45 years of failure: A bureaucracy built for unions, not students

Since the first days of this administration, outrage has been building in the fake news media and their teacher union financial backers at Education Secretary Linda McMahon and President Donald Trump over the prospect of dismantling the Department of Education.

This past week, with the adoption of several quantifiable actions to make their dream a reality, liberal furor has bubbled over.

But no one seems to want to look at the facts: For 45 years, the agency has been one of the most expensive failures in the federal government.

The DOE was created in 1979 by President Jimmy Carter as a political favor to the teachers unions, and since then, the agency has consumed more than $3 trillion in taxpayer money while producing virtually nothing to show for it. 

What was billed as a way to “improve education nationwide” has become a bloated bureaucracy that drains resources, lowers standards, and protects union power at the expense of students.

The numbers speak for themselves.

Reading scores for 13-year-olds have been flat for decades. Only 27% of America’s eighth graders are proficient in math. Only 31% can read at grade level.

In the greatest nation on earth, with the largest education budget in the world, that’s nothing short of a national embarrassment.

And yet the money keeps flowing. Nearly 47 cents of every federal education dollar never makes it to a classroom. It disappears into paperwork, compliance, regulatory hoops, and administrative waste. Federal mandates multiply, outcomes stagnate. Taxpayers spend more, students learn less.

If you’re defending the Department of Education, you’re defending these failures.

The truth is simple: Washington doesn’t teach kids. Teachers do. Parents do. Local communities do. 

The idea that a distant federal bureaucracy can, or ever has, improve student learning is a myth perpetuated by the unions and the political class that benefits from their influence.

For decades, the teachers unions have treated the Department of Education like their personal policy arm. They use it to block reform, resist accountability, and push ideological agendas. During COVID, they held America’s children hostage, lobbying to keep schools closed long after the science was clear. 

They fought efforts to raise expectations, restore discipline, or teach the basics. They demanded more money while outcomes plummeted. And the DOE backed them every step of the way.

The shutdown from which we’re just now emerging isn’t chaos. It’s a correction. 

A correction of decades of failure, waste, and union-driven policy that has set an entire generation back. 

It’s the first serious opportunity in American history to return control of education to the people who know children best: parents, teachers, and local communities.

States will now have the opportunity and responsibility to take charge of their own classrooms. That’s where authority belongs. Not in a federal department that has proven incapable of putting students first.

Ending the Department of Education is not a partisan stunt. It is an overdue acknowledgment of reality: The federal model has failed, and America’s kids cannot afford another generation of declining standards and bureaucratic excuses.

This moment gives us a chance to rebuild to raise expectations, restore discipline, empower teachers, and bring parents back into the center of their children’s education.

We can return to the fundamentals that made this country strong – literacy, numeracy, civics, and character.

Shutting down the Department of Education isn’t radical. What’s radical is pretending this failed experiment ever worked.