Former President Donald Trump, should he win re-election, plans to dismantle the Department of Education. Isn’t that a radical plan? Well, actually, no, it isn’t. The idea that the federal government should control education would have been considered strange for the majority of the nation’s history. It wasn’t until 1979 that Jimmy Carter created the modern DOE, and Republicans have been trying to abolish it ever since. Can Donald Trump succeed where so many others have failed? And what, in its very expensive 44 years of existence, has the Department of Education accomplished?
Department of Education in the Crosshairs
Trump brought up eliminating the Department of Education in his interview with Elon Musk on X: “What I’m going to do, one of the first acts – and this is where I need an Elon Musk; I need somebody that has a lot of strength and courage and smarts – I want to close up the Department of Education, move education back to the states.”
Democrats have since seized on that proposal to call the former president a far-right extremist. But the idea isn’t that alien to mainstream Republicans. Jimmy Carter signed the act in October of 1979, and the DOE began its work in May of 1980, right in the middle of a presidential election year. Ronald Reagan, the Republican challenger seeking to oust Carter, wasted no time attacking the new department. “At 11:01 a.m. Eastern Standard Time on Sunday, President Jimmy Carter’s new bureaucratic boondoggle was born: the Department of Education,” he said. “Welfare and education are two functions that should primarily be carried out at the state and local levels.”
As president, Reagan tried to end the department but failed. When Bob Dole ran for president in 1996, the GOP platform said: “The federal government has no constitutional authority to be involved in school curricula or to control jobs in the marketplace. This is why we will abolish the Department of Education.” Of course, Bill Clinton’s win put a stop to that. It became a platform issue again in 2012 and resurfaced during the 2016 primaries.
In his first term, Trump eventually gave up on abolition and moved to consolidation. His administration released a 132-page framework for merging the Departments of Education and Labor.
But what was created by an act of Congress must be destroyed by an act of Congress – and if Trump wins, the GOP may be ready. Representative Thomas Massie (R-KY) has been introducing bills to end the Department of Education since 2017, and his 2023 attempt won more than 160 Republican votes, though it ultimately failed to pass. With a president friendly to the cause, however, it may be easier to rally the party for another vote.
A Legacy of Waste
What has the Department of Education really accomplished – and what would be lost if it ended? There are plenty of factors to help measure its worth. “Since the 1970s, the long-term trend National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) has reported periodic data on the reading and mathematics achievements of 9-, 13-, and 17-year-olds enrolled in public and private schools,” reads the intro to a fast facts page by the National Center for Education Statistics. The line looks fairly flat when viewing average reading scores from 1971 to 2022. There are ups and downs, but the score – 215 – isn’t significantly higher than the first: 208. Mathematics doesn’t look much better, ranging from 219 to 234 in the same span.
A look at average composite scores for the ACT (American College Testing) shows a fairly flat trend from 1970 on, too. The average composite for both boys and girls was 18.6 in 1970, 18.5 in 1980, 20.6 in 1990, 21 in 2000 and 2010, and 20.6 in 2020. That’s a slight increase over the decades – just a 2-point improvement over half a century. The SAT (Scholastic Aptitude Test) stats tell the same tale. Students averaged 509 in math and 530 in critical reading in 1972, and in 1990, it was 501 and 500, respectively. Math averages rose slightly in the 2000s, and reading scores fell into the 490s. In 2023, the average was 508 for math and 520 for Evidence-Based Reading and Writing (the test was restructured in 2017). That’s a net change of minus one in math and minus ten in reading over 51 years.
While American students don’t seem to be getting much smarter or dumber, regardless of which test you track, the US certainly is falling behind internationally. While we once led the world in the quality of education, that hasn’t been the case in many years. According to the 2022 test data from the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), the US comes in 34th out of 80 countries tracked.
So, if the Department of Education hasn’t resulted in smarter students, what has it done? Well, it has spent a ridiculous amount of money. In 2023, the Washington Examiner ran a story on the long-term NAEP test scores. “What sticks out is that, particularly in reading, there were never significant improvements over time in either category,” the author concluded. “At their peaks, math scores had risen 7% and reading scores had risen a mere 3%. Comparing the 1970 scores to those today, reading scores rose by 1% and math scores rose by 1.8%. To put that in context, since 1971, inflation-adjusted educational funding per student has risen by more than 245%.”
The Department of Education has wasted a staggering amount of tax dollars. In 2024 alone, the DOE requested $90 billion – a 13.6% increase from 2023 funding levels. Most schools in America closed from 2020 to 2022, though some reopened in 2021 or even late 2020. The DOE’s budget was $64 billion in 2022, $66.6 billion in 2021, and $102.8 billion in 2022 – but for what? If schools were closed and students were falling behind, why did the Department of Education see some of the highest funding years on record?
Thanks for Nothing
Gripes with the Department of Education are as varied as its detractors. Many take issue with the woke ideology being pushed on schools by a progressive administration. Others argue it’s simply unconstitutional and, therefore, should not exist. But even without those opinions and interpretations, the objective facts simply don’t bode well for the DOE. The executive agency has controlled the nation’s schools for more than four decades, but all it has to show for its expense is a slight bump in some test scores, a drop in others, and America falling far behind in global educational rankings.
The argument that the states could do a better job – or, at least, that the people of each state should be responsible only for their schools, not those on the other side of the country – certainly has its appeal. Perhaps the days of the Department of Education are numbered, and maybe that’s just fine.
