Among the encouraging elements of the second Trump administration are more serious efforts to pare back the size and role of government than we’ve seen in decades. Whether everything the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is doing is by-the-book and likely to come to fruition depends on the outcome of political tussling and court challenges, but at least there’s a shot at shrinking Leviathan. And while it will almost certainly take an act of Congress to succeed, plans to deep-six the Department of Education, a useless bureaucracy born as a political payoff, would be an important step in the right direction.
A Department Born as a Political Favor
“As a presidential candidate in 1976, [Jimmy] Carter promised the National Education Association that he would push for a separate education department, a goal the NEA had sought for a century,” Mark Walsh detailed for EducationWeek in December 2024 after the death of the 39th president. “In return, the nation’s largest teachers’ union made the first presidential endorsement in its then-117-year history.”
The new department was broken off the old Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, so its formation didn’t introduce a federal role in education. But it created a whole bureaucracy dedicated to what had traditionally been (and remains) primarily a state, local, and family issue. And while most education funding is still sourced far from D.C., the new department brought the not-so-subtle clout of federal bureaucrats to nudge what and how children are taught in directions they prefer—generally with the support of the teachers’ unions who had lobbied for the creation of the Department of Education.
“Eliminating the department, National Education Association President Becky Pringle said this week, was equivalent to ‘giving up on our future,'” the union huffed in a press release. “Americans did not vote for, and do not support,” Pringle added, “ending the federal government’s commitment to ensuring equal educational opportunities for every child.”
Actually, it sounds like a great idea. Getting government out of the business of telling children what and how to think is wise, and the level of government most distant from families and children is a good place to start—especially since, over the decades it has existed and the more than trillion dollars it has spent on its efforts, the federal Department of Education has been a failure.
A Legacy of Failure
With the release in January of the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress, the Department of Education admitted that the “results reveal a heartbreaking reality for American students and confirm our worst fears: not only did most students not recover from pandemic-related learning loss, but those students who were the most behind and needed the most support have fallen even further behind.”
Troublingly, as Reason‘s Emma Camp noted, “In this year’s test, almost 1 in 4 eighth graders were ‘below NAEP Basic’ in math, meaning that they didn’t even have ‘partial mastery’ of the skills necessary to succeed in eighth-grade math. Around 1 in 3 eighth graders were below ‘NAEP Basic’ in reading.”
While especially bad because of ill-conceived public health disruptions of education, disappointing results aren’t new. Whatever the Department of Education is doing isn’t working.
Defenders of the bureaucracy point out that “the Federal contribution to elementary and secondary education is about 8 percent” and “about 92 percent of the funds will come from non-Federal sources.” So, the department isn’t responsible, right? If we take that argument seriously, though, it appears the department does little, so why not cut it and save what amounts to 3-4 percent of federal outlays?
In fact, though, the feds punch above their weight because the funding provided to states and localities comes with conditions. As Brendan Pelsue wrote in 2017 for the Harvard Graduate School of Education’s Ed. magazine, “the federal government uses a complex system of funding mechanisms, policy directives, and the soft but considerable power of the presidential bully pulpit to shape what, how, and where students learn.” Under decades of accumulated laws and policies, “states could receive federal funding provided they met the requirements outlined in certain sections, or titles, of the act.”
Public school bureaucrats generally inclined to do the feds’ bidding anyway have been happy to go along with the pressure. Maybe some of the federal policies are good ideas, and often they’re bad. But they’ve reduced the variety of approaches among public schools which are nudged to comply with federal preferences. And, importantly, they’ve done nothing to improve the results of government-run schools that consistently fail to properly educate large numbers of American children.
Cost Savings and Education Gains Through Choice
It’s worth noting that without federal money, state and local officials would have to make up only 8 percent of education spending even as they regained more autonomy. Where could that money come from? Well, it’s worth looking at the boom in Education Savings Accounts (ESA) which assign funding to follow students to the learning methods of their choice, including private schools and homeschooling. Arizona’s program caps ESA funding at 90 percent of per-student public school spending. Florida’s program averages 72 percent of per-student funding for public schools.
While not all families will choose to participate, considerable savings might be found by expanding those programs. Or, perhaps, state and local governments could back out of the business of funding everybody‘s education and taxing accordingly and leave families to make their own choices as they do with food and shelter. Assistance might be offered to those of limited means, as was John Stuart Mill’s original recommendation (in a seeming glimpse of our modern world, he warned that letting the state operate schools was a recipe for a “battle-field for sects and parties…quarrelling about education.”)
Such a change could not only make up for federal funds but would likely lead to happier families. In December 2024, Morning Consult/EdChoice pollsters found that 81 percent of school parents reported being very or somewhat satisfied with charter schools, 94 percent reported satisfaction with homeschooling, 90 percent with religious private schools, 88 percent with secular private schools, 80 percent with in-district public schools, and 85 percent with out-of-district public schools.
People tend to like what they choose for themselves, and alternatives to the traditional public schools supported by the Department of Education make parents happier still.
So, getting rid of the federal Department of Education could decentralize education, improve outcomes, and increase parents’ satisfaction with how their kids are taught. And let’s not forget, it could help reduce the size of the federal Leviathan.
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