Imagine a government program that existed to achieve one goal — a laudable goal. But after spending more than $1 trillion in taxpayer dollars — that’s trillion, with twelve zeros — in pursuit of that goal, not only had the agency failed to achieve the goal, but it had also made the problem demonstrably worse.

Perhaps it’s not that hard to imagine because so much of what the federal government does is to fail in its mission.

But that scenario is far from hypothetical. It’s the regrettable truth about the US Department of Education. And those trillion dollars only scratch the surface of why the agency is a failed experiment and a malignancy to those who love freedom and believe students are more important than “the education system.”

The department’s main function in elementary and secondary education has been to spend money … a lot of money. But over the course of its four-decade history, there’s scant evidence that the department has done anything to improve student outcomes. In fact, there is considerable evidence to the contrary. It doesn’t take much more than a cursory skim of the Nation’s Report Card to see that it’s true.

But with money comes power. And because the Department of Education controls so much money, it has the power to push schools around, meaning that even things like “nonregulatory guidance” and “Dear Colleague letters” quickly become law in schools because the department threatens to withhold funding from those who don’t adhere to its edicts.

Power has been the department’s primary purpose. Its bulging bureaucracy has created rules, guidance, conditions, and red tape that have consistently stifled innovation, shackled teachers, slowed student achievement, advanced political agendas, and squandered most of the trillions in taxpayer dollars that have come through “Big ED’s” Brutalist doorways.

In one sense, it’s almost unfair to criticize the department for its failure to improve the condition of education; it doesn’t have any of the requisite tools to do so. But in another sense, that fact ultimately proves why the department need not exist at all.

People are often surprised when I recite what the department does and does not do. They seem to assume that the department runs schools — it does not. Or that the secretary is “in charge” of public education — she is not. The department does not hire or train teachers. It does not set learning standards. It generally doesn’t “do business” with teachers, students, or families at all. Instead, its main “customers” are state education bureaucrats and trade associations — namely the unions and the alphabet soup of organizations they financially control and who in turn financially benefit from the department’s mere existence.

Rightly, and perhaps most importantly, the US Department of Education is statutorily barred from having any role in curricula whatsoever. The law very clearly delegates that role, as it does almost all meaningful decisions in education, to states and communities:

No provision of a program administered by the Secretary or by any other officer of the Department shall be construed to authorize the Secretary or any such officer to exercise any direction, supervision, or control over the curriculum, program of instruction, administration, or personnel of any educational institution, school, or school system, over any accrediting agency or association, or over the selection or content of library resources, textbooks, or other instructional materials by any educational institution or school system. (Section 103[b], Public Law 96-88)

That’s a pretty unambiguous line of demarcation. But it didn’t stop the Biden Department of Education from trying to impose the racist and factually flawed “1619 Project” on schools and students via a “grant condition” on awards in 2021.

That’s a small example that proves a broader point. The department’s mere existence as a political body within the executive branch creates a magnetic pull toward overreach in pursuit of an agenda — a problem that frankly has plagued both parties. We saw this clearly with No Child Left Behind under George W. Bush and Race to the Top under Barack Obama. As secretary, I had to fight that pull against elements of the Trump White House and many members of Congress. When there is a lever of power that can be pulled, people in Washington just want to pull it.

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A short recitation of the history of the department is important to understand why it was a failed experiment from the jump.

In 1976, the federal role in education was comparatively de minimis and resided within the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. But a new trajectory was created that year when then governor Jimmy Carter cut a deal with the National Education Association. In exchange for its first-ever endorsement in a presidential campaign, Carter would form the US Department of Education as a Cabinet-level agency.

The NEA made no bones about its motives; then union boss John Ryor said it out loud:

Electing candidates dedicated to meeting the needs of education isn’t a goal, it’s a means to an end. Our goals, the things we need to enable us to teach more effectively and to live more comfortably — things like one‐third Federal funding, collective bargaining legislation in every state, national health care, a separate Secretary of Education, equity in teacher retirement nationwide — will not accomplish themselves.

The NEA got their man, and, in turn, they got their Cabinet agency.

I use “their” deliberately. When I became secretary, the department maintained a shuttle between “its” buildings in Washington. Those included the three owned by the federal government, and also those owned by the NEA and the American Federation for Teachers (AFT). Today, the Office of the Secretary houses a “senior liaison for labor relations.” My successor has a monthly meeting with the union bosses, and his staff has twice-per-week “check-ins” with the unions’ lobbyists. They do joint events and joint TV appearances. President Joe Biden, when he isn’t uncomfortably talking about “sleep[ing] with a NEA member every night,” headlines Democratic National Committee fundraisers at the NEA’s headquarters. The AFT’s Randi Weingarten is a Democratic superdelegate.

