Former Vice President Mike Pence has now put meat on the bones of a four-decade-old desire of conservative activists to eliminate the federal Department of Education . His ideas, discussed in an exclusive May 1 phone interview , track well with the elements of a column last week by two former top advisers to conservative former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.

The conservative advocacy group founded by Pence, Advancing American Freedom , has for two years called to eliminate the department, whose creation, Pence said, was “a bad idea” from the start. But the question is, how?

“Education is a state and local function,” Pence said. “It ought to ever continue to be so. As it is … less than 10% of what this country spends on education comes from the federal government … But the opposite is true in terms of education policy ... The heavy hand of federal regulation plays an outsized role.”

He continued: “The very simple answer would be to block-grant the budget of the federal department of education back to the states, close down the department at the federal level, and allow states to use those resources to expand educational choice for families. We’re at the very beginning of an evolution-choice revolution.”

Pence said the grants would be made on a “per-student basis,” adding, “You give states that are expanding educational choice to expand more opportunities.”

The federal department, though, does a lot of things that can’t just be sent in monetary grants to the states. What, I asked, should be done with the necessary enforcement of civil rights and rights for the disabled in the educational sphere? Not the directives for ideological agendas related to identity politics, but basic enforcement of civil rights statutes? The Education Department devotes considerable efforts to ensuring compliance (albeit oft-times with far too much red tape and interpretively expansive rule-making).

“I would assume the Justice Department would be as capable of enforcing civil rights requirements in educational institutions as they are in every other area,” Pence quickly replied.

As it happens, those elements are precisely the ones independently put forth last week by Robert S. Eitel and Jim Blew, co-founders of the Defense of Freedom Institute and former top officials for the Trump-Pence Education Department. In a column called “ Just Do It : A Plan to Close the Federal Department of Education,” Eitel and Blew call for expanded school choice, establishing “no-strings-attached block grants to the states,” and “mov[ing] civil rights enforcement in education to the U.S. Department of Justice.”

In sum, Pence is calling for a major reform that experienced officials say is indeed feasible.

Again, Pence’s point was to stress the imperative of getting the heavy hand of federal bureaucrats away from local decision-making. That way, even if radicals in various localities might still be able to force their tendentious agenda in some school systems, other localities can thrive without worrying that the huge power of the federal government will impose national mandates on them for, say, identity politics, or for newfangled math-teaching approaches that don’t work.

The Biden administration, for example, is fighting on multiple fronts to make it harder, by national policy, to ban biological males from competing in athletic events for women and girls. Pence spoke at length and with great feeling on the subject.

“We have to put the interests of women’s sports first,” Pence said. “We’ve made incredible strides in women’s sports in the last 50 years. And to see the radical Left squandering that and threatening that by advancing the gender-identity agenda, I think, is a travesty.”

The former vice president said that just in recent years, in speeches at the University of North Carolina and the University of Alabama, he has told students that “students should be required to compete in the sport represented by the biological birth as a matter of common sense and fairness.”

Finally, that discussion of his North Carolina speech led Pence into impassioned advocacy for one other agenda item of Advancing American Freedom, namely that states should require that high school students demonstrate basic knowledge of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Federalist Papers. The UNC campus, he noted, has been roiled by faculty objecting to a legislative proposal requiring college students to take courses on the founding documents.

“It’s astonishing to me that that would be controversial,” Pence said. “These are the cornerstones of the greatest nation in the history of the world. They still represent the wellspring of our ideals and not only our form of government but our liberties. The fact that it would be seen as controversial or that it would be seen as optional whether students would, at some point in their academic career in college, study the Declaration and the Constitution just shows you how far many on the Left have gone … Every American should take time to understand the principles enshrined in our Declaration and Constitution. To me, it’s an essential aspect of citizenship.”