No Need To Save an Education Department That Fails Our Kids

on Mar 25, 2025

SAN DIEGO -- A lot of what I know about public education in America I learned in kindergarten.

Literally. After college, I supported my writing habit by working as a K-12 substitute teacher in my old school district in Central California. The gig included teaching in kindergarten classrooms.

Looking back, that was excellent training for what I do now as a journalist covering another group of rowdy malcontents: politicians. Come to think of it, the kids were better behaved.

Republicans have been talking about abolishing the Department of Education since the 1980s, when President Ronald Reagan proposed it.

Back then, as a high school student, I was starting to pay attention to politics. I didn't like Republicans, Reagan or the idea of eliminating a Cabinet department dedicated to supporting something that had a transformative effect on my family: the public schools.

At the time, I was swayed by a pithy soundbite I heard from a liberal Democrat who opposed Reagan's plan. It went something like: "Well, we have a Department of Defense and a Department of Commerce because we value defense and commerce. If we value education, we should have a Department of Education."

Today, it's all different. I'm different. In numerous elections over the last 40 years, I've voted for Republicans. I would take Reagan in a heartbeat over the current occupant of the Oval Office. And I'm ambivalent about the idea of eliminating the Department of Education.

That's what President Donald Trump vowed to do on the campaign trail, and he seems determined to keep that promise through a flurry of layoffs, budget cuts and executive orders aimed at the department.

This month, Trump signed an executive order instructing Secretary of Education Linda McMahon to "take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education and return authority over education to the States and local communities."

In a statement, McMahon praised what she called "a history-making action by President Trump to free future generations of American students" by sending education policy "back to the states where it so rightly belongs."

Meanwhile, even though only Congress can scrap an entire Cabinet department, Trump and McMahon have gutted the department by firing about 1,300 people, or nearly half of its workforce.

Trump also recently transferred the responsibility of monitoring college student loans to an agency that knows a lot about lending: the Small Business Administration.

The result has been a series of lawsuits filed by everyone from teachers unions and the NAACP to public school districts and the attorneys general of nearly two dozen states.

The administration's goal is to return the focus on public education to where it was before the Department of Education was founded by President Jimmy Carter in 1979: the state and local level. Trump clearly envisions a future where the federal government is out of the education business. Permanently.

But there is a paradox. Even while attempting to dismantle the education department, the president is also using it at a full strength as a battering ram to pressure Columbia University to institute new policies to purge its campus of antisemitism. The administration has stripped the university of about $400 million in funding in response to the feckless manner in which administrators responded to violent campus protests last year.

So Trump can't seem to make up his mind about whether the Department of Education is useful or obsolete. One minute, the administration insists U.S. education policy should be handled at the state and local level. The next, it's expanding the size and depth of the federal footprint by trying to bend educational institutions to its will.

If the Trump administration is having this much trouble assessing the value of the Department of Education, then how are the rest of us supposed to make heads or tails out of whether the institution should be saved or scrapped?

Our moral compass must be what's best for the children. That's one constituency that doesn't have many advocates in Washington, where the department is based. Within the beltway, what counts is money, votes, power and influence. Kids can't deliver those.

That's why, not surprisingly, the Department of Education has evolved -- or rather devolved -- to the point where, rather than go to bat for the students who attend public schools, it exists mostly for the convenience and career advancement of the adults who work in them.

If Americans need a reason to support the Trump administration's efforts to pry education policy out of the hands of the federal government, that'll do.

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To find out more about Ruben Navarrette and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.