Late Thursday night, President Donald Trump finally delivered on a promise that has been part of the Republican Party Platform since 1981. He signed an executive order to dismantle the Democrat Party’s Department of Education, which was created by Jimmy Carter. Every other Republican president has paid lip service to the idea, but none of them ever had the will or courage to actually do it.
This is amazing! For anyone who thinks that this will be a bad thing “for the children” as the teacher unions and the Democrat Party are whining, here are a few things you should know.
In 2024, the Department of Education gave $2 billion in US taxpayer money to the American Federation of Teachers—the second-largest teacher union in America. That money didn’t go to any American teachers and it didn’t pay for any initiatives to improve education in the classroom for American students.
The money went into the campaign coffers of Democrat candidates for the US House, US Senate, state legislatures, gubernatorial races, and the Joe Biden/Kamala Harris failed run for president. The Department of Education takes your tax dollars and gives the money to political candidates.
And before anyone claims we’re being partisan about this, we would be just as opposed if our tax dollars were being stolen and given to Republican candidates for office as well.
The Department of Education has nothing to do with education. If it did, public schools in Illinois would be doing much better.
The state of Illinois now has 60 large public schools in which there are no students who are proficient at grade level in reading or math. There are 23 schools in Illinois, including 18 in Chicago, where zero students had proficiency in reading or math. Seven other schools had zero proficient students in reading alone, and 30 schools had no students with proficiency in math alone.
Not to just pick on Illinois. Most public schools in America are failing to teach children. The latest National Report Card showed that 60% of fourth-graders and almost 75% of eighth-graders are not proficient in math. 70% of fourth-graders and eighth-graders aren’t proficient in reading, and about 40% of fourth-graders don’t even have basic reading skills.
But they know their pronouns!
Those kids would be better off if they just let them have recess on the playground all day long, unsupervised. Imagine sending your child to school five days a week, year after year, and they never learn the alphabet or how to calculate 2+2. This has been the effect of our top-down federal control of education in America since the 1970s.
Another thing that people need to know about the Department of Education is that not one local teacher will be fired by this action (unfortunately). This department is a massive black hole that our tax dollars disappear into and then are never seen again.
As we’ve reported previously, for every $1 that the Department of Education doles out in per-pupil funding in local schools, it spends $5 on “administrative” costs, campaign contributions to Democrats, and salaries for the bureaucrats running it. Most local school funding comes from your state and local property taxes in America.
The average cost of education in public schools in the US is around $15,000 per pupil. It’s much higher than that in states like California, Illinois, and New York. Only $1,700 of that comes from federal spending. President Trump could double or triple the amount of federal per-pupil spending (and he probably will) and still save the taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars by dismantling the Department of Education.
Student loans, Pell grants, Title I resources, and any money used for children with special needs and disabilities will be unaffected by this. President Trump says those monies will be “redistributed to various other agencies and departments that will take very good care of them.”
In order to completely dismantle the Department of Education, it will take an Act of Congress. Republican Senators have already submitted a bill to do just that. In the meantime, President Trump hopes to whittle the department down to one employee who will dole out federal funding to local schools, so long as they’re teaching the three R’s—reading, riting, and rithmetic.