RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://tomklingenstein.com/can-the-department-of-education-be-used-for-good/

Can the U.S. Department of Education be put to good use? Forty-six years of experience — it opened its doors in 1980 — have persuaded many Americans that we would be better off without this arm of government. But efforts to amputate it, beginning with Ronald Reagan’s attempt in 1981, have failed. It is a lot easier to persuade Congress to add to the national bureaucracy than to take away an entrenched instrument of state.

Dislike of ED has many tributaries but one main source: the belief that education is something properly left to students, to families, and to local institutions — not the federal government. ED got much of its initial support from special interest groups representing teachers, and it continues to this day to favor programs that benefit teachers and educational bureaucrats over the needs of the citizenry.

A concise summary of this indictment can be found in Lindsey Burke’s essay in Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise. Supporters of Kamala Harris, of course, have excoriated Project 2025 and called out Burke’s essay in particular for calling for the abolition of ED. Donald Trump, moreover, has distanced himself from Project 2025 and never shown interest in uprooting ED.

This leaves open the possibility of attempting to put ED to good use if Trump manages to take back the White House. What might that look like? Can it be done?

The guiding principle of such an effort must surely be that education serves a real national purpose. As soon as that door is cracked open, all manner of well-meaning (and some not so well-meaning) reformers come crowding in. Some say national purpose is now best defined as “anti-racism,” and ED does its part by advancing the DEI agenda. Others say our national purpose is the pursuit of “social justice,” and ED can advance this by dismantling the system that privileges the American middle class.

Those are two of ways in which the national purpose of American education is subverted. There are plenty of others, but I want to focus on what I take to be the genuine national purpose of education, and that is to sustain the nation. We need our schools and our schooling (in whatever form it takes) to prepare young people to play positive and meaningful parts as citizens of our self-governing republic.

In my organization, the National Association of Scholars, we call this “the promotion of virtuous citizenship.” If that sounds too old-fashioned, think of it like this: we want young people to grow up understanding the difference between freedom and tyranny. We want them to recognize their own rights and the rights of others. We want them to realize that with their rights come some obligations. And we like them to appreciate that they are the beneficiaries of generations who have struggled and sacrificed to make their freedom possible.

It wouldn’t be too much a stretch to say that sustaining the nation requires that young people develop a grasp of the rule of law and an acquaintance with our founding documents. This can be adjusted to the age and ability of the student, but it should always be infused with the right attitude. What attitude is that? I’ll tread on somewhat more contentious ground by saying it is love of country — fellowship or brotherhood in the broad sense.

This is not a matter of enforcing a doctrine. Children, and especially teenagers, will question and doubt, which is part of the freedom America gives them. But we live in a time when many of our schools immerse children in disdain for their own country. Teaching the young to elevate racial and ethnic identity over shared citizenship is wrong, as is the cultivation of resentment, victimhood, and fragility. Presenting America as the summation of every injustice ever committed in its history is a radical distortion of our past. Teaching children that they are pre-doomed by capitalism, war, technology, or climate change is likewise to raise them to live in fear and apprehension. They deserve, as members of a free republic, to approach life with confidence knowing that they have a large say in their common future.

If we are to have a Department of Education, its mission should be to “sustain the nation” by taking steps to infuse these values into the nation’s curriculum. To someone who would say it is none of the federal government’s business to infuse values in children, I would say that ED does that right now — only the values ED now promotes are starkly the opposite of what I have just described. ED currently serves as an oracle of American weakness, division, and perfidy.

I fear in writing this I will be accused of glib generalization. Let me add some context. My organization has been embarked for some time on a project we call the Department of Education Audit. It is not an “audit” in the technical sense of tracing the flow of every dollar, though we have paid some serious attention to ED finances. Rather, we have focused on the policy priorities of ED, the organizational scaffolding of these policies, and the ways in which ED’s priorities are carried into the nation’s schools. Our finished report will not be published until January, and I don’t wish to get too far ahead of it.

But for a little detail above the granular level, ED runs more than 200 programs. Its 2024 official budget was more than $79.5 billion. An $18 billion share of that went to “Local Educational Agencies” (LEAs), which essentially means school districts, for the purpose of assisting children from impoverished backgrounds: Title I. It is a form of welfare, except that the recipients are not the children or their parents but the services and service providers.

Fourteen billion dollars went to Special Education.

Twenty-nine billion goes to Pell Grants for students of limited means to attend college.

Over and above ED’s official $79.5 billion budget, ED also disbursed $106 billion in the form of student “loans” which may or may not ever be collected.

All told, K-12 schools receive about 11 percent of their revenue from ED. This is surely enough to give the Washington bureaucrats a major say in what the schools do in other areas. Promoting leftist propaganda, transgenderism, “social-emotional learning,” climate hysteria, and 1619 Project mythology may not show up in the spending on impoverished children or special education (though in fact it may be in there too). But those massive programs have eligibility requirements that the schools must meet, and ED has never been shy about threatening a school’s eligibility if it fails to follow suit on the woker parts of its agenda.

It may be unfortunate that things are this way, but out of misfortune comes an opportunity for a future president. The same leverage used to promote wokery can be used for “the promotion of virtuous citizenship.” This would clearly require some housecleaning and reassignments of bureaucrats who cannot be trusted to carry out a program of such a different character. But it points to a way forward that would leave most of the ED budget untouched. That means it is politically feasible.