Since President Ronald Reagan first promised to eliminate the Department of Education, the agency President Jimmy Carter created in 1979 as a payback to teachers unions for their campaign support, abolishing it has been a recurring theme in Republican politics.
But Reagan and subsequent Republican presidents faced the same reality: Dismantling a Cabinet agency is far harder than campaigning against federal overreach. Consequently, the department stayed, got bigger, and became the kind of entrenched bureaucracy the Founders warned us about.
But the Trump administration has now taken steps to dismantle it. And for Washington, D.C., a city that only knows how to accumulate power, this is a monumental moment.
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The case for getting rid of the department isn’t complicated. Centralization has failed. American students are falling behind despite decades of federal programs, expanding bureaucracy, and billions of wasted dollars. We’ve tried No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, and other top-down reforms.
The result has been more paperwork and test scores that haven’t really improved.
At some point, we have to ask whether the solution is actually the problem.
Education is fundamentally local. A high school in rural Montana doesn’t look like one in South Los Angeles. It doesn’t serve the same students. It doesn’t have the same challenges.
Federal mandates seem to treat this difference as a glitch that needs to be fixed rather than a reality to be accommodated. The result is a “one-size-fits-all” policy that ends up fitting no one.
The counterargument is that state control means inequality. Rich states will invest, poor states won’t. Some students will be protected, others will be abandoned.
Fair enough. But we already have inequality.
Mississippi spends far less per student than New York, though it achieves comparable results.
Achievement gaps are still huge. Vulnerable students are still underserved.
The federal department hasn’t prevented any of this, nor has it seriously tried.
What it has done is add another layer of bureaucracy, giving everyone involved someone else to blame when things go wrong.
That’s the core problem. Nobody is accountable.
States blame federal mandates. School districts blame state regulations. Washington blames poor implementation. And then parents have no idea who to call when their schools fail.
Return control to the states, and that changes. Your state’s schools are terrible? Vote out your school board, or maybe even the governor and state legislature.
Still terrible? Move to a state that takes education seriously. People already do this for more favorable tax climates and improved quality of life.
Some states will handle this transition poorly. Others will learn to innovate. That’s not a flaw in federalism. That’s the point.
In both business and government, competition produces better results than monopolies.
The Founders designed a federal system because they didn’t trust concentrated power, and they knew different communities would want different things.
Somehow, we decided education was special, that it required national uniformity managed by experts in Washington. Five decades later, we’re faced with, at best, mediocre results.
Dismantling the Department of Education won’t magically fix American schools. But it will force states to take responsibility for their own systems. Some will succeed, some will struggle.
Right now, we just have 50 states all doing poorly in slightly different ways while pointing fingers at Washington.
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Let’s not forget: Our Republic flourished for over two centuries without a Department of Education. Eliminating it is an experiment worth running.
We already know what the current system produces.
Aaron Withe is CEO of the Freedom Foundation
