The great Ronald Reagan aimed to kill the unconstitutional and ineffective Department of Education decades ago but unfortunately did not have enough support within his party and government to do so. He would be delighted to know that Donald Trump has accomplished what he hoped to do.
After years of plummeting test scores, widespread functional illiteracy, and other similar educational crises, it is obvious that the Department of Education is a massive failure. Not only was it unconstitutional to begin with, but it also hasn’t even succeeded in its alleged object. It has simply gotten the federal government bureaucrats and woke ideology endlessly and uselessly involved in education.
In 1981, Ronald Reagan delivered an address to the nation on the Program for Economic Recovery, following the nightmare presidency of Jimmy Carter, who created the Department of Education unconstitutionally with his executive order.
“As a third step, we propose to dismantle two Cabinet Departments, Energy and Education,” Reagan declared. “Both Secretaries are wholly in accord with this. Some of the activities in both of these departments will, of course, be continued either independently or in other areas of government.”
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Reagan wisely observed, “There's only one way to shrink the size and cost of big government, and that is by eliminating agencies that are not needed and are getting in the way of a solution… education is the principal responsibility of local school systems, teachers, parents, citizen boards, and state governments. By eliminating the Department of Education less than two years after it was created, we cannot only reduce the budget but ensure that local needs and preferences, rather than the wishes of Washington, determine the education of our children.”
The Founding Fathers would have agreed with him. Unfortunately, Reagan did not succeed in eliminating either the Energy or Education Departments at that time. But fast-forward to 2025, when Republicans control both Congress and the executive, and Trump has just made a major move to eliminate the Department of Education in his executive order. It’s a long time coming.
American students’ reading scores on the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress fell once again, continuing a downward drop that was only exacerbated by the idiotic COVID-19 lockdowns. Education Week is a leftist rag, but even it had to admit the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study test results in December: "In math, American 4th graders’ scores fell 18 points after 2019, while 8th graders’ scores fell by 27 points—the biggest drop since the United States began participating in the test in 1995."
It turns out DEI, CRT, and LGBTQ ideology aren’t doing anything but making students stupider. And while teachers, administrators, and unions keep demanding ever more taxpayer money, their competence and the quality of their students’ education keeps going down. Giving more money to ignorant political activists to propagandize your children doesn’t solve anything. Nor does incorporating racist nonsense and sexually explicit content into curriculum do anything but destroy children’s innocence.
Even the good teachers find themselves struggling against a tide of endless wokeness and unnecessary, entirely subjective “diagnoses” for every single child. Little Timmy isn’t hyper because he has “ADHD,” which is a modern invention of bad psychology; he’s hyper because he’s a little boy. A century ago, that was entirely normal. And putting him on drugs and giving him special homework doesn’t prepare him for life. It prepares him to be a ward of the bloated federal government for his entire life. Fortunately, he’ll know whom to blame: straight, white, colonizing males.
Thank goodness the Department of Education is being killed. It has wreaked incalculable harm on America’s youth ever since the insidious Jimmy Carter created it.
