For the White House press corps on Thursday, class was in session — and press secretary Karoline Leavitt was the teacher.
Speaking before President Donald Trump signed an executive order Thursday aimed at dismantling the behemoth known as the Department of Education, Leavitt was armed with some solid statistics documenting some results of the department’s decades of failure.
Not even Democrats should try to defend numbers like these.
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“The current status quo is failing our students. In fact, I have some facts right here,” Leavitt said, at about the 30-second mark in the video above.
“Thirteen-year-olds’ mathematics scores are the lowest they have been in decades.
“Thirteen-year-olds’ reading scores are the lowest since testing began over 30 years ago.
“Low-performing students are falling further behind.
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“One city, Baltimore, Maryland, in 2023, high schools had zero students who tested proficient in mathematics.”
Then she summed it up succinctly.
“American students are falling behind,” Leavitt said. “We’re not keeping up with our allies or our adversaries and that’s a major problem for our country.
“And the president is fixing it today.”
It’s a fix that’s decades overdue.
A creation of President Jimmy Carter and his Democratic Congress in the dismal year of 1979 (inflation, the Iranian hostage crisis) the Department of Education has been a bipartisan blot on the country’s governance that’s lasted through seven presidencies, including Trump’s own first term — four Republican and three Democrats.
And as Leavitt’s statistics show, it’s not working to actually improve education outcomes. (As an enforcer of left-wing priorities during Democratic administrations, it’s got a much more efficient record.)
No executive order from Trump can completely abolish the department. As a creation of Congress, it will take a congressional vote to close it completely.
But Thursday’s order is a great first step — a death sentence, as it were, even if the actual execution is a long way off.
Trump campaigned on ending the department. (“We’re going to end education coming out of Washington, D.C.,” he said in a September 2023 campaign video, CNN reported at the time. “We’re going to close it up – all those buildings all over the place and people that in many cases hate our children.”)
He’s already made moves against it, cutting its workforce in half.
And on Thursday, he was getting cheers from his supporters for keeping his word.
#BREAKING: President Trump has officially signed an executive order directing the Department of Education to be DISMANTLED
Our children’s education will now be HALF the cost, and multiple times better.
PROMISES MADE, PROMISES KEPT!
pic.twitter.com/UZygJW4qCW— Nick Sortor (@nicksortor) March 20, 2025
The DOE has done more to harm and interfere with actual education more than anything else.
Return any legitimate functions it may have to the States.
Protect homeschooling as an option for parents who are unhappy with their State’s education efforts.
Watch test scores rise!— Stoat ن (@Furrystoat) March 20, 2025
Former teacher of 30 years here: WHOO HOO!
— Libby (@LibbyWorking) March 20, 2025
It isn’t just conservatives who see the department for the failure that it is — or at least it shouldn’t be. The reality of decades of failure is too plain to see.
Way back in 1983, the department commissioned a study of the U.S. educational system by a National Commission on Excellence in Education.
The commission’s report was titled — appropriately, and disturbingly enough — “A Nation at Risk.”
After an introduction, its first page included these sentences:
“If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war. As it stands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves.”
Those words are as true in 2025 as they were four decades ago. And as Leavitt’s statistics showed, precious little has changed in the intervening years. (And COVID can’t be blamed. Check out a report from 2018 that’s as depressing as anything else you’ll read on the subject.)
With Trump’s action Thursday, maybe the lesson will finally start to sink in.
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