Addition By Subtraction – It's Time to Eliminate the Department of Education – Top 3 Takeaways – November 15th, 2024
- Getting rid of the Department of Education is a great idea. It’s been a hot topic throughout the week among many. On occasion over the years, I’ve shared the brief advice I was given early in my career by a top radio executive. When asking him what I could do to improve, his response to me was to “stop doing the bad stuff”. It’s a short, simple and brilliant truism which can be applied to just about anything. The best and most efficient way to improve in any aspect of life is to identify “the bad stuff” and to stop doing it. Getting rid of the bad instantly makes whatever you’re working on better! Question for you. What percentage of Americans are “completely” satisfied with the state of K-12 education in this country? According to Gallup the answer is 9%. 9%! And only a total of 43% find the current state of K-12 education to be somewhat satisfactory. That means 91% of Americans think we can do better! And they’re right, because our country has done considerably better – prior to the creation of the Department of Ed. With only 27% of Americans currently holding the view that the country is headed in the right direction, hence Donald Trump’s historic election win, something most Americans can agree on is that there’s no shortage of “bad stuff” that comes out of Washington D.C. (and at our literal expense). But in the grand scheme of bad stuff that metastasizes in our nation's capital, arguably nothing’s worse than the U.S. Department of Education. Whoever thought that getting considerably worse results for considerably more money was ever a good idea? Unless you are supportive of that concept you too should want to “stop doing the bad stuff” when it comes to education in this country which would start with eliminating The U.S. Department of Education. In my extensive coverage of education and mental health issues over the past two and a half decades I’ve laid out the case. Entering 1980, the first full year of operations for The Department of Education, the average education outcome for Americans was 2nd in the world (with only Australians ahead of us). Religious holidays, references and prayers were acceptable. Over the next twenty years, entering the 2000’s, we experienced a 300% increase in diagnosed depression. At the same time the United States slid to 17 from 2nd in grade school education outcomes (over the next twenty years we’ve fallen to 27th). It directly coincided with the creation of the US Department of Education and the implementation of its various agendas. According to the Pew Research Center only 6% of Americans didn’t identify with any religion or faith in 1980. More recently that figure has nearly tripled. But even a three-fold increase in atheism doesn’t tell the whole story. Over 26% of those under the age of 35 don’t believe in God. The proliferation of faithlessness connects directly to the rise in mental health issues in society which connects directly to the timetable of the onset school shootings – starting with Columbine in 1999. That was the first generation raised in the current, faithless public-school system under The Department of Education. Much worse education results. A proliferation of mental health issues and subsequently more violence.
- It’s a damning record for the US Department of Education as students have become far less globally competitive and have experienced a rapid rise in mental health issues manifesting in worse outcomes including schools that aren’t as safe. Other than that, the US Department of Ed has been great. And bonus, as taxpayers we pay $80 billion annually to fund that kind of failure. Now the last time I addressed this topic was over a year ago when Vivek Ramaswamy, now a member of President-elect Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency team, addressed it in a speech in Washington D.C. As Ramaswamy said at the time... We will shut down the U.S. Department of Education based on *existing* legal authority. I’ll take the $80BN spent by a useless & toxic agency & put that $$ in the pockets of parents to send their kids to better schools. It’s quite sensible, actually. Ramaswamy’s plan was, and is, to end the Department of Education and to put the greater than $80 billion budget into a national school voucher program. President-elect Trump has likewise previously pledged to end the Department of Education – a hot topic related to many media meltdowns over the past week. Quoting Trump on the trail: We will move everything back to the states, where it belongs. They can individualize education and do it with the love for their children. It would seem that Trump and Ramaswamy are on the same page. Now Ramaswamy, in talking to Sean Hannity about his new upcoming role with DOGE, said this: We want to go in and slash and burn that bureaucracy to help Americans, stimulate the economy and to restore self-governance again. While, for a limited government minded constitutionalist that’s an exciting prospect generally, it’s something that hopefully will be specifically applied to the Department of Education. Because again, the formula to get better isn’t hard given the current state of the federal bureaucracy.
- We just need to stop doing the bad stuff to get better. It’s not complicated. The US was a world leader in education before the creation of the US Department of Education in 1980. We’ve gone nowhere but backwards since. So cut it out and stop doing “the bad stuff”. And from a point of practicality, not only could taxpayers save money while getting a better educational result in return, but the influence of the teacher’s unions and other political organizations that infest all D.C. bureaucracies and that taint educational agendas and curriculum in the classrooms would go away as well. There wasn’t a need for a US Department of Education for the first 204 years of our country’s history. There isn‘t one now either. Every state has its own Department of Education, and every state is comprised of local school districts. Letting them do their jobs free from Washington politics and interference is the best possible plan for education. This is the time (technically January) to make it happen. Ramaswamy teaming with Musk to right size the federal government with the support of an incoming president with a broad mandate, has presented a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. There are few things we could do to improve this country more than to eliminate the Department of Education which has ailed it over the past 44 years.