In this article, I will start with an anecdote. After that, we’ll see what kind of student performance we are getting for the taxpayer dollars we spend on education. Is the federal Department of Education doing a good job of producing high-performing students? And after that, we’ll talk about what the Republicans can do to abolish the federal Department of Education.

Here’s the funny anecdote, reported by Newsweek:

Aleysha Ortiz, 19, alleges she cannot read or write yet says she graduated with honors from Hartford Public High School in 2024. She has since filed a lawsuit against the Hartford Board of Education and city officials, accusing them of negligence in failing to provide adequate special education services throughout her schooling, per reporting from Connecticut’s News 8 WTNH.

[…]Ortiz told CNN she was promoted through school without acquiring fundamental literacy skills. In a May 2024 city council meeting, she testified that after 12 years in Hartford Public Schools, she was unable to read or write, despite being awarded an honors diploma.

She can’t read or write, but she’s now a university student at the University of Connecticut.

So, let’s take a look at the federal Department of Education. Are they doing a good job of improving student test scores?

The Heritage Foundation has the answer:

Nearly 45 years after its creation under former President Jimmy Carter, high school seniors’ math and reading outcomes remain stagnant. Worse still, the academic achievement gap between the United States’s poorest and wealthiest students, a gap of four grade levels, has not narrowed since the department’s inception.

These dismal results come at a staggering cost. Funding this vast federal agency, with its more than 4,000 employees, has cost parents and U.S. taxpayers billions of dollars. Since 1980, K-12 spending and college costs have doubled in real terms, while every additional dollar funneled through Washington has come at the expense of local schools, including public, charter, and private, that actually educate our children.

As the American Enterprise Institute’s Rick Hess recently pointed out, more than 1,000 Department of Education employees are paid more than $160,000 annually, with nearly 90 making upwards of $200,000—more than four times the average starting teacher salary.

The most common complaint from parents about federal control of education is not the inefficiency. It’s the weaponization of government against parents – the same parents who pay the salaries of the education bureaucrats.

More:

In just the past four years, the Biden administration has weaponized the federal government against parents and children in unprecedented ways. The FBI, under President Joe Biden’s direction, created “threat tags” to monitor parents simply for exercising their First Amendment rights at school board meetings and speaking up about critical matters such as school safety, boys in female bathrooms and locker rooms, and sexualized content in classrooms.

Meanwhile, the Department of Education rewrote Title IX rules to expand the definition of “sex” discrimination to include “gender identity” and then handed enforcement over to the Department of Agriculture, which threatened to withhold school meal funding from institutions that refused to embrace this radical ideology.

OK, excellent. We’re spending a lot of money on these bureaucrats, and getting lousy results. That would be unacceptable in the competitive, consumer-focused private sector. But it’s totally fine in a government monopoly that gives customers no opt-out.

Let’s shut it down. How can we shut it down? This article from The Federalist explains how the process has already started.

McMahon said that the review of the department was “long overdue,” noting the over $1 trillion spent by taxpayers on a government agency that has overseen plummeting education outcomes for American students. She also noted massive student debt for obtaining degrees that are less and less valuable, anti-American indoctrination in schools, and teacher shortages due to bureaucratic “red tape.”

“Disruption leads to innovation and gets results. We must start thinking about our final mission at the department as an overhaul — a last chance to restore the culture of liberty and excellence that made American education great,” she said. “Changing the status quo can be daunting. But every staff member of this Department should be enthusiastic about any change that will benefit students. “

McMahon laid out three “convictions” that will guide the closure of the department: Parents should be “the primary decision makers in their children’s education”; “taxpayer-funded education should refocus” on educational pillars like math, reading, science, and history as opposed to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and gender ideology; and education beyond high school should revive its value by aligning degrees “with workforce needs.”

States, school systems, teachers, and families alike would benefit from being able to tailor education funds to their individual needs, as opposed to having objectives dictated by federal control, McMahon said.

By the way, a lot of states aren’t waiting for relief from federal mismanagement of education. The Federalist reports on which states already have school choice:

On Tuesday, Wyoming became the 15th state to enact universal school choice into law with Gov. Mark Gordon’s signature on the Steamboat Legacy Scholarship Act.

The Cowboy State joins a rapidly growing group of states that have passed laws giving all (or nearly all) families statewide choice concerning their children’s kindergarten through twelfth-grade education. Those states are Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Louisiana, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Utah, and West Virginia.

The act grants families who choose to participate with an education savings account of $7,000 per student per year to allocate toward approved K-12 educational expenses. Education savings accounts with universal eligibility are the gold standard of school choice programs due to the flexibility they provide parents to select the best learning avenues for their children.

Do you live in a state without school choice? Why? Get out of there!