In the wake of Donald Trump's election victory, many education reformers are saying it's time to abolish the U.S. Department of Education. Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are the presumed leaders of the new Ministry of Government Efficiency. strongly suggest Completely eradicating the DOE is a real possibility.
This is an attractive goal. The DOE is wasting a lot of money and doing a great disservice to American students. However, it will be difficult to eliminate it completely. Education reformers need 60 votes in the Senate to abolish the Department of Education. Budget reconciliation could be used to circumvent that requirement, but it is doubtful that Congress would follow that tactic. What's more, the Trump coalition isn't just made up of small-government conservatives, it also includes voters who don't care about big government until they wake up.
The way to achieve rapid and substantive education reform is through thoughtful and thorough work to simplify and reduce the Department of Education.
Also, “abolishing the Department of Education” may not mean as much as it seems. All offices and programs can be transferred to the Department of Health and Human Services without reform or change. Those who call themselves reformers will declare an empty victory, while supporters of radical educational establishments will happily dance the anger dance with the conviction that nothing has actually changed.
To achieve real reform, we reformers should instead perform radical surgery on the Department of Energy. We should eliminate spending on dozens of small programs that are useless or counterproductive, and preserve as simple as possible the big-ticket deals that have huge public support, including within the Trump administration. It is. It also reduces the size of the Civil Rights Office so that it no longer uses “Dear Colleagues” and case-solving to serve as the thugs who execute America's radical race and sex fanatics. Should. Once this is done, we will be able to establish real accountability for the Department of Education's core functions and decide whether further reforms are needed.
DOE primarily spends money on Title I funds for disadvantaged K-12 students ($18 billion annually). Special Education Fund for physically and mentally disabled students ($14 billion annually). Pell Grants for disadvantaged post-secondary students ($29 billion annually); and direct student loans to post-secondary students ($106 billion annually). The Department of Education should clearly say it will maintain these four core functions, but it will also avoid waste, fraud, bureaucratic bloat, and fraudsters who cry poverty and handicap to steal some of the federal funds. He has a keen eye for elimination.
These four core functions also need to be radically simplified.
- The four formula grants for Title I funds will be combined into one formula grant as closely as possible to either an unconditional block grant to states or a portable grant to each household. Should.
- The Department of Rehabilitation Services ($4.4 billion annually, nearly one-third of the special education budget) should be transferred to HHS. Congress should amend the Americans with Educational Disabilities Act to eliminate unfunded and unspecified special education spending obligations on states and school districts.
- All remaining college grant programs should be integrated into Pell Grants. Special programs such as college aid for veterans should be transferred to the Department of Veterans Affairs.
- All college loan programs should be integrated into the Federal Direct Student Loan Program. Ironclad Congressional legislation should be passed to make it impossible for future administrations to repeat the Biden administration's illegal “loan forgiveness.”
Additionally, OCR's staff size should be reduced from 633 to no more than 175, with its staff to population ratio at most proportional to that of the Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division. In that case, the OCR would be incorporated into the judiciary, and its executive powers would be limited to litigation, without the power to issue “Dear Colleagues” or settle cases.
For now, the Department of Education should maintain several programs, including programs to support charter schools, gifted education, English language acquisition, and historically black colleges and universities (for which the U.S. Both have made historic commitments that can be protected by institutional support) against discrimination among citizens), and national evaluations. These are good goals, and while they are not core capabilities, the DOE could be reformed to properly support them.
Discretionary subsidy programs, racist programs seeking “equity,” miniature welfare states masquerading as educational programs, political propaganda masquerading as “social and emotional learning” and “mental health,” and more. All of them should be abolished at once. Some of these programs should be moved to better locations, such as the Department of State (International Education, Funding for Pacific Island Countries). Ministry of Home Affairs (Indian Education). Department of Defense (Foreign Language Program). Department of Justice (Prison Education). Ministry of Labor (Vocational Education). or the National Endowment for the Arts (arts education). Any office or program that discriminates against American citizens, such as the Division of Hispanic Serving Institutions, should be abolished immediately.
OCR must also formally revoke any legal reinterpretations that:
- Justify quotas.
- Use disparate influence theory.
- Redefining sex to include gender, gender identity, or gender expression.
- Redefining sex discrimination to include sexual harassment and sexual violence.
- It abridges due process and First Amendment rights within educational institutions.
OCR also rescinds all policies, requirements, documents, case resolutions, and investigations based on these legal reinterpretations, and the Department of Education will uphold due process and the First Amendment for all educational institutions that receive federal funds. It should be stated as a clear principle that this is mandatory. – Duration. Oh, and any institution that condones or encourages hateful threats against Jews by campus mobs will be immediately defunded.
Once the Department of Education is reduced to four major functions and stripped of most of its discretionary grant programs, policymakers and the public may begin to demand real accountability for its remaining functions. They can achieve it by:
- Create efficiency measures in all offices to assess how well the ED bureaucracy performs.
- Create a return on investment for all DOE programs and estimate how much educational improvement taxpayers receive.
- and eliminate spurious accountability measures such as: 1) Funds spent without measuring their value. 2) Publish student achievement scores without examining the relationship to federal funds spent. 3) The number of teachers who received training without any understanding of whether it would help improve student performance. or 4) “qualitative” measures of success. It's an academic way of saying, “My gut feeling is that this was a pretty good use of money.”
Once all these reforms are implemented, education reformers will be in a good position to make a simple and clear case to the public that the remaining core functions of the Department of Education should be relocated, reformed, or abolished. That's going to happen. Or it may decide that a slimmed-down DOE actually serves the public interest. In either case, a practical way to achieve rapid and substantive education reform is through thoughtful and thorough work to simplify and reduce DOE. Do that first and then consider whether you need to remove it.
Editor's note: A version of this article was originally published at: american mind.
