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The Trump administration is putting the pressure on. Here are a few examples.Our colonial ancestors were the most literate in the world. By 2023, American students ranked at a near 30-year-low compared with students from other developed nations on international tests. That, despite the U.S. spending more per pupil than most other countries in the world.
The latest national test scores showed that students are “falling dangerously behind in math and reading,” a threat to the nation’s economy. Not since 2000, when the test began, has this large a percentage of eighth-graders performed below “basic” level in reading. Merely one third of eighth-graders are “proficient” in math or English.
What has changed?
Federal control over elementary and secondary education — control that has increased dramatically in recent decades. With that control has come a dramatic increase in spending under the U.S. Department of Education and its predecessor agencies, from $4.5 billion in 1965 to $40.2 billion in 2016 to $268.35 billion in 2024. The Education Department funds more than 100 subsidy programs, and each comes with regulations that extend federal control into state and local education.
A substantial amount of K–12 funding comes from other agencies as well, including the Departments of Agriculture, Health and Human Services, and Labor. This funding along with that of the Education Department brings 2024 funding to more than $320 billion.
Angry American voters made it clear they wanted change. President Trump has responded with his intention to close the unconstitutional Department of Education and return control to the states and schools. The plan is to start with massive cuts in funding for unnecessary and/or ideological programs.
The first spending cut by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was $900 million for the Institute of Education Sciences. IES is a research arm of the Education Department that tracks student progress and outcomes, evaluates the effectiveness of federal programs, and oversees the administration of national and international student tests.
Although IES claims to be “research-based, neutral, fair, and non-partisan,” it encourages educators to use the Gloria Ladsen-Billings Marxism-infused Culturally Responsive Pedagogy, creating student leftist activists.
Advocates warn that less money means that the IES will be hampered in its ability to provide information for policymakers, researchers, families, and taxpayers about the progress of K–12 and college students. To be sure, less money will hamper the ability of the IES to advance leftist propaganda.
Democrat Sen. Patty Murray said, “An unelected billionaire is … taking a wrecking ball to high-quality research and basic data we need to improve our public schools.” If their research is so terrific, why has student academic achievement continued the downhill slide for decades? It’s going to take a lot more than data to improve public schools.
After the release of information about the ideological corruption at the Education Department and its sprawling NGO network, USDE announced a spending cut of $350 million for the Regional Educational Laboratories and Equity Assistance Centers that organized racist and sexist training.
The Education Department canceled ten contracts totaling $336 million with REL, which purportedly supports applied research, development, and technical assistance activities. Its real purpose? Promote Marxist ideology. The Regional Educational Laboratory Midwest has been advising schools in Ohio to undertake “equity audits” and “equity conversation.” That is the code term for Marxist Critical Race Theory, centered on supposed oppression of non-whites by whites.
The Education Department terminated grants to four Equity Assistance Centers totaling $33 million. According to the department, the EAC program “plays a vital role in ensuring that all students have equitable access to learning opportunities, regardless of their child’s race, sex, national origin, or religion.” Its actual role? Support DIE, Critical Race Theory, and gender identity for state and local education agencies as well as school boards.
Next, the Education Department announced a cut of more than $600 million in grants to institutions and nonprofits for teacher training on divisive ideologies, including “inappropriate and unnecessary topics such as Critical Race Theory; Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI); social justice activism; ‘anti-racism;’ and instruction on white privilege and white supremacy.” The press release stated that several of the grants went toward recruitment strategies for teachers and staff based on race — discrimination toward whites.
Before the federal control over K–12, there were no mandated state curriculum standards, state exams, or state-approved textbooks. Lessons were centered on academic learning, not on sex, gender, white supremacy, oppression, or other ideologies. Teachers dressed as professionals rather than drag queens. Chewing gum and talking during class met with swift punishment. Anything goes now in our public daycare centers.
With the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, schools began to change dramatically. Federal subsidies provided for teacher training, educational research, school libraries, textbooks, school technology, ad infinitum. The act beefed up school bureaucracies with “grants to strengthen state departments of education.” With the creation of the U.S. Department of Education in 1979, new federal legislation with more control and spending took off like a rocket — straight up. Since 1980, Education Department spending has increased 371.6 percent.
The Education Department is a patronage scheme for left-wing ideologues to disperse trillions of dollars to universities, schools, and NGOs to promote their left-wing line. Nearly all federal funding is a guise for establishing a statist government that uses education to create compliant citizens for population control.
America had the most highly educated workers in the world without the need for massive research about student progress. The American public already knows about student progress — or lack thereof. Parents understand all too well what is going on in public schools. That is precisely why they are facing down hostile school boards and yanking their offspring out of public hellholes. The public now knows that teachers are brainwashed by colleges with the Freire philosophy: teach young students they are oppressed, and teach them how to engage in activism for leftist social change.
Education will never improve until the federal government is out entirely and we return to the education model that made American workers the best educated in the world. For centuries after the first colonists landed in the New World in the 1600s, there was not a centralized public education system. American students were taught independence and creativity that resulted in millions of inventions that made America rich. Today we have dumbed down, dependent students who require safe spaces to accommodate their zoned out mental instability and gender confusion. Yet those who are ignorant about the history of education naïvely believe we can reform our current system.
Defunding and abolishing the Education Department must be more than just one option among several. If it is only downsized, like a wild green onion in our yards, it will grow back quickly with future weak leaders and politicians desperate for money and power.
Control over education must be returned to the people and the states now, where the Constitution placed it.
Carole Hornsby Haynes is an education policy and curriculum consultant, historian, classical pianist, and entrepreneur. More of her articles can be found at her website.
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