Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, the nation’s largest teachers union, recently claimed on CNN that President Donald Trump’s plan to dismantle the Department of Education is “going to make it harder for teachers to teach and kids to learn.”
While Weingarten doesn’t have much of a leg to stand on in criticizing others for making teaching and learning harder – she is a controversial figure whose championing of school closures during the pandemic has led to irreversible learning loss among American students – her statement both encapsulates and contributes to many of the public fears surrounding the Department of Education’s potential closure: How will American education fare if and when the Department of Education shuts down for good?
What’s important to keep in mind is that the Department of Education does not actively instruct students. As Weingarten herself stated in a press release for a recent protest, “The department is effectively one of America’s biggest banks, with 45 million borrowers holding $1.6 trillion in loans.” Many of the most vocal advocates of the Department of Education may publicly fearmonger that President Trump is making cuts to American education, but even they know that the department has nothing to do with actual education.
The department mostly exists to handle the student loan program, Pell grants for low-income college students, Title I grants for high-poverty K-12 schools, and federal funding for all K-12 schools. That federal funding comprises only 13.6% of all educational spending (the rest of the funding is handled by states and localities). The department also investigates civil rights violations in schools and colleges that receive federal funding.
All of these tasks are important – and, as they are mandates of Congress for the federal government, all of these tasks can be handled by different federal agencies. There is no reason the Department of Education specifically needs to exist to complete these tasks.
Indeed, it should not exist to do such tasks, as its creation has arguably been unconstitutional from the get-go. America, after all, was founded on federalism, which delegates certain authorities to states and localities as opposed to the federal government: Article I, Section 8, which outlines what the federal government has the authority over, makes no mention of education. The Founders never meant for education to be centralized in one federal department, and in fact, the Department of Education was established quite recently in our history, in the last few months of the Carter administration.
When signing the Department of Education into law, President Jimmy Carter justified its creation by stating, “Our ability to advance both economically and technologically, our country’s entire intellectual and cultural life depend on the success of our great educational enterprise.”
And yet, there was little basis then, as there is now, for such a statement: constitutionality aside, it is telling that the Americans who created the atomic bomb and helped land the first man on the moon went to schools well before there was any real federal overreach in education. Meanwhile, despite the sheer amount of money we have put toward an ever-expanding federal educational bureaucracy, American students today are performing worse on reading and math assessments than ever before.
We’re getting, if anything, a negative return on our tax-dollar investment academically, so where is that money going? Well, to ideological pet projects, mostly.
The department has granted over $200 million to 21 “Comprehensive Centers,” which have pushed radical gender ideology and has pushed critical race theory, too, telling schools to “decenter whiteness in education.” It has granted $33 million to four “Equity Assistance Centers” that have wasted taxpayer dollars on workshops such as “Identifying and Disrupting Your Whiteness.” It has funded over $600 million in teacher training programs that ascribe racial biases to infants and encourage teachers to enable child prostitution.
This is the level of rot that federal centralization has led to and enabled. This is what President Trump is tearing down.
Union bosses like Randi Weingarten, who benefit from such grants, regularly weaponize empathy by pretending that the Department of Education has only ever acted in the best interest of students and teachers – “It has education in its name!” their logic goes. And yet, the department’s record of handing out ideologically motivated grants and thereby pushing ideology on American schoolchildren shows that it is well outside the realm of “just education,” and has entered the realm of partisan politics.
Its presence is not only failing to make American education any better, but is actively making American education worse. Decentralizing the federal role in education by shifting the department’s necessary duties to other agencies and impeding any federal entity from using our tax dollars toward destructive ideological purposes will create a better, more accountable educational system that is more in line with what the Founders intended it to be.
In other words, genuine education advocates who worry about the dismantling of the Department of Education should relax. The Trump administration is not abolishing the Department of Education to kill American education. It is abolishing the Department of Education to save American education.
This article was originally published at www.thecentersquare.com
Author
