America Teeters On Precipice Of ‘Radical Education Reform’ After Trump Shuts Off Lights At ED

President Donald Trump fulfilled a key campaign promise when he signed an executive order to begin dismantling the Department of Education (ED), sending shockwaves throughout an entrenched bureaucracy that has been the face of American education for decades.

Though officially dissolving the ED can only be done through Congress, Democratic officials like California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, teachers unions and several education groups have wasted no time in protesting Trump’s actions. Despite the outrage, experts say a full shuttering of the department would bring much-needed changes to a bloated education system that spends over $10,000 per pupil with very little to show for it.

“America is on the precipice of radical education reform and change, where we are empowering parents, and we’re not empowering the bureaucrats anymore,” Norton Rainey, CEO of ACE Scholarships, an organization that gives financial support to children so that they can attend the school of their choice, told the 🏢Daily Caller News Foundation. “We’re putting money into the hands of our children, not into administrators, and that’s a good thing for America.”

Trump’s executive order is framed around “returning education to parents and communities,” and directs the Secretary of Education to “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education.”

The department excused half of its employees March 11 while Secretary of Education Linda McMahon vowed to end the “bureaucratic bloat” of her department to fulfill Trump’s mandate.

McMahon announced on March 3 that her department’s “final mission” is “to send education back to the states and empower all parents to choose an excellent education for their children.”

“American education can be the greatest in the world,” she continued. “It ought not to be corrupted by political ideologies, special interests, and unjust discrimination. Parents, teachers, and students alike deserve better.”

The main complaints surrounding the Department of Education, stemming from conservative and libertarian critics, is that the agency is unconstitutional, fails to deliver on the promises it makes and that is corrupted by left-wing ideology.

The taxpayer spends about $14,840 per pupil every year, according to figures from World Population Review, though educational achievement does not seem to be improving.

“Increases in education spending do not produce student achievement,” Johnathan Butcher, a senior research fellow for education policy at the Heritage Foundation, wrote in a statement provided to the DCNF. “How we use the spending matters far more — and since centralized policies will not meet the needs of a diverse study body nationwide, interest groups will claim that they need more money in order to make the programs work.”

Numerous reports regarding student test scores have revealed shocking declines in academic performance, one example being the Nation’s Report Card released in January. Its 2024 data showed plummeting reading scores for fourth and eighth grade students and static math scores for students in both grades. The report stated that this was “compounding a decline in the nation’s reading scores that started prior to the pandemic.”

Trump has championed the demise of the department for months, declaring that “we will ultimately eliminate the federal Department of Education” while on the campaign trail in Wisconsin in September.

“Closing the Department of Education would provide children and their families the opportunity to escape a system that is failing them,” Trump said during his speech accommodating his executive order signing on Thursday.

The Department of Education did not respond to the DCNF’s multiple requests for comment.

‘A Product Of Leftist 🏛️Politics’

In 1979, President Jimmy Carter signed the Department of Education Organization Act, with the office officially established in 1980. Carter stated that though the primary responsibility for education falls to the “states, localities, and private institutions,” the federal government “has for too long failed to play its own supporting role in education as effectively as it could.”

“The Department of Education is a product of leftist 🏛️Politics from the late 1970s,” Butcher continued. “President Jimmy Carter negotiated with teacher unions about its creation, and it has since become a way for special interest groups to identify and claim funding streams from federal taxpayers.”

Federal education projects and grants were already being organized and doled out before the ED, though the department was created to “improve the coordination” of these programs, as well as “supplement and complement” state efforts to improve education.

The office was contested by Republicans from the start, while in the Cato Institute’s policy recommendations for the 108th congress, the think tank cited several Democrats that weren’t fond of the idea, either. Democratic Rep. Benjamin Rosenthal went along with the plan out of “not wanting to embarrass the president,” according to the handbook.

The libertarian think tank also pointed to one House Democrat that spoke to the Wall Street Journal at the time. “The idea of an Education Department is really a bad one,” the anonymous House Democrat told the Journal’s Al Hunt in 1979. “But it’s NEA’s top priority. There are school teachers in every congressional district and most of us simply don’t need the aggravation of taking them on.”

During his first State of the Union address in 1982, President Ronald Reagan called on Congress to eliminate both the Energy Department and the Education Department.

“The budget plan I submit to you on February 8th will realize major savings by dismantling the Departments of Energy and Education and by eliminating ineffective subsidies for business,” he said.

The ‘Gazillion-Dollar-Question’

Leading libertarian and conservative thought leaders at the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Manhattan Institute, the American Enterprise Institute the Center for Education Reform remain convinced that dissolving the ED will not diminish the quality of American education.

Important programs would continue and could even flourish if given more flexibility if their grants were provided “in block grants to the states,” Butcher argued.

