COMMENTARY: Effort to dismantle the Department of Education is long overdue

It’s only taken 45 years for my father’s dream to come true — at least in part. But thanks to Donald Trump, a Republican Congress and a conservative Supreme Court, the Department of Education is finally being dismantled.

My father called for the department to be abolished when he ran for president in 1980. It didn’t happen, of course, and he couldn’t make it happen because Democrats ran Congress.

Creating a Cabinet-level education department in 1979 was Jimmy Carter’s gift — some might call it a bribe — to the hurtful teacher unions, which have since paid back Democrats with millions of votes and billions in campaign donations. The move was an unnecessary, wasteful and harmful federal intrusion into an area that was rightly and sensibly controlled by states and localities.

Liberals loved it because it gave them billions to spend on their dirty work. But almost every conservative Republican presidential candidate including Trump promised to abolish the department — but never did or could.

By 2024 the department employed 4,133 bureaucrats. It spent an annual budget of $268 billion. Now it’s down to 2,183 people and falling. The education bureaucrats don’t hire teachers and don’t concoct or impose curriculums on school districts.

Most of the billions they spent last year — $160 billion, in fact — went for college loans, direct student aid and things like Pell grants for college students. Special education for younger school kids cost $16 billion and pandemic recovery grants still ate up $55 billion, for God knows what.

Most of the department’s budget is spent in the form of sending checks to states and localities — which another federal bureaucracy such as the Small Business Administration can easily do. Other federal agencies can do the rest of the paperwork the department has been doing.

Federal bureaucracies are harder to kill than Dracula. And any attempt to cut them back even 10 percent, as we’ve seen, is greeted by Democrats and the liberal media as if it’s a national tragedy. In the case of the Department of Education, whatever it has been doing all these years to help the poorest students learn their ABCs and their times tables hasn’t worked.

We’ve all heard the sad statistics from the public schools in our big blue cities: For one example, three-quarters of the kids in Chicago don’t read at grade level and 83 percent don’t meet proficiency in math. But here’s a bunch of even more depressing numbers I found.

According to the National Adult Literacy Survey, “70 percent of all incarcerated adults cannot read at a fourth-grade level, meaning they lack the reading skills to navigate everyday tasks.”

And according to the Literacy Project Foundation and Invisible Children, “between 60 percent and 75 percent of prison inmates are functionally illiterate. Up to 19 percent are considered completely illiterate (unable to read at all).”

In other words, our overflowing prisons are composed of the under-schooled alumni of our public education system. Our criminal population is living proof that way too many of our kids “graduate” from high school without knowing anything but how to handle a Glock.

One of the reasons so many students are unprepared to make an honest living and live happily ever after, says “Dirty Jobs” host Mike Rowe, is that for decades we have overemphasized the importance of college prep courses and eliminated vocational arts from high schools.

If you’re old, you remember when high schools had shop classes that taught kids how to use tools and build and fix stuff. The classes worked.

Kids who were not suited to get a B.A. in Icelandic poetry were set off in the direction of community colleges, trade schools and apprentice programs and ended up having well-paying, lifelong, blue-collar careers in construction and important trades like plumbing.

Public schools and the Department of Education have been failing America’s poorest kids for decades. Parents know it. It’s why private schools and Catholic schools and home-schooling among Blacks have grown in popularity.

Skipping public school is no longer a bad thing. It’s the smartest way to avoid your kids getting a diploma they can’t read.

Michael Reagan, the son of President Ronald Reagan, is an author, speaker and president of the Reagan Legacy Foundation. Send comments to reagan@caglecartoons.com and follow @reaganworld on X.