When Ronald Reagan was campaigning to succeed Jimmy Carter, one of his core campaign pledges was eliminating the Department of Education. After he defeated Carter in a landslide, Reagan reiterated the pledge during his first State of the Union address. “The budget plan I submitted to you,” Reagan told Congress, “will realize major savings by dismantling the Department of Education.” But Congress — specifically Democrats in the House of Representatives — ultimately rejected the idea, so Reagan moved on.
Nevertheless, Republicans kept promising to get rid of the DOE for many years. In 1996, after Gingrich led the “revolution” in Congress, the GOP platform stated: “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.” But that never happened either. Instead, when George W. Bush became president, spending on the Department of Education ballooned by more than 65% in just two years. In other words, the party that relentlessly campaigned on getting rid of the Department of Education had actually managed to accomplish the exact opposite of their stated goal. They made the DOE even larger, even better-funded, and even harder to eliminate.
Throughout this period, no Republican president even attempted to do what Donald Trump just did yesterday, when he signed an executive order directing the Secretary of Education to take “all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education and return education authority to the states.” In signing this order, Trump did more to shut down the Department of Education than any of his predecessors. By the Trump administration’s own admission, this is not the final step in the process. Congress will ultimately have to take the final step of eradicating the department. But in the meantime, the order allows the Education Secretary to drastically scale back staffing, funding, and operations at the DOE. On Thursday, Trump explained why this is such an important step to take, after so many decades of Republicans trying, and failing, to get it done. Watch:
You just heard Trump outline some statistics showing that, while the Department of Education has grown enormously over the years, the quality of Americans’ education in this country has plummeted. The vast majority of our students aren’t capable of demonstrating proficiency in either reading or math. In a moment I’ll discuss more of these statistics, because it’s important to spell out the sheer, almost unbelievable magnitude of the department’s many failures. By every single available metric, the DOE has overseen the collapse of education in this country.
But before we go into those details, it’s important to understand how the Left is responding to Trump’s executive order. If you listen to what these people are saying, they’re not actually disputing Trump’s fundamental claim, which is that the Department of Education has not done its job. They’re not even trying to claim that the education system in the United States has been improving since the DOE was established, or that most students in this country understand basic arithmetic and reading comprehension. They’re not disputing the fact that we’ve gone backwards since Jimmy Carter gave us the Department of Education.
Instead, all of the arguments from the Left amount to some sort of allegation that the vast bureaucracy of the Department of Education will no longer be able to distribute taxpayer money to various school programs. That’s the catastrophe they’re complaining about.
CNN for example trotted out someone who apparently won a “teacher of the year” award back in 2016. And now this person is in Congress. Here’s her complaint:
This is one of the ways that large, sprawling bureaucracies manage to stick around for decades, even after it’s clear to everyone that they’re useless. They grow out of control, like a cancer — but at the same time, they still control a small amount of relatively important functions. And they make the claim that, if you kill the cancer, then you’re also going to kill the host.
WATCH: The Matt Walsh Show
Think back a few weeks ago, to when the Trump administration cut some jobs at the national parks, and Yosemite National Park responded by claiming that people were going to get trapped in bathrooms now. The Trump administration had apparently fired their only locksmith, and according to The Washington Post, that one locksmith was the only person in the entire park with the “institutional knowledge” to rescue people who are trapped in the bathrooms. When you cut funding to any large organization, this is the kind of thing that inevitably happens. They try to make it seem like some kind of disaster is imminent, and that you can’t possibly account for all the useful functions that bureaucracy was serving.
But of course, that’s not true. Yellowstone can simply find another locksmith. Or they could make a copy of the keys. Along the same lines, the handful of useful functions that the Department of Education provides — like supporting disabled children in poor school districts, or managing the student loan program — can easily continue, even after the DOE itself is abolished. Trump outlined that plan yesterday. Watch:
The key point here is that eliminating the Department of Education is less about cost savings — although those will be significant — and more about returning power over the education system to the states. Right now, bureaucrats in Washington have the power to require school districts and universities to adopt various Left-wing policies in exchange for receiving funding. Think about the Biden administration’s expansion of Title IX to cover trans-identifying students, or their funding for “racial equity” and climate initiatives, and so on. Even the student loan program has been manipulated to advance the Left’s agenda, with various “pauses” that are designed, practically speaking, to force taxpayers to cover the costs. Getting rid of this Left-wing control over the education system, and handing it back to the states, is the real objective here.
That’s why the head of one of the largest teachers’ unions in the country, Randi Weingarten, is so irate about the closure of the Department of Education. She’s been complaining about it for months now. And yesterday, as she was whining on CNN, the anchor tried to point out that the unions worked closely with the DOE to ensure that schools were closed throughout the COVID lockdowns. And when she was confronted with this obviously (and highly inconvenient) piece of information, Weingarten simply denied it:
We all remember the images of teachers going on spring break, even as the teachers’ unions were arguing that schools needed to remain closed for safety reasons. It got so bad that, in 2021, the largest teachers’ union in Los Angeles had to send out a memo telling teachers to stop posting their spring break pictures. “If you are planning any trips for Spring Break, please keep that off of Social Media,” the union said. “It is hard to argue that it is unsafe for in-person instruction, if parents and the public see vacation photos and international travel.” Everyone saw this happening. Everyone understood that the Department of Education supported these closures because the unions demanded them — even though they were clearly fraudulent.
