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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