Abolishing Education Department as First Step in Fixing American Schools

Auguste Meyrat writes for the Federalist about new hope for fixing federal education policy.

Last week, Donald Trump nominated Linda McMahon, co-founder of the World Wrestling Entertainment company, the head of the Small Business Administration during Trump’s first term, and two-time nominee for the U.S. Senate, as his secretary of education. 

While Democrat critics will deride McMahon’s lack of education experience, many conservatives will see this as her greatest asset. Unlike current Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona, an equity-obsessed educrat from Connecticut, McMahon will approach her duty with the necessary pragmatism and detachment that true reform requires. Like any successful businesswoman, she will find solutions, not excuses, for the rising costs and declining performance that have plagued American K-12 government schools for decades.

As Trump has said on numerous occasions, the ultimate hope is that McMahon will be the last secretary of education and work to eliminate the Department of Education altogether. He and many others believe this will help end the leftist indoctrination happening in schools, restore parental rights, weaken teachers unions, and save the federal government a few hundred billion dollars each year. 

While all this sounds very nice, speaking as a high school English teacher who has worked in this system for nearly two decades, this rationale fundamentally misunderstands what the DOE does and doesn’t do.

First and foremost, the DOE mainly cuts checks for schools that serve poorer students, certain special education programs, and bogus education studies that no one reads. It doesn’t officially create curricula or mandate any pedagogical or disciplinary approaches, nor does it have much to do with national standardized tests, which are handled by a third party. For this reason, it’s better to see the DOE as more of a welfare program than an educational one.

That said, the DOE has overstepped its authority in the past decade by using federal funds to force states to use Common Core curriculum. At the same time, Barack Obama used the department to send out “guidelines” for school discipline that let countless delinquents off the hook in the name of equity.

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