It is important to note that this does not make the unions’ “our way or the highway” mentality strictly partisan. While they called on me to resign seemingly daily, they also passed a resolution calling on President Barack Obama’s secretary and close friend, Arne Duncan, to resign. His supposed crime? Having the audacity to agree with a court ruling that stated that low-income students deserved better than low-quality teachers — a position that was good for kids, but bad for union bosses.

All of this makes it little wonder that the unions were given special — and unprecedented — access under Biden to edit Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidance on school reopenings to meet their liking (which was keeping children masked and schools closed).

It’s an outcome so obvious that even the Washington Post saw it coming. In 1978, the Post editorialized:

One of the principal risks of creating a creature of its clientele. That clientele would not necessarily be the schoolchildren and their parents affected by the federal government’s education programs. Much more probably it would be the National Education Association, the organization of teachers and school administrators who already exert a great deal of influence on education policy in Washington. In a way, this would be giving them their own department. (emphasis mine) 

*****

Back to the money. As mentioned earlier, Congress gives the Department of Education a lot of taxpayer money. Last year, it received more than $80 billion (excluding the $100 billion-plus in student loans it originates each year). It costs taxpayers more than $1.5 billion just to pay for the department’s 4,000 employees, buildings (three in DC alone), and basic operations.. By comparison, the Departments of Labor, Treasury, and Interior receive approximately $14 billion each in yearly discretionary funding – one-sixth the amount of the Department of Education.

When I walked veteran reporter John Stossel around just a few floors of one of the Department of Education’s buildings, he was aghast. “What do all these people do?” I told him that for many, I have no clue, and for many others, I wished I didn’t know. The answer is almost never “help students.” 

The Department of Education isn’t even close to being the primary funder of K–12 education. In most states, the federal share of education spending is less than 10 percent. In my home state of Michigan, last year’s state budget increased K–12 spending by more than what the federal government sent, making it hard to argue that the federal funding is irreplaceable.

Many have quipped that the Education Department provides 10 percent of the money but 90 percent of the paperwork. We weren’t able to concretely substantiate the claim, but even Randi Weingarten shared that reducing the department’s paperwork burden was an area of agreement between us.

Of course, the funding would be well worth it if the return on investment was there. But when researchers from Harvard University and Stanford University studied fifty years of federal spending on education, they found quite the opposite. Recall that the department has redistributed more than $1 trillion in taxpayer dollars to K–12 education systems across the nation since its inception. The express, primary goal of that spending was to close the socioeconomic achievement gap. Title I, the federal department’s largest K–12 expenditure, is targeted exclusively at schools in the lowest-income areas of the country. The achievement results show that not only has the gap not closed, but, in most every case, it has actually widened. So too have the gaps between the highest- and lowest-achieving students, which widened ever more dramatically with the unnecessarily prolonged COVID closures.

Looking specifically at Title I, a 2015 Brookings Institution study concluded, “[T]here is little evidence that the overall program is effective or that its funds are used for effective services and activities.” This was hardly news. A 1984 study, the first longitudinal study conducted after the Great Society passage of the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act, found that the “gap in achievement is not closed over time.” In short, the spending isn’t working to achieve the goal.

The same was true in a study released just as I took office. That report looked at so-called School Improvement Grants, a $3 billion program created by the Obama administration with the explicit goal of fixing chronically low-performing schools. But the study found that “implementing any SIG-funded model had no significant impacts on math or reading test scores, high school graduation, or college enrollment.” It was the largest-ever federal government investment in trying to fix failing schools, and it failed — miserably.

There’s a cautionary tale here as well. In response to consistent findings about the ineffectiveness of federal education spending, Republicans have been quick to propose cuts. Their generally poorly articulated arguments cause backlash. As a former Democratic education aide put it: “The defenders became overly protective and didn’t want to make any changes. It caused a hardening of positions rather than reaching for solutions.” I certainly experienced this firsthand.

It is a critical lesson to learn. Well-intentioned conservatives, dating back to Ronald Reagan, have tended to be lazy in their critiques of the Department of Education, often simply stating that it doesn’t do anything beneficial or that education isn’t a proper federal role. Both are true; the department does very little productive work, and education is best and properly left to the states, localities, and, ultimately, families.

