should also handle the issuance of Pell Grants.
Funding for special-education programs can be directed through the Department of Health and Human Services, as it was before 1979 when HHS was the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.
Title I funding, which is part of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 and 2002’s No Child Left Behind, sends federal money to schools with high percentages of students from low-income families. That law should be rewritten, with the regulations removed and the money block-granted to the 50 states to allocate as they see fit. Better yet, Congress can give that money directly to families by passing universal school choice.
And yes — as the Trump administration well knows — new legislation is indeed necessary for the major reforms: An act of Congress is required to close the department; legislation is required to clear out the labyrinth of red tape and regulations that are a function of federal law and decades of case law. Even if Donald Trump could wave a magic wand and be rid of the U.S. Department of Education, because the laws governing the funding mechanisms and requirements would still exist, much of the red tape and many of the federally imposed inefficiencies would remain.
Nearly 40 years ago, Ronald Reagan warned that the Department of Education was primed for capture by the education blob, the teachers’ unions, and lobbyists trying to get their piece of the pie. Never have we had such a vivid illustration of that inexorable pattern than under Miguel Cardona and Joe Biden, who attempted to force their radical ideological priorities on schools, teachers, and parents, while attempting to “forgive” a half-trillion dollars of student loans during an election year and stick taxpayers with the bill.
Trump and Linda McMahon’s efforts should be commended. But more importantly, Republicans in Congress should unite, and then seek to find a few free-thinking Democrats, to effectuate what the administration will propose.
The United States won the space race and sent men to walk on the moon without a federal Department of Education. Americans advanced toward universal primary and then secondary education without a federal Department of Education. Americans settled a continent, rose to superpower status, and built a massive industrial economy without a federal Department of Education.
Randi Weingarten and the national teachers’ unions may scream and yell, or find their fainting couches, but we have full confidence in the good people of New Hampshire, Nebraska, Florida, Nevada, and the other 46 states, acting through their legislatures and school boards, to effectively write curricula and standards and run their local schools without the malign guidance and persistent interference of Washington, D.C.