It’s only taken 45 years for my father’s dream to come true – at least in part.
But thanks to Donald Trump, a Republican Congress and a conservative Supreme Court, the Department of Education is finally being dismantled.
My father called for the DOE to be abolished when he ran for president in 1980. It didn’t happen, of course, and he couldn’t make it happen because Democrats ran Congress.
Creating a Cabinet-level DOE in 1979 was Jimmy Carter’s gift – some might call it a bribe — to the hurtful teacher unions, which have since paid back Democrats with millions of votes and billions in campaign donations.
The DOE was an unnecessary, wasteful and harmful federal intrusion into an area that was rightly and sensibly controlled by states and localities. Liberals loved it because it gave them billions to spend on their dirty work.
But almost every conservative Republican presidential candidate including Trump promised to abolish the DOE – but never did or could. By 2024 the DOE employed 4,133 bureaucrats. It spent an annual budget of $268 billion. Now it’s down to 2,183 people and falling.
DOE doesn’t hire teachers and it doesn’t concoct or impose curriculums on school districts.
Most of the billions it spent last year – $160 billion, in fact – went for college loans, direct student aid and things like Pell grants for college students.
Special education for younger school kids cost $16 billion and COVID-19 recovery grants still ate up $55 billion, for God knows what.
Most of DOE’s budget is spent in the form of sending checks to states and localities – which another federal bureaucracy like the Small Business Administration can easily do. Other federal agencies can do the rest of the paperwork DOE’s been doing.
Federal bureaucracies are harder to kill than Dracula. And any attempt to cut them back even 10%, as we’ve seen, is greeted by Democrats and the liberal media like it’s a national tragedy.
In the case of the DOE, whatever it has been doing all these years to help the poorest students learn their ABCs and their times tables hasn’t worked.
We’ve all heard the sad statistics from the public schools in our big blue cities: for one example, three-quarters of the kids in Chicago don’t read at grade level and 83% don’t meet proficiency in math.
But here’s a bunch of even more depressing numbers I found.
According to the National Adult Literacy Survey, “70% of all incarcerated adults cannot read at a fourth-grade level, meaning they lack the reading skills to navigate everyday tasks.”
And according to the Literacy Project Foundation and Invisible Children, “between 60% and 75% of prison inmates are functionally illiterate. Up to 19% are considered completely illiterate (unable to read at all).”
In other words, our overflowing prisons are composed of the under-schooled alumni of our public education system.
Our criminal population is living proof that way too many of our kids “graduate” from high school without knowing anything but how to handle a Glock.
One reason so many students are unprepared to make an honest living and live happily ever after, says “Dirty Jobs” host Mike Rowe, is that for decades we have over-emphasized the importance of college prep courses and eliminated vocational arts from high schools.
If you’re old, you remember when high schools had shop classes that taught kids how to use tools and build and fix stuff. The classes worked.
Kids who were not suited to get a BA in Icelandic poetry were set off in the direction of community colleges, trade schools and apprentice programs and ended up having well-paying, life-long, blue-collar careers in construction and important trades like plumbing.
Public schools and the DOE have been failing America’s poorest kids for decades. Parents know it. It’s why private schools and homeschooling have grown in popularity.
Skipping public school is no longer a bad thing. It’s the smartest way to avoid your kids getting a diploma they can’t read.
Michael Reagan, the son of President Ronald Reagan, is an author, speaker and president of the Reagan Legacy Foundation. His column is distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.
