Five Reasons Why Eliminating The Department Of Education Is A Good Thing

The Department of Education, much like USAID, is treated as if it’s a sacrosanct charity instead of a government institution subject to scrutiny and regulation. The message surrounding government agencies and federal employees is generally unhinged these days; when did these people suddenly become saints and martyrs? Most of them are, in fact, parasites feeding on taxpayer dollars and they serve no purpose.

To be sure, progressives often elevate bureaucracy in their minds to a sanctified level. The Shadow Government is their god and the bureaucrats slithering through the dimly lit corridors of unaccountable power are treated like high priests. The system is worshiped because it is at war with America’s foundations. The left wants the west to die, and the bureaucracy is more than happy to accommodate while filling their pockets with easy cash.

The Department of Education (ED) is particularly beloved by the political left because it is the mechanism by which public schooling is twisted into a propaganda machine. The ED is the key to everything; in cooperation with teachers and teachers unions they are creating the next generation of woke adherents, and your kids are the target.

But beyond the issue of political indoctrination there’s the obvious problem of obligation versus outcome – What does the ED actually do to fulfill its supposed duties? In truth, it does absolutely nothing. Lets examine five reasons why the Department of Education is a complete failure as an agency and why it deserves to be eliminated.

The More Money The ED Receives The Less Education American Students Get

In 2010 the ED’s budget was $94 billion, by 2024 it had ballooned to $268 billion (a 160% increase). But what are US taxpayers getting for this massive chunk of change they are spending annually? National testing averages in reading and math continue to decline dramatically in the past decade. Scores barely eek out gains on testing results from the 1970s before the ED was founded.

In other words, the more money Americans spend on the ED, the worse the results get. Despite the agency enjoying a budget that surpasses the GDP of many countries, the US is 28th in the world for math, 24th in the world for science according to PISA results for high school age students. It is also rated 36th in global literacy rankings. For the richest country in the world with the largest education budget in the world, this is abysmal.

The ED Has Even Failed To Help Minorities Despite DEI Programs

Some people argue that minority demographics (except Asians) consistently test lower and they are dragging US scores down compared to the rest of the developed world. This is a fair point, however, with the amount of funding and fanfare paid to DEI by the Department of Education in recent years you would think those scores would be going up. They haven’t. More minorities than ever are getting college degrees but their testing scores continue to plummet.

In inner city schools where minorities are the majority, the lack of effective education is stark. In urban areas of Illinois, for example, at least 30 schools do not have a single student that can pass a reading proficiency exam.

If the Department of Education’s real intention was to create „equity” for minorities in public schools, they have failed miserably.

Woke Propaganda And DEI Ideology In Schools

The ED had at least $600 million allotted for DEI and Critical Race theory programs for teachers, not to mention extensive programs for LGBT and gender studies. Its not a coincidence that public schools across the nation started allowing gender ideology to invade the classroom all at the same time. The Department of Education was a big part of the indoctrination push. Incentivizing teachers and school districts with extra federal cash certainly helped things along.

Until the Supreme Court finally blocked „race conscious” admissions in colleges due to discrimination against Asians and Whites, the ED was highly active in promoting DEI based campuses. The agency specifically encouraged equity based student admissions, allowing underqualified applicants access to top universities while rejecting high achieving applicants because of their race.

With the lowest common denominator getting easy access, it’s no surprise that American colleges are churning out far less desirable graduates and less workers with STEM degrees.

The ED Has Driven Secondary Education Costs Into The Stratosphere

In 2024 the Department of Education spent around $160 billion on federal student aid grants and loans. This might sound like a humanitarian effort that would expand America’s professional labor base, but that’s not the case. In-demand career fields like those in STEM are desperate for qualified graduates. Meanwhile, all that easy government cash has inflated college tuition costs beyond reckoning.

There is a direct correlation and causation between the ED’s increased grant programs and the rising costs of a college education.

The ED Consistently Loses Money

For years, the ED vastly underestimated the true cost of the federal Direct Loan program. Between 1997 and 2021, ED expected these loans to generate more than $100 billion in government revenue. Researchers and watchdogs have warned about the flaws in ED’s budget model for years – the agency did nothing to address these concerns.

Federal student loans issued during this period cost taxpayers $200 billion, meaning ED’s faulty budgeting was off by more than $10 billion a year on average according to a GAO report in 2022.

ED’s budget is consistently wrong due to incorrect assumptions about:

The number of borrowers who would choose to enroll in Income-Driven Repayment (IDR).

The income growth for borrowers repaying loans through IDR.

The probability that borrowers would default on their loans.

The effects of new programs enacted by Congress and ED

Like most federal agencies the ED only serves to lose money while never actually accomplishing its supposed purpose. It is a failure by every metric and should be shut down forever. When an institution bombs this hard for this long, there’s no excuse. The political left appeals to emotion by painting a picture of a dystopian future filled with uneducated American children without the guiding hand of the Department of Education, but the opposite is true. They have already created an uneducated America, and now its time to remedy the problem.