Should the Department of Education Be Abolished?

Washington Stand | by Dan Hart - August 26, 2024

In the wake of former President Donald Trump declaring earlier this month that he would seek to shut down the Department of Education (DOE) if elected president in November, some experts are reexamining the usefulness of the federal agency, arguing that the education of children is best handled at the local level and that cutting the agency would be part of addressing the federal budget deficit.

During a recent interview with entrepreneur and businessman Elon Musk, Trump stated, “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.”

On the most recent episode of Family Research Council’s “Outstanding” podcast, FRC’s Senior Fellow for Education Studies Meg Kilgannon joined host Joseph Backholm to reassess the DOE’s worth in 21st century America.

She acknowledged that in theory, there is a valid argument for the DOE serving as a kind of educational “quality control” for the country, making sure that there is a “baseline of excellence” in schools across the nation.

“[B]ut there’s a reason that education takes place at the state and local level,” Kilgannon argued. “It takes place most importantly in the family. And so once you get outside the family and outside your community, outside your church, outside your neighborhood, your state, things tend to devolve in the level of control and impact that you can have. So, I would say that having a federal Department of Education is inherently flawed. I think that there may be a role for it in terms of grant-making in certain cases. But when it comes to K-12 education, educating children, that, of course, is work that that simply must be done very, very closely to the families that produce the children who are being educated.”

Kilgannon, who formerly served in the DOE under the Trump administration, went on to observe that most of what the agency does is simply dispense federal funds. “[S]chools [in low-income parts of the country] receive most of their funding from Title I grants,” she explained. “… [The DOE also does] grant making to colleges and universities for research. Those grants are very substantial. … [Much] of federal government is essentially a money pass through. There are not a lot of services that the federal government does. They manage money. They send money from one place to another.”

But as she further noted, the DOE’s controversial impact on culture has grown substantially under the Biden-Harris administration.

“The Department of Education has an office for Civil Rights that is separate from the Department of Justice … that’s dedicated to education,” she detailed. “… [T]hey enforce lots of things. The Biden-Harris administration has been enforcing an effort to stop schools from removing sexually explicit books from libraries under the auspices that you are interfering with the civil rights of LGBTQ+ children and teachers and families. So there is a tremendous amount of power to be wielded there. The department also collects statistics about the students, [and] now under the Biden-Harris administration, they will collect a statistic about a student’s status as non-binary [which] is extremely consequential. Right up until now, we’ve just been calling them boys and girls, men and women. So there are lots of things the Department of Education has grown to do that have a very significant impact on culture. They are both a reflection of culture, but also they are making culture.”

In addition, Kilgannon asserted that the DOE has been highly influential in convincing American culture that college education and student loans are imperative for everyone.

“Historically, less than 25% of people have had a college degree and certainly not an advanced degree,” she noted. “And so this idea that everybody needed to go to college was sort of socialized in the ’90s with the Clinton administration and has taken off from there. The idea that to get ahead and to have a better life, you must go to college, that to keep someone from going to college is somehow to oppress them — these are very postmodern ideas. It’s not necessary to go to college to have a good life, to have a good income, [and] to make a meaningful contribution to society, which in my opinion, is having a happy family. That doesn’t require going to college, right? So this idea that we must be super educated to make our way in the world is one that I think benefits people in the education business and not necessarily people in the mainstream of society.”

One of the biggest reasons to consider defunding the DOE, Kilgannon went on to argue, is to begin to address the federal deficit.

“I think that what we need to ask ourselves as a country, ‘What are the limits that we’re going to set for ourselves?’ We have a deficit that is out of control. We’re spending $1 trillion on interest alone, over and over again. This is crippling for our country. And so where in the government could we possibly cut back? … In the grand scheme of things, that would put a department like the Department of Education in question, since it’s not been here for that long, and we were managing to educate people before we had it. … Can we on the Right pose a question to the Left? Is there any part of government that you think we should get rid of, or that could be cut or trimmed?”

As Kilgannon elaborated, the most critical functions of the DOE can be delegated to other governmental agencies. “[T]he federal student loan program … could stand alone [as] its own entity, or you could give it to Treasury. … The Office of Civil Rights, that’s at the Department of Education right now. That whole function could be done by the Department of Justice.”

Kilgannon urged conservatives to take more of a leadership role in providing the next generation with the expertise in how to reduce government bloat. “I think that we really need to have more appreciation for the skill that’s needed to deal with these agencies [through] the huge areas of law and public policy that are in these agencies. We need our Christian universities to have public policy schools that are graduating people who are experts on every place that abortion is funded and promoted by our federal government, and how those programs could be managed or reduced. There are so many areas like that where we need to make a better contribution than we’ve historically made.”

“[T]he question remains,” Kilgannon summed up, “does the Department of Education make a meaningful contribution to our overall educational landscape in America? And is it improving the lives of children and adult students? In my opinion, that’s an open question. Not everything the Department of Education does is bad. But I would say that [it’s] unnecessary. It’s not necessary for the provision of education for us to have a federal department involved in that role.”

Topics:Education, Sexually Explicit Books, Biden Administration, Parental Rights

Dan Hart is senior editor at The Washington Stand.