President Trump signed an Executive Order last month, “Improving Education Outcomes by Empowering Parents, States, and Communities,” which directs Secretary of Education, Linda McMahon, “to take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education and return education authority to the States while continuing to ensure the effective and uninterrupted delivery of services, programs, and benefits on which Americans rely.” How much do you know about the Department of Education? Can you identify which of these statements are false?
A. The Department of Education has interfered in the day-to-day activities of schools and has hurt teachers.
B. Decentralizing the Department of Education will gut civil rights protections.
C. The Department of Education has always been unconstitutional.
Let’s take these statements one at a time:
A. TRUE! In 2014, the Obama administration’s Department of Education, in the name of so-called “equity,” made it more difficult for teachers to give detentions or suspensions to students. This helped create the student behavior crisis in our country and has caused teachers to quit at alarming rates. Although in 2018, then-Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos repealed the 2014 guidance on student behavior, old habits died hard, and student behavior has gotten worse, not better, in the years since, especially taking a nosedive after the pandemic.
B. LIE! Civil rights legislation associated with the Department of Education is actually enacted by Congress, including Title IX (which protects women’s sex-based rights in federally funded educational institutions) and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (which protects people from discrimination on the basis of race, color, or national origin). Therefore, civil rights legislation remains the law of the land, Department of Education or not, especially seeing that Title IX and Title VI predate the Department of Education. The agency tasked with dealing with civil rights complaints may shift away from the Department of Education—for instance, the Department of Justice may handle Title IX or Title VI claims—but civil rights are protected regardless of which agency handles their enforcement.
C. TRUE! Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution outlines the federal government’s duties—and education is not one of them. The Founders, with their respect for federalism and state authority over state matters, never intended for centralized education. In fact, only in the lame duck period of the Carter presidency in 1979 was the Department of Education even established.
Bottom Line: In the years that the Department of Education has been allowed to overpower state authority in matters of schooling, it has caused more problems than it has solved. For most of American history, we’ve gone without the Department of Education, and there is no reason we cannot go without it today.