Former Education Secretary Pitches Plan To Completely Dismantle Her Old Agency
Former Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos proposed a plan Thursday to dismantle the Department of Education after stating it has failed to fulfill its purpose.
DeVos, who served under the first Trump administration, said in a column published to the Free Press that the department has worsened the state of education in the United States despite spending over $1 trillion on education since 1979. President Donald Trump has expressed plans to dismantle the agency completely.
“I can understand how that idea, which President Donald Trump is committed to advancing, might sound a bit radical,” DeVos wrote. “But having spent four years on the inside as secretary of education, struggling to get the department’s bureaucracy to make even the smallest changes to put the needs of students first, I can say conclusively that American students will be better off without.”
The National Assessment Governing Board released the 2024 Nation’s Report Card in January which exposed the dire state of education, with students still testing below pre-pandemic levels five years later. Roughly 40% of fourth grade students tested below the reading benchmark and there is now a nearly 100-point gap between the lowest and highest performing students.
“Nothing could be more important to our success as a nation than having well-educated citizens,” DeVos asserted. “But don’t be fooled by the name: the Department of Education has almost nothing to do with actually educating anyone. The Department of Education does not run a single school. It does not employ any teachers in a single classroom. It doesn’t set academic standards or curriculum. It isn’t even the primary funder of education—quite the opposite. In most states, the federal government represents less than 10 percent of K–12 public education funding.”
“So what does it do? It shuffles money around; adds unnecessary requirements and political agendas via its grants; and then passes the buck when it comes time to assess if any of that adds value,” DeVos continued.
Under former President Joe Biden, the department invested heavily in diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, critical race theory and gender ideology. Trump has already taken steps to strip these concepts from public schools.
DeVos went on to explain that the department functions merely as a “middleman,” imposing regulations on schools and taking in billions of dollars for their own salaries while forcing schools to do the work of implementing the policies themselves.
DeVos’ three-step plan for dismantling the agency includes sending the Congressionally-allotted education funding straight to schools and passing a universal school choice measure which “would take away more than half of the department’s duties, while materially increasing the amount of funding going to educating students,” passing the responsibility of enforcing civil rights law to the Department of Justice (DOJ), and privatizing student loans.
“With those issues solved, a federal Department of Education would no longer have any pretext to exist,” Devos explained. “While it is true that no federal agency has ever seen its doors closed, there must be a first for everything. On the merits, the Department of Education has earned such a historic distinction.”
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The Federal Department of Education needs to be disbanded because it is nothing but another bloated bureaucracy with a 160 Billion dollar budget; mostly used to bribe school districts and colleges to institute a DEI agenda in staffing and admissions and inculcate far left positions (like CRT and “Intersectionality”) into their curriculums. And remember that Biden’s DOE last year sued a school district for removing pornographic books for an elementary school library. The Federal Department of Education thinks that’s just fine and will sue to allow pornographic books for children?!! The DOE’s “mission” is supposed to make America’s students more competitive in the world and it is just a horrific joke as Student’s test scores have been dropping to below third world levels for a decade and most American students can’t even read or write or do math at their grade level. But the DOE wants to let them see “Drag Shows” and to read about boys having oral sex with each other. It’s disgusting beyond words…..
Our educational system needs to be reformed from top to bottom. School choice in K-12 is the only antidote to the corrupt teacher’s union and the leftist destruction of our public educational system. Let the universities compete based on costs and quality without government money and their hand on the scales of influence is the only remedy for the liberal control of all of our country’s colleges and universities. Colleges should only emphasize the importance of STEM (science, technology, engineering, & mathematics) in higher education and get rid of all the useless Liberal Arts degrees in things like “gender studies” and “ethnic studies”, etc..
And we need a national focus on technical careers and schools for plumbers, electricians, welders and many more. Jobs that often pay six figures and where there are shortages of skilled workers everywhere in the country as the Democrats have continuously promoted the lie that “everyone should go to college”. The simple truth is that probably 75% or more of young people are ill suited, not adequately prepared, nor will they benefit from college. I would much rather see some of my money going to scholarships and funding for trade schools than the indoctrinating universities that already have billions in endowments.