The Liberated Learner — Column by Suzanne Kearney
…education was once a function of a family…
Former Rep. John Ashbrook (R-Ohio)
On March 20, 2025, President Trump signed an executive order to “dismantle the Department of Education,” launching an tsunami of condemnatory headlines and critical talking heads. Despite promising that “the department’s useful functions … will be fully preserved,” including Pell Grants, Title I funding, and programs for students with disabilities, the action has been bemoaned as extreme and outright dangerous.
Becky Pringle, president of the NEA (the largest teacher’s union in the U.S.), lamented, “the real victims will be our most vulnerable students. Gutting the Education Department will send class sizes soaring, cut job training programs, make higher education more expensive and out of reach for middle class families, take away special education services for students with disabilities, and gut student civil rights protections.” The assumption is that this federal agency has done much to advance the cause of learning, and without it the future of America is doomed.
While the Department of Education (DOE) was first established in 1867 by President Andrew Johnson as a compliance agency to guarantee “education for all” in former Confederate states, it existed as such for only a year. It then went into semi-hibernation as the downgraded “Office of Education” until the Carter campaign resurrected the idea of making it a full Cabinet agency in the late 1970s.
What motivated Carter to champion the re-establishment of the DOE? According to a recent Prager U video, it was not about the students. On the contrary, Carter, with his lackluster presidential performance, needed leverage to boost his chance at re-election. The National Education Association was an ideal ally.
“The teacher network is politically perfect,” says journalist Robert Heffernan. “Teachers are in every town, hamlet, county, city, and state of the union.” Furthermore, an unnamed Carter-era House Democrat confessed, “There are school teachers in every congressional district, and most of us simply don’t need the aggravation of taking them on.”
In fact, for decades the NEA had lobbied for its own federal cash cow, with its accompanying abundance of influential bureaucratic jobs and the enforcement powers of the D.C. government. Carter eagerly joined in on the deal. In a word, “From its inception, the Department of Education was a political institution… it was intended to help the Democratic Party and the Unions.” On average, the majority of DOE employees vote blue, and over half earn at least $100K per year. It’s a vicious cycle in which money flows from your taxes to the D.C., to the DOE, to teachers’ salaries, to unions, to their PACs, and from there, to Democratic campaigns (the NEA has endorsed every Democratic presidential candidate since Carter).
And while the money and power flows, students suffer. Since 1979, the U.S. education system has declined from being one of the best in the world, to ranking 28th and 36th internationally in math and literacy, respectively. One out of four 8th graders is not proficient in math and one out of three in reading.
Where is the $250+ billion DOE budget going?
According to the Epoch Times, “41 percent of its funding went to state education agencies instead of classrooms. A ‘shadow department’ of 48,000 workers at the state level—or 10 times more workers than the federal agency employs—were employed to keep up with the paperwork burden imposed by federal mandates.”
In the opinion of Gerard Robinson, professor of public policy at the University of Virginia and an expert on the history of K–12 education policy, the DOE has not shown an adequate return on investment; rather, according to Trump Education Secretary Linda McMahon, it is nothing but a “pass-through mechanism” for funding appropriated by Congress.
If the money-grabbing, power-wielding, inefficient bureaucracy isn’t enough to give pause, consider the ideas forced into local schools by politically-driven Presidential administrations and teacher’s unions. DEI, Critical Theory, SEL, “climate change,” and boys’ in girls’ sports have all been foisted onto our kids from the top down, often using loss of federal funding for non-compliance as a threat. It could be said that instead of educating, the DOE has perpetuated the indoctrination of our students with little fear of accountability.
So, what can be done? Instead of continuing to feed the behemoth, I suggest a return to local sovereignty. First, money: keep it local. Why are we funneling billions through D.C. to pay local paper-pushers, while classrooms receive pennies on the dollar? Even better: keep government funds out of education completely. That may sound radical, but it was the status quo in America until the debut of Horace Mann in the 1800s.
Next, policy: at minimum, educational guidelines should be made by local communities, according to the values each community represents. Decisions should be influenced by parents, and to a lesser extent, teachers, without federal money factoring in. Or, better yet, make education even more local – as in, family-centered teaching in the home. That’s right, homeschooling. You can’t get much more “local” than that – and I’ve written dozens of columns to help you get started if you really want to take your child’s education back into your own hands.
So, do we need a Department of Education? I’ve laid out the facts. You do the math – unless, of course, like one of those unfortunate 8th graders – you can’t.
