It is past time to admit that the Education Department has produced a terrible return on America’s investment. Since its creation in 1980, test scores have dropped, with math and reading scores falling to their lowest levels in decades under former President Joe Biden. Civics knowledge is abysmal, as evidenced by middle school U.S. history scores recently hitting all-time lows.
Even with such a poor track record, taxpayers are saddled with spending nearly $80 billion annually on the department as a whole. Not to mention, Congress sent an additional $190 billion in so-called emergency COVID-19 funds to our elementary and secondary schools.
The public school lockdowns during COVID-19 were a disaster for children. Millions of them went missing from the system. Millions more had their education set back in ways we won’t be able to fully understand or calculate for years. The only silver lining from that disastrous experiment is that parents took a hard look at what their children were being taught. From explicit books in the student library and radical leftist propaganda in textbooks, a lot of parents didn’t like what they saw.
It became crystal clear that Washington bureaucrats have failed our families and have put their radical ideology over the actual educational needs of our children. Since then, we’ve seen a revolution of parents standing up and speaking out to retake their schools. That needs to continue.
The biggest obstacle is the army of entrenched swamp bureaucrats who control where the federal money flows. While a relatively small percentage of education dollars come from Washington, an overwhelming number of strings are attached to every penny. As the old saying goes, “He who pays the piper picks the tune,” and we have seen exactly what kind of music Washington wants to play. It’s time to cut the strings and put parents back in control.
Thanks to the work of independent citizen journalists such as Libs of TikTok’s Chaya Raichik and organizations such as Parents Defending Education, people have been treated to a full view of the insanity that radical progressive activists in the public school system have been forcing on our children.
It now seems clear that gender theory, racial ideologies, and anti-American interpretations of history have become more important than reading, writing, and math to many teachers and administrators. Parents who dared oppose such policies, such as Scott Smith in Virginia and Shannon Adcock in Illinois, were considered racists, white supremacists, and even domestic terrorists by their own local school boards and governments.
We must return to a time when the government recognizes that parents, on the whole, know their children better than even the most skilled and well-meaning teachers ever could. That’s not a criticism — it’s just a natural reality. And that reality informs the duty that parents have in raising their children and the rights they have in determining how those children will be educated. This used to be common sense. Unfortunately, it just isn’t that common anymore.
The top-down approach to education policy fails the common-sense test. With nearly 100,000 public schools serving almost 50 million students, no federal bureaucracy could or should attempt to oversee a system that large. In fact, when Congress established the Education Department, it was not meant to. It was intended to serve as a clearinghouse of ideas, helping schools learn from each other — not to control them.
Four decades later, the department has ballooned into a massive bureaucracy with around 4,000 federal employees dictating how schools must operate. This approach is entirely inconsistent with the founders’ intent to create a constitutional system that reserved rights to the individual and their belief that governmental power should be exercised at the most local level practicable.
IT’S TIME TO WIND DOWN THE DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION
If you want to see America’s education system return to the fundamentals that will prepare students for the demands of the modern economy and the responsibilities of U.S. citizenship, we need to ensure local school board members are directly accountable to parents for results without Washington’s interference.
Re-empowering parents will be a good investment in our future and a necessary step to truly make America great again. President Donald Trump and Education Secretary Linda McMahon are absolutely right to dismantle the Education Department as we know it, and every parent, student, and teacher in this country should welcome it.
Mary Miller is a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Illinois.
Mark Harris is a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from North Carolina.