In the recent Republican primary presidential debate, several of the candidates discussed how they would address today’s compounded educational crises: abysmal test scores; widespread dissatisfaction; and indoctrination in gender ideology, which leads schools to withhold information about children from their own parents. Unsurprisingly, each candidate who proposed solutions to these growing problems touted school choice.
There was also widespread agreement about bringing educational policy back to the states, which echoes a longstanding call within the GOP to eliminate the federal Department of Education. Since the moment of its establishment by former President Carter in 1980, the agency has been on the Republican chopping block.
Of course, according to several of today’s GOP presidential hopefuls, workers in the Department of Education are far from the only federal employees who need to be sent packing. Former President Trump, for example, claims that he will crush the “deep state” by initiating mass firings of federal bureaucrats and civil servants. Vivek Ramaswamy goes even further, insisting that he will unilaterally fire three-quarters of the federal workforce.
These plans seem imprudent at best and insane at worst; federal bureaucracies perform countless necessary functions on which all Americans depend, regardless of party. And, in many cases, they do so fairly efficiently.
But when it comes to the Department of Education, which should never have been suffered to exist in the first place and has done nothing but wreak havoc on America’s children since its inception, the GOP has it right: Abolishment can’t come soon enough.
Why?
First, because the Department of Education adversely impacts American children and families by creating and advocating for a far-left agenda in public schools, which in turn renders education a nationally polarizing issue when it would be much more intelligently, effectively and moderately handled on a state and local level.
As a nexus for culturally salient policies and edicts that affect public education across the country, the Department of Education provokes outrage on both sides of the political spectrum and renders political and abstract issues that should be practical and tangible. Fighting over the idea of gender ideology in schools, for example, breeds extremism on both sides because ideologically motivated individuals, removed from any specific place or situation, are constantly reacting in a blanket way to ostensible grooming on the one side or to alleged bigotry on the other. Addressing such hot-button issues in the particular at the local level, rather than in the abstract at the national one, would almost certainly yield less outrage and more cooperation because the interests and opinions of actual stakeholders would take precedence over the overbroad influence of political polarization.
For example, the phenomenon of broadly left-leaning people taking umbrage when it comes to the sexually explicit books promoting gender ideology on offer in their children’s school libraries, or at learning that their children can “transition” without their knowledge, is indicative of a larger truth: When people’s ideological commitments run into realities that adversely affect them in real time, reality usually prevails. Allowing educational policy to be decided at the state and local levels, where nuances and specificities can be better addressed, would more often than not compel the triumph of reason over ideology.
The second reason to abolish the Department of Education as soon as possible is that its assumption of authority over social mores, discipline and so-called DEI measures on college campuses is inextricable from the illiberalism, fragility and infantilization that now define the student culture at most American universities.
The 2011 “Dear Colleague” letter distributed to American colleges by the Obama administration’s Department of Education expanded Title IX, the 1972 regulations stating that no one may be barred from participation in any educational or extracurricular activity on the basis of sex, to include sexual violence. This new understanding of Title IX is profoundly detrimental to the prospects of both young women and young men on college campuses.
By rendering all campus sexual assault ostensible violations of Title IX, the Department of Education under President Obama assumed new authority for campus bureaucrats to try and adjudicate cases of sexual misconduct among students. The resultant kangaroo courts on college campuses leave potential sexual predators in the general population by handling matters without criminal charges while simultaneously ruining the college and career prospects of many demonstrably innocent (and disproportionately minority) male students. Although this disgraceful state of affairs was remedied in part by Betsy DeVos, the secretary of Education under President Trump, the fact that campus policies on what are really criminal matters are dependent upon the party of the person in the White House is a problem in and of itself.
Moreover and more broadly, the assumption among college students that college administrators should be involved in all aspects of their lives, unto crimes that may have been committed against them (which should be reported to law enforcement) or words that may have offended them (which are typically beneath notice), renders the modern campus a fundamentally infantilizing place. Allowing the jurisdiction of the Department of Education to include higher education, and thereby rendering college administratively just like kindergarten, has left college intellectually and interpersonally more like kindergarten as well.
And since the Department of Education is doing actual kindergartners no favors either, it’s long past time to give state and local jurisdictions a chance to do better.
Elizabeth Grace Matthew is a visiting fellow at Independent Women’s Forum and a Young Voices Contributor. Her work has appeared in USA Today, Deseret News, Law and Liberty, and America Magazine.