But all of that needs to be memory-holed now, along with everything Randi Weingarten was saying during the COVID lockdowns. You can pull up about a thousand clips and news articles of Weingarten saying repeatedly, throughout 2020, that schools should remain closed. The account “MAZE” on X has gathered a lot of footage highlighting this. All of these clips are from after April of 2020, when she’s now claiming she wanted to reopen schools. Watch:
As devastating as these school closures were — they permanently disrupted the educational and psychological development of millions of school children — they’re just one of many, many data points that illustrate the failures of the Department of Education. Donald Trump mentioned a few of those data points in that signing ceremony. Here are a few more.
If you pull up the “Nation’s Report Card,” which is published by the Department of Education, you’ll find that reading scores for 13-year-old students have declined since the Department was established in 1979. In 1980, the average score was 258. That’s the baseline. In 2023, the average reading score was two points lower. I’m reading directly off a table from the Department of Education here, which is intended to show “long-term trends.” And the trend is clearly negative, regardless of any differences in how the test has been administered. But even among more recent versions of this test, it’s still an obvious negative trend. The reading score for 13-year-olds was 257 in 2004. And again, now it’s lower than that.
Meanwhile, in 2024, the national average ACT composite score was the lowest it’s been in at least the past three decades, even though they’ve done everything they can to make the test easier. In 2012, the average ACT score was over 21. Now it’s 19.4. This is a decline that began several years before COVID, so the lockdowns weren’t the only cause. Additionally, the number of students scoring below a 16 — which indicates that they probably shouldn’t go to college — has dramatically increased since the 1970s. This is a test that more than a million high school students take every year, or about a third of every graduating class. And it’s showing, very clearly, that these students have been underperforming for a long time.
Of course, over time, student-level problems become adult-level problems. And that’s exactly what we’re seeing. A study from Northwestern recently found that, throughout most of the 20th century, IQ scores increased by around three to five IQ points per decade. This is a phenomenon known as the “Flynn effect.” But beginning in 2006, the trend reversed in virtually every single category in this country, except for spatial reasoning: “Ability scores of verbal reasoning (logic, vocabulary), matrix reasoning (visual problem solving, analogies), and letter and number series (computational/mathematical) dropped during the study period. … The differences in scores were present regardless of age, education or gender.”
Pretty much every major study bears this out. Recently, for example, researchers at the University of San Diego found that Americans’ vocabulary skills have significantly declined since the 1970s, even though many more people go to college now. Take a look at this chart:
Credit: Elsevier. https://gwern.net/doc/iq/2019-twenge.pdf
That shows the decline of Americans’ ability to answer basic vocabulary questions on a standardized test from 1974 to 2016, controlling for education. They use the same words on the test from year to year, so it’s a fair comparison. And we can confidently say that there has indeed been a massive drop in verbal ability, as you can see. The researchers concluded that, “Americans across all levels of educational attainment have become less able to correctly answer [vocabulary] questions on a standard test of vocabulary. Increased educational attainment has not led to increased verbal ability.” In fact, if you look at the data, you’ll find that people with “less than a high school education” actually have improved the most since the 1970s, when it comes to vocabulary. By not going to school, they’ve apparently learned more vocabulary than people with graduate degrees.
Other data shows that Americans still have very limited understanding of statistics and basic geography, despite the best efforts of the Department of Education. National Geographic found that a “majority of young Americans grossly overstated the U.S. population…. Close to one-third (30%) said that the U.S. has 1 to 2 billion people, or roughly one-third of the world’s population.” Additionally, less than 40% of Americans could find England on a map.
In other words, test scores, literacy, knowledge of geography and civics, et cetera are all on the decline. Really, every “dumb guy on the street” video of some American who spent 13 years in public education and can’t identify which century the Civil War was fought in is an indictment of the education system, and thus the DOE. That is why Donald Trump’s executive order getting rid of the Department of Education is obviously a major step in the right direction. It’s hard to imagine how we can do any worse, frankly.
What’s coming next is a battle in Congress to finalize the destruction of the DOE, so that states can present an alternative — one that prioritizes learning, instead of activism and bloat. This is a battle that Democrats are going to fight, primarily because they understand that the DOE is a critical component of their campaign to indoctrinate children, while also benefiting the teachers’ unions they depend on for political support. But if conservatives manage to win this fight — and right now they have the momentum — Donald Trump will once again have achieved a goal that Republicans campaigned on for decades, without success. He did it with Roe v. Wade, which a lot of conservatives had given up on. And now he’s doing it again with the Department of Education. He’s promising to restore this country to the status quo that existed before the DOE was established in 1979 — a status quo that produced men who invented the airplane and ultimately landed on the moon. In that era, we didn’t have endless trans-rights investigations or universities with bloated endowments from taxpayer-funded student loans. But we did have a functioning education system. And very soon, with the dismantling of the Department of Education, we might just have one again.
