President-elect Donald Trump has promised sweeping change to education policy.
The 45th president and 47th president-elect said he intends to abolish the Department of Education (ED) in a recent video.
“One other thing I’ll be doing very early in the administration is closing up the Department of Education in Washington D.C. and sending all education … back to the states,” he said.
He added, “We want [the states] to run the education of our children –– because they will do a much better job of it. You can’t do worse.”
This is not the first time Trump has said something in this vein.
“I say it all the time, I’m dying to get back to do this. We will ultimately eliminate the federal Department of Education,” Trump said at a September rally in Wisconsin, as reported by ABC 15.
“We will drain the government education swamp and stop the abuse of your taxpayer dollars to indoctrinate America’s youth with all sorts of things that you don’t want to have our youth hearing,” Trump also reportedly said.
In 1979, then-President Jimmy Carter signed a law that created the Department of Education as a Cabinet-level agency. Before Carter’s action, multiple federal agencies administered various education programs as the federal government began to play a larger role in the formerly state-controlled dominion of education.
The legislation’s passage fulfilled a campaign pledge the former Georgia governor had made to the National Education Association, a large teacher’s union.
The next president, Ronald Reagan, tried to reverse Carter’s action. In his State of the Union speech, President Reagan called on Congress to end the Department of Education in 1982.
However, after three years of little support by the legislature, Reagan relented. “I have no intention of recommending the abolition of the department to the Congress at this time,” Reagan reportedly said in a letter to the Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee in 1985.
The Department of Education provides about 10% of K12 funding, handles alleged civil rights violations in education, and administers a multi-trillion dollar student loan program, The Washington Post reported.
Former Obama Secretary of Education Arne Duncan told Spectrum News that dismantling the department is not feasible.
“It just makes no sense,” he said. “It would be incredibly self-destructive to the country. We would never, sort of, outsource the military or the Marines, the Army or the Navy to 50 states to somehow do this themselves because it’s too important.”
Critics of ED often point to the fact that educational outcomes have not improved since its creation.
Tom Patterson, who previously penned an opinion piece in The Dallas Express advocating for the abolition of ED, wrote, “Yet our educational system, which in the long run may matter most, is below mediocre. We consistently score below average in math and literary achievement tests versus students from other developed countries.”
“… The reason for this is no mystery,” Patterson added. “American education policymaking is dominated by the federal Department of Education (DOE). The department was created by President Jimmy Carter in gratitude to the teachers’ unions for their support in the 1976 election. It has been the gift that keeps on giving as the Department has faithfully represented the unions’ interests ever since.”
This plan is one of several governmental downsizing projects Trump has spoken about, along with firing “rogue bureaucrats” and chopping heads in federal law enforcement agencies.