The Department of Education—To Be, or Not to Be, That Is the Question

President Donald Trump has made it abundantly clear he wants to eliminate the U.S. Department of Education (ED), and some news reports suggest an executive order to achieve that is imminent. Since the ED was created by Congress, it would take formal Congressional action to eliminate it, and the administration lacks the votes. Therefore, whether the administration can completely end the bureaucratic monstrosity on Maryland Avenue is debatable, but likely Trusk (Trump + Musk) can lower its clout to that of, say, the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

Despite statements from the National Education Association (NEA) and other groups, the end of the ED would not be a mortal blow to education in America. Indeed, it might be a necessary precondition to ending the decline in learning at all levels, from pre-school to advanced adult professional education. Our main interest here is higher education, but the universities inherit students who are products of our primary and secondary schools. Objective measures of learning look very bad, with Americans generally falling below several Asian and European nations in learning in core areas such as mathematics. In the more than 45 years since the ED began, spending per pupil at the K-12 levels has soared as learning has, at best, remained constant, and in important nation-strengthening subjects like American history and civics has shown some decline. Colleges are getting students that on average have mediocre training necessary to the development of erudite, wis e, and honest leaders.

I have known three Education Secretaries well—one even put me on a federal commission on higher education—and I am sure that two of them, and suspect the third, support efforts to abolish the ED. And for good reason, as it applies to colleges. Compare the 15 years before the ED’s creation with the years since. From 1965 to 1980, collegiate enrollments more than doubled. Tuition increases were less than the rise in personal income. The proportion of Nobel laureates with American university connections was rising. Arguably, the 1960s and even 1970s were the Golden Age of American higher education. The post 1980 era has seen soaring tuition fees, new challenges to America’s planetary superiority in academic research, and signs of absolute knowledge decline among our college students, along with other nasty things, such as a decline in intellectual diversity and robust collegiate debate of the issues of the day.

In 1979, when the ED was created, Democrats dominated Congress, for example, having 275 seats in the House of Representatives, a plurality of well over 100. Jimmy Carter was president. In the relevant House committee the bill advanced on a 20 to 19 vote, with seven Democrats voting against it. Thanks to a few absentee members, the bill cleared the House with fewer than the usual necessary 218 vote majority. Easily the most respected intellectual in the Democratic Party congressional leadership, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, did not like the bill. The New York Times (!!) argued that “school and college authorities have a hard enough job without a full-time cabinet agency delving deeper into their business.”

Why then was the bill barely approved? The nation’s most powerful teachers’ union, the NEA, want ed it and had supported Jimmy Carter’s successful 1976 election campaign with the tacit if not explicit promise that they would get their wish if Carter won. It was a brazen political payoff to a special interest group.

Aside from profound policy issues, the ED is known for its extraordinary level of administrative ineptitude and incompetence. Take the FAFSA form, completion of which is necessary for students seeking federal college assistance. In 2007, I attended a meeting with the Education Secretary and a few others devoted to simplifying the 130 or so question form. Those attending mostly thought a questionnaire ranging from 0 to 30 questions was quite feasible. Fast forward a dozen years. The form was still around 130 questions. A furious Congress passed legislation mandating a shorter form in three years or so, which, of course, the ED failed to meet, causing an admissions fiasco a couple of years ago.

I once advocated promoting our educational system in two ways. First, have the Air Force use strategic bombing techniques to wipe out the headquarters of the ED. Second, turn over the empty land to the nearby Smithsonian Institution to expand the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, providing both enjoyment and learning to the American public.