By Nina2024/peopleimages.com @ Adobe Stock
Blame the DOE
Despite all the money dumped into the Department of Education, education is still on the decline. A long-overdue movement is underway to try to rectify DOE. As Kimberley Strassel mocks in the WSJ, “never has a department been so deceptively named.”
To listen to this week’s wailing, the federal Education Department is the beating heart of our nation’s schools, its demise a straight line to an illiterate nation.
The reality: Our federal education bureaucracy takes no part in the daily, hard-fought grind of teaching. It doesn’t step in classrooms, interview teachers, or debate pedagogy. It doesn’t meet with parents, coach sports or set bus schedules.
The department’s only job is to act as the keeper of the education treats. Every year these federal masters get some $80 billion to dispense on “good” behavior. They hive off a dollop for their own salaries, while the rest they dispense as if rewarding a pet. Good state puppies—those that roll, fetch and fill out paperwork in triplicate—get grants called IDEA funds. Bad puppies lose their school lunch money.
With today’s inane system, America’s children are held hostage to a “counterproductive maze of federal rules that dictate dollars yet waste resources and stymie local innovation.”
- Schools stage bingo nights when staff coach parents to minimize their salaries on forms so that a school qualifies for Title I (low-income) funding.
- Parents fight to get their kids labeled “special needs” to score an individualized education plan and extra federal resources. (IDEA stands for Individuals With Disabilities in Education Act.)
- In recent years, the threat of losing federal funds also sent districts scurrying to comply with Joe Biden’s transgender directives.
Who doesn’t need more money? Ms. Strassel reveals the formula that has sent $1 trillion to schools since 1979, “producing a perfect inverse correlation of plummeting education scores.” Just concoct a need for teacher development:
- (Title II), tot up non-English speakers
- (Title III), bulk up on shop classes
- (Perkins V grants), show a plan for “well-rounded education” and “safe and healthy students”
- (Title IV, Part A). Money will flow, though only after studies, evaluations, assessments, surveys, training, certifications, complete exhaustion and total submission to a one-size-fits-all federal formula for success.
Randi Weingarten, Public Enemy #1
What these needs have in common is bestowing the money onto adults rather than onto the children.
The money, ostensibly for “the children,” all goes to the adults—to hire more counselors and special-ed teachers for those IEPs, more administrators to run programs, legions of staff to input data. And guess what? Most of those adults belong to a union local of the National Education Association or the American Federation of Teachers. Because the keeper of the treats was, is, and always will be Jimmy Carter’s thank you for teachers’s union endorsements. Randi Weingarten controls the clicker.
As a KS reader notes, taxpayer money cycles back to the Democrat Party through public and teachers’ unions and NGOs. This corrupt system is by design and illustrates why Dems are upset about DOGE efforts.
Trump’s “Civil Rights Issue of Our Time”
Ms. Strassel thinks it is a head-scratcher – a bizarre, missed opportunity – that Trump did not elevate education reform on both practical and political grounds. After all, the “parents movement played a big role in recent Republican electoral successes.”
Republicans are already on offense—and winning. School choice is exploding across the states, those laboratories of democracy innovating on scholarships, vouchers, savings accounts, charters.
A new generation of conservative leaders are embracing next steps—accountability in standards, merit pay for teachers, reviving vocational education. This is proving a potent issue for parents, newly re-engaged after the Covid pandemic, keen on voting for reformers.
Keep It Local
Dismal report cards prove the fledging wins. And don’t make voters laugh/cry by hiding behind the claim: it’s a “state issue.” As KS notes, states have not “controlled their education destinies for decades—thanks to the feds.”
Hammering the message that the Education Department is the source of decline—a giant bar to states truly innovating and competing for education gains—is a huge first step. And while congressional action is needed to abolish the department, lawmakers need presidential leadership to turn it into a movement-wide objective.
The President has a unique opportunity to work with reform-minded governors “to devolve as much education power as possible back to where it belongs—local, local, local.”
It’s past time to acknowledge that Washington’s stomp into education has been a massive failure—a union perk at the sacrifice of our kids—and needs to end.
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