Donald Trump isn’t the first presidential candidate who promised to eliminate the Education Department. But he is the first to not let congressional inaction stand in the way of a promise.
The Education Department announced on Tuesday it was firing half of its workforce, about 1,300 people. This is a step toward the ultimate goal of completely shuttering the agency, which will require an act of Congress.
Education Secretary Linda McMahon, a co-founder of World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE), made clear on her first day on the job that drastic changes were coming. She sent a letter out to department employees informing them of a “final mission.”
McMahon told Fox News’ Laura Ingraham after the announcement of the workforce reduction:
[Trump’s] directive to me, clearly, is to shut down the Department of Education, which we know we’ll have to work with Congress, you know, to get that accomplished. … What we did today was to take the first step of eliminating what I think is bureaucratic bloat. …
But we wanted to make sure that we kept all of the right people and the good people to make sure that the outward-facing programs … the grants, the appropriations that come from Congress, all of that are being met, and none of that’s going to fall through the cracks.
The firings won’t affect “Free Application for Federal Student Aid forms, student aid, operations for students with disabilities, civil rights investigations and formula funding to states,” a senior official told The Hill.
But the department’s Office of Civil Rights did experience some of the steepest cuts, “with regional centers shuttered or reduced to a skeleton crew, including those in New York, San Francisco and Boston,” according to The New York Times.
What the Times failed to report is that this office has served as a major conduit for left-wing ideologies into classrooms across the country.
McMahon’s actions are proving accurate earlier reports from The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post that the Trump administration plans to hollow out the department until it can get congressional approval to completely eliminate it. Despite Republicans in control of both chambers of Congress and the White House, shuttering this department will not be easy. Even if all 53 Senate Republicans are on board, they will have to clear the 60-vote filibuster hurdle.
Former President Jimmy Carter created the Department of Education in 1979 at the behest of the National Education Association, the country’s largest teachers union.
Department advocates believe that getting rid of it will erode the quality of education. However, the data suggest that’s already happened. There are zero academic subjects in which more than half of America’s government-school students are proficient. That’s according to the government’s own assessment, the Nation’s Report Card. In no private-sector endeavor would a less-than-50-percent success rate be acceptable.
Perhaps the agency has failed where it matters because facilitating actual education was never the primary goal. The New American has pointed out that the template for today’s failing school system was really an indoctrination program designed by atheistic socialists such as John Dewey and Horace Mann. We have published reports highlighting the much higher learning levels of 19th-century youth compared to those of today.
Christopher Rufo, a board member of New College of Florida and the author of America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything, recently reported on the ideological corruption in which the Department of Education and its sprawling network of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have been complicit:
Last week, I had a front-row seat to this process. … In one video, a Department of Education-funded NGO argued that public-school educators should destigmatize child “sex work,” especially for “queer and trans people of color” and “LGBTQ+ youth.” In another, activists with a Department of Education-affiliated NGO claimed that babies develop racial biases and begin “attributing negative traits” to nonwhite races by age five. And finally, I published a clip from an NGO that had received an $8 million grant to promote the idea that America is a “racialized structure of power, privilege, [and] oppression.”
The U.S. Constitution does not authorize federal involvement in education. And even if advocates’ argument that it is covered by the general welfare clause were to be entertained, it’s clear the Department of Education has accomplished quite the opposite of education. Empirical data show a steady deterioration of academic knowledge among America’s students since the creation of the department.
The Department of Education’s failure has become clear to many parents. That is why interest in alternative ways of providing education is increasing.
If you’re looking for an alternative to public school, we encourage you to look into our affiliate online classical school, FreedomProject Academy.
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