But those rhetorical barbs leave too much room for opponents to claim that such propositions are not realistic or, more often, are harmful to schools. They do so most successfully by leveraging the fact that few Americans, let alone probably most members of Congress, actually know what the department does or does not do.

Accordingly, the answer conservatives must put forward is not to simply “abolish” the department, as Representative Thomas Massie’s bill would do. Instead, we must provide a vision of a stronger future state for education. We should put forward policies that empower students and their families, improve the teaching profession, and restore local control.

In our final budget proposal to Congress in 2020, I laid out a roadmap for how to do all this. The same ideas hold true today:

Unlock Educational Freedom for Students

When we were in office, we advanced legislation called Education Freedom Scholarships. In short, it would have created a federal tax credit for taxpayers who donated to state-based school choice scholarship programs. The program wouldn’t have grown federal power one bit or created anything for the US Department of Education to do — or, more likely, to mess up. It would simply be another available tax credit on your 1040, but with the important element of providing rocket fuel to education freedom programs designed and run by states.

In this Congress, that idea has taken shape as the Educational Choice for Children Act, brought forward by Senator Bill Cassidy. Congress should pass it, or something similar, without delay.

The imperative has only grown as more states have implemented education freedom programs. As of this writing, West Virginia, Arizona, Iowa, Utah, Arkansas, and Florida all have passed laws that provide education savings accounts (ESAs) to every single student in the state, with the funds able to be used for any educational expense the family chooses. Many more states have existing tax-credit programs, and many more — most notably Texas — are currently working to pass new ones.

This shift in the balance of power, from the education system to the student, will radically transform the K–12 experience and improve outcomes. It will also elevate the value of teachers by allowing them to grow in their careers, instead of being artificially capped by the one-size-fits-nobody system.

Fiscally, the tax credit would be a relative bargain. If Congress could find $190 billion to send to the K–12 system as COVID “relief,” without requiring them to reopen schools, it can certainly find $10 billion in tax credits to unlock new learning opportunities for millions of kids and give them a fighting chance to catch up academically.

Block Grant Funds to the States

The US Department of Education does one thing well: it takes taxpayer money appropriated by Congress, shuffles it around, adds strings and red tape, and absorbs some of it to feed itself before finally “granting” it to intermediaries, like state education agencies. They, in turn, shuffle it around, add strings and red tape, feed themselves, and then finally send it to school districts. Eventually, some of that money finds its way to a classroom and something a student actually benefits from, or at least interacts with … probably.

There’s clearly a more effective way. At the very least, we should cut out some of the middlemen.

We proposed that Congress combine the funding for the dozens of programs that the Department of Education administers at the K–12 level into a single block grant to the states — without red tape. In addition to improving efficiency, and increasing the total number of dollars actually available to schools, block-granting the money might prompt states to try new ideas and innovate. The people closest to students are the most likely to know how best to use those funds to improve student outcomes. We should unleash that creativity and see what flowers, not continue to constrict it from on high.

Much the same could be done in higher education. For example, the Department of Education currently administers eleven separate programs for minority-serving institutions. By consolidating them into one block grant, schools could almost certainly better target the dollars and serve students.

Though the “sky is falling” crowd will cry differently, the only harm done in this scenario would be to the power center in Washington from which the Blob (as Secretary Bill Bennett famously named the education lobby) has long fed. When I shared this idea with America’s governors, they immediately understood the flexibility that it could give them to pursue ideas that work. One literally jumped up and down with excitement.

Of course, it would be even better if we block-granted the money to families themselves. This could be done by bundling up every cent that the federal government spends on education, from Head Start to worker training programs, and depositing those funds into interest-bearing Lifelong Learning Accounts given to every American infant. With states, charities, and families also contributing to these accounts, we could more than fund preschool, K–12, college, and ongoing learning for every man, woman, and child in America.

Make FSA an Autonomous Government Corporation, Restore Private Lending

While I believe that the Department of Education is ill-equipped to productively manage much of anything, it is particularly ill-equipped to run one of the nation’s largest consumer banks.

Federal Student Aid (FSA) is just that. It has a loan portfolio of nearly $1.7 trillion, making it bigger than Bank of America, JPMorgan, or Capital One. For comparison, Wells Fargo is the nation’s largest mortgage servicer, and it holds less than $1 trillion in mortgages.

Such scale requires strong governance and deep financial expertise. But FSA has neither. Instead, as I said at its annual conference in 2019, FSA’s mission is to serve students and their families, but its structure is set up to serve politicians and their policies. As has been noted, no one can serve two masters.

