In 1979, President Jimmy Carter established the Department of Education, one of the most egregious moves by the U.S. government against the people.
Since then, it's followed the long, proud tradition of being a federal department that fails upward. Any inability to achieve a good result is because it wasn't funded enough, or staffed enough. The budget for 2025 has the Dept. of Ed taking in nearly $90 billion, and yet, since its inception, we went from being number one in education in the world to one of the worst.
As such, many of President-elect Donald Trump's promises made during a video made a year ago are going viral today and one people are excited about was his promise to end the Department of Education, stopping the wasteful spending and putting control of children's education wholly back to the states.
"One other thing I'll be doing very early in the administration is closing up the Department of Education in Washington D.C., and sending all education and education work, and needs, back to the states," said Trump. "We want them to run the education of our children because they'll do a much better job of it."
"You can't do worse," he continued. "We spend more money per pupil by three times than any other nation, and we're absolutely at the bottom. We're one of the worst. So you can't do worse."
"We're going to end education coming out of Washington D.C., we're going to close it up," he said. "All those buildings, all over the place and yeah, people that, in many cases, hate our children. We're going to send it all back to the states."
This now means that the $90 billion we're effectively burning in education can be handed to the states, where it will be utilized for the better, as the more local the department, the closer it is to the subjects it's governing. Now, instead of D.C. bureaucrats being appointed who too often have no real interest or care about the will of the people, or especially their children, you will now have state-level officials who answer more closely to the people.
D.C., and its bureaucracy, are rife with waste. They don't care about the concerns and needs of families, and have no need to heed the calls of parents for change. For instance, the infamous "common core math" was a one-size-fits-all approach that ignored regional or local needs and left teachers with little flexibility for tailing education for their students. The practice was overly complicated and unnecessary, and teachers struggled to suddenly shift their lessons, many of whom were under-trained on how to implement the new standard.
Ultimately, the lack of results from common core math speaks for itself, and as such, the usefulness of the DoE.
The DoE also oversees the federal student loan program, which is currently $1.7 trillion in debt. It also pushed the "teaching to test" standard you see in so many schools today through programs like "No Child Left Behind," causing other subjects to suffer as schools focused on math and reading and sidelined other subjects in order to not be penalized by the government for failing to have good test scores.
A book could be written on the failed experiment that is the DoE, as its failures are many, but suffice it to say that many of these issues, including public schools' inability to evolve as new technologies and data are released, can be placed at its feet.
It won't be missed.