Trump’s School Choice:
The Department of Education needs to be abolished to get kids learning again.
(WSJ)

President Trump is reported to be mulling an executive order to begin dissolving the Education Department. Let’s hope, as that’s the game-changer necessary to halt decades of education decline and an overdue Trump embrace of one of the boldest conservative movements already under way.

Never has a department been more deceptively titled. To listen to this week’s wailing, the federal Education Department is the beating heart of our nation’s schools, its demise a straight line to an illiterate nation. The reality: Our federal education bureaucracy takes no part in the daily, hard-fought grind of teaching. It doesn’t step in classrooms, interview teachers, or debate pedagogy. It doesn’t meet with parents, coach sports or set bus schedules.

The department’s only job is to act as the keeper of the education treats. Every year these federal masters get some $80 billion to dispense on “good” behavior. They hive off a dollop for their own salaries, while the rest they dispense as if rewarding a pet. Good state puppies—those that roll, fetch and fill out paperwork in triplicate—get grants called IDEA funds. Bad puppies lose their school lunch money.

Thus today’s inane system, in which kids from Taos to Tallahassee are held hostage to a counterproductive maze of federal rules that dictate dollars yet waste resources and stymie local innovation. Schools stage bingo nights when staff coach parents to minimize their salaries on forms so that a school qualifies for Title I (low-income) funding. Parents fight to get their kids labeled “special needs” to score an individualized education plan and extra federal resources. (IDEA stands for Individuals With Disabilities in Education Act.) In recent years, the threat of losing federal funds also sent districts scurrying to comply with Joe Biden’s transgender directives.

Need extra bucks? Concoct a need for teacher development (Title II), tot up non-English speakers (Title III), bulk up on shop classes (Perkins V grants), show a plan for “well-rounded education” and “safe and healthy students” (Title IV, Part A). Money will flow, though only after studies, evaluations, assessments, surveys, training, certifications, complete exhaustion and total submission to a one-size-fits-all federal formula for success. That formula has sent $1 trillion to schools since 1979, producing a perfect inverse correlation of plummeting education scores. 

Yet note what these federal funds have in common. The money, ostensibly for “the children,” all goes to the adults—to hire more counselors and special-ed teachers for those IEPs, more administrators to run programs, legions of staff to input data. And guess what? Most of those adults belong to a union local of the National Education Association or the American Federation of Teachers. Because the keeper of the treats was, is, and always will be Jimmy Carter’s thank you for teachers union endorsements. Randi Weingarten controls the clicker.

A head-scratcher of this hard-charging administration has been the afterthought nature of education so far. Yes, Mr. Trump has taken action to eradicate critical race theory and transgender ideology from the classroom and sports fields, and in January he issued an executive order directing the Education Department to favor school-choice programs in grant programs, a huge shift in direction. 

But he didn’t mention school choice in his address to Congress this week, and has yet to devote major time to the topic. For a president who in his first term called school choice “the civil rights issue of our time,” that failure to elevate education reform is a bizarre missed opportunity—on both practical and political grounds.

Republicans are already on offense—and winning. School choice is exploding across the states, those laboratories of democracy innovating on scholarships, vouchers, savings accounts, charters. A new generation of conservative leaders are embracing next steps—accountability in standards, merit pay for teachers, reviving vocational education. This is proving a potent issue for parents, newly re-engaged after the Covid pandemic, keen on voting for reformers. The parents movement played a big role in recent Republican electoral successes.

Yet the wins are fledgling, and as the nation’s dismal report card proves, there are miles to go. Claiming this is a state issue is a joke: states haven’t controlled their education destinies for decades—thanks to the feds. Hammering the message that the Education Department is the source of decline—a giant bar to states truly innovating and competing for education gains—is a huge first step. And while congressional action is needed to abolish the department, lawmakers need presidential leadership to turn it into a movement-wide objective.

Short of that goal, Mr. Trump has a unique opportunity to work in lockstep with reform-minded governors to devolve as much education power as possible back to where it belongs—local, local, local. It’s past time to acknowledge that Washington’s stomp into education has been a massive failure—a union perk at the sacrifice of our kids—and needs to end.