Over the past half-decade, millions of parents have learned the hard way that when ideologically driven, unresponsive officials control public schools, their children are the ones who suffer. As former President Joe Biden’s administration began flooding America’s schools with $1 billion for diversity, equity, and inclusion programs based on critical race theory, parents across the country were shocked to learn that educators were profiling their children by race.

Instead of places of learning, classrooms became incubators of divisiveness. Teachers underwent indoctrination in DEI and CRT. Librarians filled shelves with new reading materials bearing the DEI and CRT stamps of approval. Students from “oppressor” races and ethnicities were pressured into becoming DEI and CRT “allies,” taught to condemn their history, society, and even parents who refused to accept the new ideology. The alternative was ostracism.

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What tool did progressive ideologues use to impose this radical doctrine on the nation’s 50 million public school students?

The Education Department. 

Under former Education Secretary Miguel Cardona, in addition to disbursing DEI and CRT funds to schools nationwide, the department rewrote long-standing federal regulations to completely transform America’s classrooms, teaching materials, sports teams, and even school bathrooms.

Perhaps the zenith of this ideological zeal was the department’s reinterpretation of Title IX, a 50-year-old law meant to provide equal opportunity and funding for female athletes in school and colleges, as requiring women’s and girls’ sports teams and locker rooms to include transgender women. It was an assault on biological reality bordering on hallucinogenic, brought to us courtesy of a federal Education Department that should never have been created.

Predictably, parents revolted. School board meetings became contentious. Attorney General Merrick Garland mobilized the FBI to investigate parents critical of DEI and CRT, while his son-in-law was profiting from the ideology, and the National School Boards Association likened them to domestic terrorists. Female athletes who protested being forced to compete against biological men were labeled as bigoted, intolerant, and threatened with violence, receiving little or no support from school and college administrators fearful of federal retribution.

Sanity is once again prevailing in schools thanks to President Donald Trump, but the job isn’t finished. That’s because a Cabinet-level Education Department has too much influence over what is taught in America’s schools. Beginning with George W. Bush’s presidency and continuing through Barack Obama’s and Biden’s, the Education Department has shaped and reshaped the curriculum of every public school in the country with disastrous consequences. A succession of education secretaries has used the carrots and sticks of federal funding to compel schools to implement education “reforms” that have, in fact, done more damage to students than good.

A word of clarification here: Defenders of the status quo will argue that the department is expressly prohibited by Congress from dictating textbooks or curricula used in public schools. True, but bureaucrats are clever and there is a workaround. The Education Department uses federal funds as incentives and withholds them as sanctions, colloquially the carrot and stick, to effectively compel schools. Educators comply because, as behavioral economists know, human beings respond to incentives and disincentives.

Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act pushed schools nationwide into mandatory testing for “proficiency” in math and reading to gauge whether students and schools were making annual progress in improving scores. The law was the brainchild of the former president’s brother, Jeb Bush, who used a similar approach as Florida’s governor. Failure to show steady improvement was punished by the loss of federal funds.

Educators modified their behavior, but not the way the Bush brothers envisioned. State and local school systems dumbed down their tests in what became a “race to the bottom” to make tests easier to pass and thereby preserve federal funding. Teachers focused classroom time on “teaching to the test” to the detriment of other learning.

The Education Department’s reshaping of the nation’s schools had lackluster results. From 2003 to 2009, advanced reading scores for eighth graders remained unchanged from 1992 levels while overall reading scores rose only slightly. Scores for fourth graders stagnated. Math scores improved slightly. Mediocre or no improvement resulted because the goal was to achieve the minimum to avoid federal sanctions, not to excel.

As Obama took office, Bill and Melinda Gates decided to try their hand at transforming America’s schools. Their focus was on a mind-numbing uniformity of what was taught in the classroom. Perhaps over a dose of LSD, Gates decided it would be swell if every high school student was taught the exact same subjects. Employers could hire graduates from Alabama and California or New Mexico and Michigan knowing they were as interchangeable as cogs in a machine. They even had standards “suggesting” how much time in English class should be spent on literary works versus other reading — spoiler alert: Literary works got short shrift. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation called the plan the Common Core Standards Initiative and spent $200 million to buy support for it.

Arne Duncan, Obama’s education secretary, bought in and used $4.35 billion in “Race to the Top” federal funds to incentivize states to adopt Common Core. Jeb Bush and Chris Christie endorsed it. So did the Business Roundtable and Chamber of Commerce. Obama took credit for it in his State of the Union addresses, and the Democratic Party embraced it in the 2012 platform. By 2011, more than 40 states signed up for the federal money and required Common Core in the classroom.

It was a dud. The Gates’ educational experiment not only failed to produce positive results, it actually set students back. By 2015, states began to jettison Common Core. Congress passed legislation explicitly prohibiting the department from paying for similar curricula control in the future, but it was too late for scores of millions of students. An entire generation went from kindergarten through 12th grade subject to failed experiments pushed on schools by the Education Department and self-appointed reformers during the Bush and Obama presidencies.

The only way to prevent federal experimentation with our schools is to diminish the department’s power. This can be done by sending existing financial support directly to the states through block grants, with minimal federal strings attached, and by scattering its functions throughout several Cabinet departments to prevent a concentration of school funding under any single Cabinet secretary.

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As Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) has shown, states that take control of their educational system can improve student achievement. The genius of federalism is that different states can take their own approach to boosting student performance or creating a curriculum that uses innovation and creativity. There is no one-size-fits-all approach to teaching and learning. Former President Woodrow Wilson called the states 50 separate “laboratories of democracy.”

When it comes to education, the best way for these laboratories to flourish is to dismantle the Education Department before it can do more harm to future generations of students.

John B. Roberts II served in the Education Department and the White House during Ronald Reagan’s presidency. He is an author and former executive producer of The McLaughlin Group. His latest book is Reagan’s Cowboys and his website is www.jbrobertsauthor.com.