“Likewise, student loans should be moved to another agency, and the main adjustment will be to whom or where students make payments,” he continued.

Butcher’s long-term vision for education is that “local schools and state departments of education will not have to keep navigating burdensome federal education regulations or ‘dear colleague letters’ that micromanage local school practices. And this will be one of the largest benefits from closing the federal agency.”

“We do not have the option to send our kids to public school because of a progressive agenda. It’s not an option for a committed Christian family,” Pam Costes, administrator of Spirit Christian Academy, a private school with an alternative education model referred to as a NAUMS inc. university model school, told the DCNF.

The institution is “a school that puts the parents into their rightful place,” Costes said, though she is not against public school. Costes emphasized that the partnership between parents and the school are essential to the institution’s model.

During the COVID-19 shutdowns, the school looked to what other academic institutions were doing for guidance and that the school’s leadership was “really good about listening and letting people make their decisions about what they thought was for their family, and allow parents to make those decisions, rather than us,” Costes said.

“We don’t for sure know why some districts are really able to leverage their dollar to get greater growth for their students,” Dr. Marguerite Roza, research professor and director of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University, told the DCNF. “But it’s clear that some districts are really quite successful at leveraging their money and getting better outcomes than maybe some of their others.”

Roza agreed with Butcher’s assessment that it is not the amount of funding that seems to make a difference, but how the funding is used. Edunomics has dedicated years of research to measuring states’ return on investment. The professor pointed to several factors that might impact a state’s return on investment, including differing work forces, certifications, “appetite for academics,” poverty levels and pay structures.

Edunomics documents the correlation between state funding and student outcomes, with some data showing that increased spending doesn’t positively relate to increased academic achievement. However, some school districts in certain states within them do show a positive correlation.

The “gazillion-dollar-question” is why some states are more effective at converting their state or federal funding into academic success than others, and that it can’t be attributed to any one factor, Roza said.

The professor emphasized that it is not necessarily a department that leads to improved education, but good policies. She pointed to former President George W. Bush’s’ ‘No Child Left Behind’ policy, which she said was “widely suspected to be responsible” for “some steady improvement in student outcomes,” though other sources say that the policy was “a failed experiment.”

The policy triggered “more focus by states on getting the student outcomes,” Roza argued. No Child Left Behind expired in 2009 but was later officially changed in 2015 to the Every Student Succeeds Act.

A common critique of private schools is that they are not accessible to all students. Organizations like ACE Scholarships and the Commonwealth Foundation, a Pennsylvania-based think tank dedicated to expanding school choice and fighting government overreach, work to ensure that school choice options are available, even for low-income families.

“I think we as taxpayers need to ask ourselves what we are getting from the U.S. Department of Education,” Rachel Langan, a senior education policy analyst at the Commonwealth Foundation, told the DCNF. “What are we getting for all of those tax dollars and is there a better way for those dollars to be spent?”

Langan is a former public-school teacher and described herself as once “very pro-public education” to the DCNF. She pointed to the COVID-19shutdowns’ effects on education as having changed her perspective.

The policy analyst noted that the “COVID crisis open the eyes of American parents as to the value they were receiving or not from their public schools.” Langan pointed to the shutdowns as a catalyst for many parents to realize that education could be improved, that school choice options are a necessity and how confusion emerged among parents over funding.

“Where is our money going?” She asked.

The Commonwealth Foundation “would like to see a dollar amount attached to every child in Pennsylvania that would follow that student to the school of their choice, whether that’s a public, private, homeschool, career, technical school or charter school,” Langan continued.

She also referenced that in January, the think tank learned from a Right-to-Know request that there are about 50,000 students who applied for a tax credit scholarship in the state and did not receive one due to Pennsylvania’s state program caps. “There’s 50,000 kids whose families want something better for them who applied for scholarship but because of program caps, they didn’t receive it,” she said.

 ACE Scholarships also provides K-12 scholarships to lower-income children. The organization also collaborates with state legislatures to advocate for school choice policies.

“Our belief at ACE is that school choice works,” Rainey told the DCNF. He also noted that ACE financially supports children with partial tuition scholarships for up to $4,000 annually, and that a child’s quality education prepares kids for the “American dream.”

Rainey said that at ACE, they believe every child “should experience the American dream. And we think that it really does begin with education, but sadly, as we all know and we lament about this, our country is not providing the American Dream for too many kids. They’re being left behind. They’re not being educated.”

Rainey pointed to some “exciting” upcoming changes in education, including Texas’ proposed education savings account bill and Trump’s federal tax cut initiative.

“We believe that when you invest in kids, great things will happen, and that when you change education, that you’re changing everything in their lives,” he said.

(Featured Image Media Credit: PatrickRich/Creative Commons, Public Domain)

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