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Abolishing Dept. of Education Will Be ‘Tremendous for our States’: State Education Official
Some officials wait in trepidation to find out if President-elect Donald Trump will follow through with his campaign promise to abolish the Department of Educat
Some officials wait in trepidation to find out if President-elect Donald Trump will follow through with his campaign promise to abolish the Department of Education. Some wait with glee.
In an online video posted last July, then-candidate Trump promised that, if elected, “very early in the administration” he would begin “closing up the Department of Education in Washington, D.C., and sending all education and education work and needs back to the states. We want them to run the education of our children, because they’ll do a much better job of it. You can’t do worse.”
The promise echoes back to 1980, when Ronald Reagan promised to close the department, which President Jimmy Carter opened that May. Bob Dole made the same promise in 1996. But Trump’s allies believe the 47th president will be the man to follow through. “In his first term, President Trump moved the U.S. embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, as so many Republican candidates had promised before him. I am hopeful that closing the Department of Education will be President Trump’s second term version of that long-term promise keeping,” Meg Kilgannon, senior fellow for Education Studies at Family Research Council and a former Trump administration education official, told The Washington Stand. “Nearly every Republican candidate for president has campaigned on this. It’s time to make good on that promise.”
Officials at the state level are already planning ways they can improve the quality of education once the federal government no longer dictates the curriculum, standards, and conduct.
“When he eliminates the federal Department of Education, it is going to be tremendous for our states,” Oklahoma Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters told “Washington Watch with Tony Perkins” on Tuesday. “Literally every educational statistic has gotten worse since Jimmy Carter created the Department of Education.”
The most recent “Nation’s Report Card” — the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)’s long-term trends exam (LTT) — found that the average 13-year-old student’s math scores ranked the lowest in more than three decades. The number of high school seniors who did not read a single book for pleasure in the last year nearly quadrupled between 1976 and 2021-2022.
The United States is losing ground compared to other nations. “In 2022, there were 5 education systems with higher average reading literacy scores for 15-year-olds than the United States, 25 with higher mathematics literacy scores, and 9 with higher science literacy scores,” reported the National Center for Education Statistics, analyzing data from the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), coordinated by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). In the first year of PISA, 2000, only three nations had higher average reading literacy scores than the U.S., eight outperformed the U.S. in mathematics, and seven countries did better in science literacy.
The Department of Education “was formed to close the achievement gaps, and they have not budged one little bit,” former Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos told Newsmax on Tuesday. American taxpayers “spent over $1 trillion … trying to do it, and we’ve gotten nothing but worse results. It’s time to do something different.”
Education results declined as per-pupil government education spending rose from $11,221 in 1979 to $17,700 in 2023 in inflation-adjusted dollars. The Biden-Harris administration boasted of the “largest annual spike in public school spending in over 20 years,” when per pupil spending increased 8.9% between 2021 and 2022. President Joe Biden — a longtime labor union ally who boasts that his wife, Jill, belongs to a teacher’s union — requested $90 billion in discretionary spending in his most recent budget, an increase of $10.8 billion or 13.6%. Congress appropriated $79.1 billion in fiscal year 2024.
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