The Trump administration is reportedly drafting an executive order to eliminate the Education Department (ED), something the president has long championed. But unless he has a magic ace up his sleeve, he will need Congress’ approval to make it stick. Still, the action raises many questions, especially since new data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) show scores nationwide in all tested grades and subjects remain below pre-pandemic levels. Reading assessments for fourth- and eighth-graders declined again. A third of students in eighth grade do not read at a basic level. Would abolishing the ED benefit students’ learning? Perhaps, but there’s more to this issue than just one agency.
The Fall of Education
Maybe Uncle Sam has been the problem all along, but terminating the department could be a step in the right direction. “Federal programs encourage a compliance mindset that is anathema to excellence, experimentation, and improving student outcomes,” said Michael J. Petrilli, president of the Thomas Fordham Institute, in a recent article on the organization’s website. Moreover, the relentless push to promote educational equity through “well-meaning but naïve policies” forces schools “to make compromises that aren’t always good for kids.” The nation’s schools are rife with “bad ideas,” said Petrilli, “like recent efforts to ‘reform grading’ by never giving kids a zero, to ‘reform discipline’ by, well, not disciplining students, to teach reading by not explicitly teaching reading, to teach American history as a story of the oppressors versus the oppressed, and on and on ad nauseam.”
Another issue, which coincidentally seemed to develop alongside the rise of smartphones and social media, is that “over the past decade or two, those who lead and train educators got fixated on quasi-mystical fever dreams,” said Rick Hess, director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, in the journal Education Week. “The measure of a school leader gradually became a willingness to parrot the tenets of social justice.” Teachers were urged to “deconstruct privilege” and to be “on the lookout for microaggressions.” Instead of science and math, many have devoted their time to dogmatic beliefs about gender identity while “interrogating privilege,” all of which “undermine academic pursuits.”
“[M]odern teachers want activists, not educated students,” said journalist Mary Rooke in the Daily Caller. “Their focus is not to mold the next brilliant mind” but to create conformists well-versed in social justice. Some of this malaise is promoted by teachers’ unions, which have a strong presence in the majority of states. Former members are often on school boards, echoing doctrines and policies favored by the unions. Organizations such as the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the National Education Association (NEA), the largest union in the country, are also big donors to the Democratic Party. Presidents of both organizations have proudly called themselves social justice warriors.
Many people probably remember Randi Weingarten, head of the AFT, from the lockdown era. She would often appear on left-wing news outlets to stress the importance of keeping schools closed. Her efforts are partly responsible for why the closures lasted so long in some states.
The pandemic set kids back, but it might be time to stop using that period as a scapegoat for why kids still struggle to learn. They were already behind in 2019. Not to mention, as Liberty Nation News has reported, “Even kids who had yet to enter the school system when the pandemic disrupted daily lives are now behind academically and delayed developmentally.” It’s not just what is happening inside schools but also outside: The mental health crisis among adolescents is likely exacerbating their difficulty in retaining and comprehending information.
President Trump is already working on some of these issues, such as uprooting DEI practices in K-12, and he seems set on ending the rampant indoctrination of students with gender ideology and critical race theory. Whether he will completely jettison the Education Department though, is hard to tell. Even if he did, without terminating some progressive and federal policies and adding better teachers, eliminating it would likely be nothing more than a symbolic gesture.