Consider the current Biden proposal to “cancel” hundreds of billions in student loans. Ignore, for a moment, that the plan is flatly illegal. FSA’s charge, under law, is to secure repayment from student loan borrowers, that is, to function like a responsible lender. Ignore, too, that Biden’s student loan cancellations are unfair to students who responsibly repaid their loans or avoided borrowing altogether — not to mention the veterans who served their country and earned their loan forgiveness. Biden can ignore all those things because he wants to get reelected, and his advisers clearly believe that delivering student loan “relief” will help him win over younger voters. As a result, FSA is currently focused on eliminating as much of its own loan portfolio as possible, regardless of the fiscal harm done to taxpayers as a result (let alone the clear signal it sends to schools to just keep raising tuition).

We envisioned exactly this type of scenario when we proposed spinning FSA out of the Department of Education and making it an autonomous government banking institution, similar to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. It should have an independent board of governors, appointed by the president with staggered terms, who are experienced financial professionals and hold a fiduciary duty to the US taxpayer.

Doing so would make it harder to raid the Treasury in search of a political payoff. It would also force financial transparency. FSA should produce a complete and meaningful balance sheet to Congress and, by extension, taxpayers each quarter. If Congress passes laws that lead to FSA losing money, that’s Congress’s prerogative. But taxpayers should have a clear line of sight into where their money is going. Today, too many student loans are being written off in the dark, without an appropriation to pay for them. To wit, the Department of Education failed its last audit because its auditors, KPMG, found that the department “was unable to provide adequate evidential matter to support certain key assumptions used to estimate the [student loan] subsidy costs.”

Much of this is due to the complete federalization of student lending in 2010 as a “pay for” for Obamacare. Yes, the student loan program, which loses money, is budgeted as a money maker. Such things can only happen in the Swamp. In the real world, a bank with books like FSA’s would be shut down and its leadership imprisoned.

Reintroducing a private lending market would benefit taxpayers and borrowers. Banks would be able to offer some students better rates and terms than the government can, while creating shared accountability for repayment. Federal higher education loans have no underwriting. While that is important to ensure access for those with insufficient credit history, it also needlessly punishes those who could access better terms. A better solution would look more like the “Lending Tree” model, where, following completion of the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, a student and their family could review a menu of available lending options, including the federal government. Getting multiple bids tends to yield better deals.

Combine Forces to Protect Students

The Department of Education enforces civil rights law for all students based on race (largely under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act), based on sex (largely under Title IX of the Education Amendments Act), and based on disability (largely under the Individual with Disabilities Education Act).

These laws provide necessary protections against discrimination that require ongoing federal effort, especially as these are areas where the states have not always lived up to their obligations. However, these laws — as important as they are — hardly necessitate having their own Cabinet-level agency.

Take civil rights. The Department of Justice has a Civil Rights Division charged with upholding “the civil and constitutional rights of all persons in the United States, particularly some of the most vulnerable members of our society.” It even has an Educational Opportunities Unit, in no small part because the Department of Education doesn’t have litigation authority and must rely on the Department of Justice to prosecute. It’s hard to argue that the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights couldn’t, let alone shouldn’t, live there.

Similarly, the Department of Health and Human Services is home to numerous programs for Americans with disabilities and is already home to a disability rights enforcement arm. 

While these bureaucracies are certainly not free from political influence or overreach, they exist within structures much more attuned to the rule of law than the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights has proven to be.

Consider how the Office for Civil Rights has weaponized Title IX, a one-sentence law that reads:

No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.

Today, the Biden administration has two proposals to torture that sentence into a liberal social engineering juggernaut. First, it would restore Obama-era “guidance” on addressing claims of sexual misconduct that so aggressively undermined basic due process protections that many likened the results to kangaroo courts and the English Star Chambers. The second would leverage Title IX, which most Americans find synonymous with protecting women’s sports, to destroy women’s sports by redefining “sex” to mean “gender identity.” It’s hard to serve as the protector of women’s sports when you’re the one putting males on the team.

***** 

In sum, if each of these ideas were enacted, the proper — and greatly diminished — federal role in education would be restored. The real work would again be done in the states and amongst students, families, and educators. The need for a bulging federal bureaucracy would disappear. If, as a result, the US Department of Education itself disappeared, so much the better!

The seismic power shift would make American education stronger, more student-centered, better funded, less bureaucratic, depoliticized, and higher-achieving.

In many ways, it would accomplish everything that the Department of Education has chronically failed to do.

Betsy DeVos served as the 11th U.S. secretary of education and is the bestselling author of Hostages No More: The Fight for Education Freedom and the Future of the American Child.

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