President Donald Trump has made it abundantly clear he wants to eliminate the U.S. Department of Education (ED), and some news reports suggest an executive order to achieve that is imminent. Since the ED was created by Congress, it would take formal Congressional action to eliminate it, and the administration lacks the votes. Therefore, whether the administration can completely end the bureaucratic monstrosity on Maryland Avenue is debatable, but likely Trusk (Trump + Musk) can lower its clout to that of, say, the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
Despite statements from the National Education Association (NEA) and other groups, the end of the ED would not be a mortal blow to education in America. Indeed, it might be a necessary precondition to ending the decline in learning at all levels, from pre-school to advanced adult professional education. Our main interest here is higher education, but the universities inherit students who are products of our primary and secondary schools. Objective measures of learning look very bad, with Americans generally falling below several Asian and European nations in learning in core areas such as mathematics. In the more than 45 years since the ED began, spending per pupil at the K-12 levels has soared as learning has, at best, remained constant, and in important nation-strengthening subjects like American history and civics has shown some decline. Colleges are getting students that on average have mediocre training necessary to the development of erudite, wise, and honest leaders.
I have known three Education Secretaries well—one even put me on a federal commission on higher education—and I am sure that two of them, and suspect the third, support efforts to abolish the ED. And for good reason, as it applies to colleges. Compare the 15 years before the ED’s creation with the years since. From 1965 to 1980, collegiate enrollments more than doubled. Tuition increases were less than the rise in personal income. The proportion of Nobel laureates with American university connections was rising. Arguably, the 1960s and even 1970s were the Golden Age of American higher education. The post 1980 era has seen soaring tuition fees, new challenges to America’s planetary superiority in academic research, and signs of absolute knowledge decline among our college students, along with other nasty things, such as a decline in intellectual diversity and robust collegiate debate of the issues of the day.
[RELATED: We Need to Keep the Department of Education]
In 1979, when the ED was created, Democrats dominated Congress, for example, having 275 seats in the House of Representatives, a plurality of well over 100. Jimmy Carter was president. In the relevant House committee the bill advanced on a 20 to 19 vote, with seven Democrats voting against it. Thanks to a few absentee members, the bill cleared the House with fewer than the usual necessary 218 vote majority. Easily the most respected intellectual in the Democratic Party congressional leadership, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, did not like the bill. The New York Times (!!) argued that “school and college authorities have a hard enough job without a full-time cabinet agency delving deeper into their business.”
Why then was the bill barely approved? The nation’s most powerful teachers’ union, the NEA, wanted it and had supported Jimmy Carter’s successful 1976 election campaign with the tacit if not explicit promise that they would get their wish if Carter won. It was a brazen political payoff to a special interest group.
Aside from profound policy issues, the ED is known for its extraordinary level of administrative ineptitude and incompetence. Take the FAFSA form, completion of which is necessary for students seeking federal college assistance. In 2007, I attended a meeting with the Education Secretary and a few others devoted to simplifying the 130 or so question form. Those attending mostly thought a questionnaire ranging from 0 to 30 questions was quite feasible. Fast forward a dozen years. The form was still around 130 questions. A furious Congress passed legislation mandating a shorter form in three years or so, which, of course, the ED failed to meet, causing an admissions fiasco a couple of years ago.
I once advocated promoting our educational system in two ways. First, have the Air Force use strategic bombing techniques to wipe out the headquarters of the ED. Second, turn over the empty land to the nearby Smithsonian Institution to expand the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, providing both enjoyment and learning to the American public.
Explore more on the Department of Education here.
Cover designed by Jared Gould, featuring the image “President Trump is joined by Vice President Pence for an Executive Order signing” from itoldya420.getarchive.net, and the image of the U.S. Department of Education building in Washington, D.C., by Andy Feliciotti, sourced from Unsplash
I recently saw Bill Bennett on tv and he proposed a few ideas in lieu of obliterating Dept. of Education. He suggested that if we did eliminate it, we’d be handing down “education” to just another bureaucracy at the state level. I think he has an excellent point!
Without a Department of Education, there won’t be a Department of Education to publish a Bad Boy list of 60 colleges being investigated for antisemitism.
https://www.ed.gov/about/news/press-release/us-department-of-educations-office-civil-rights-sends-letters-60-universities-under-investigation-antisemitic-discrimination-and-harassment
The issue is who is running the department and what its employees do (or don’t do) — as the letter points out, most of these complaints had been ignored during the Biden regime.
I don’t think we need 4,500 people, but we definitely need ED.
“The post 1980 era has seen soaring tuition fees, new challenges to America’s planetary superiority in academic research, and signs of absolute knowledge decline among our college students, along with other nasty things, such as a decline in intellectual diversity and robust collegiate debate of the issues of the day.”
All of which are reasons why we should *not* abolish the Department of Education!
First and foremost, the soaring tuition fees were caused by the introduction of student loans for the middle class, not the creation of the ED Department. In fact, it was ED Secretary Bill Bennett who warned that this would happen. Congress didn’t listen to him, but without ED there would have been no Bill Bennett warning about this.
Second, the college freshman of 1980 had started first grade in 1968 — to understand the changes in the post-1980 undergraduate cadre, one must look at the post-1968 K-12* cadre. One must look at how K-12 changed in the dozen years before ED even existed….
Third, it was ED Secretary Terrel Bell who was behind the 1983 A Nation At Risk report — the 1983 report that warned that the nation was threatened by “a rising tide of mediocrity” and which created the school reform movement.
Without the department, there’d been no Secretary Bell — he’d have remained in obscurity at the University of Utah and been unable to send up the flare that he did in 1983.
So not only did the Department of Education (per se) not cause these problems, but you had two Secretaries of Education sending up flares warning about them. Bell in 1983 warning about the “rising tide of mediocrity” and Bennett a couple of years later warning about the then-new student loans. It’s just that we didn’t listen to them — that’s not their fault. And where might we be if they hadn’t warned us — John Silbur was talking about a lifetime percentage charge (e.g. 5% on gross earnings) to pay for college — think that might have further inflated costs a bit???
I’ve said it before and I will say it again — we need a stem to stern housecleaning at ED. There are a lot of people who should never have been hired and need to be politely shown the joys of early retirement. There are a lot of things that the Federal government ought not be doing and that includes a lot of people in the ED Department.
But you do need the bully pulpit for people like Bell & Bennett to pound on. Margaret Spellings tried with No Child Left Behind (NCLB) — it would have worked had the teacher’s unions not sabotaged it — but without her, it would have been nothing but a cash handout to teachers, which is what the unions wanted and eventually got. (Obama didn’t say anything about all the accountability being removed…)
What the NEA (Never Educate Anyone…) never anticipated was that Republican Presidents would appoint competent secretaries who would attempt to improve education. And would have if it were not for the damn civil service bureaucrats blocking them at every turn. We need to abolish civil service, not ED!
And without ED, who’s going to call Columbia on how they are treating Jews, or Janet Mills om how she’s treating girls?
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* Public kindergarten didn’t exist until the late 1970s, hence the critical date being 1968 rather than 1967.
The “Post 1980 era” has also seen a dramatic increase in foreign students in our colleges and universities.
It’s gone from about 3% to more than 30%, and some IHEs have about 50% foreign students. That’s changed academia far more than 4,500 bureaucrats ever could.