Hillsdale president celebrates end of ‘Soviet’ US Dept. of Education, champions local school control

The U.S. Department of Education is a “bureaucracy-ridden system” with “more employees in public education today who are not teachers than the teachers; and that means it’s sort of like a Soviet system.”

That’s according to Dr. Larry Arnn, president of Hillsdale College – a school that has never taken federal education dollars.

During a recent interview on Mario Nawfal’s “69XMinutes” – a popular show on the X platform – Arnn praised President Donald Trump’s executive order, titled “Improving Education Outcomes by Empowering Parents, States, and Communities.” The order begins the process of dismantling the 45-year-old federal education department launched under President Jimmy Carter. 

To illustrate the complexity of the federal education bureaucracy, Arnn quipped that Title IV of the Higher Education Act “is about 500 pages” and “you have to employ six people to comply with it in your organization.” 

Arnn compared the federal education department’s bureaucracy to both the Soviet Union and China. 

“In China today, in every school, in every military unit, there’s a party officer or two to be watching over,” he explained. “And that means that we don’t delegate the doing of this thing down to the teacher, which we should. And the reason is, of all of the things in the world that can be centralized, education is last.” 

That’s because education, Arnn continued, “happens in the soul of the student. And if it doesn’t happen there, it doesn’t happen.” 

“So, control of the system should be as near the student as possible, and that means teachers and parents in school,” he said. “That’s the natural sovereign unit. It’s not difficult to understand at all. It’s just very hard to do.” 

The most “promising thing in public administration,” the Hillsdale president observed, is “the school reform movement raging in America.”  

Citing Hillsdale College’s participation in founding “100 charter schools,” Arnn noted, “We don’t take any money from the government, so they never pay us a nickel.” 

“In those charter schools, the ratio between non-teachers, including janitors and everybody, is something like one to six, to one to eight, in favor of the teachers,” he explained, adding: 

“There’s a majority who are not teachers in public education. And that’s the shameful thing … We have a crisis in America teaching reading. It’s a national goal that [students] should learn to read by the end of the 3rd grade in our schools … We never graduated a kindergartner who can’t read, and the reason is they’ve already taught themselves to talk. Every human being does, and talking and reading are the same phenomenon. And so, the way you teach reading, and this has been known for age old, is called phonics. Phonos is the Greek word for sound. Start with the sounds. They already know them, teach them to sound out the letters that are on the page, and three months later, they read. 

During an interview in Washington, D.C., following Trump’s signing of his executive order ending the federal education department, Arnn told The Daily Signal it was a “great day” and that the order was the “first step for doing what has to be done in education, which is to return the authority to sources and places near students.” 

The next step, he said, is to reform student loans, “so they’re not methods of control by the government over the process.” 

Additionally, Arnn said “special ed” needs to be addressed: 

“They can do that a hundred different ways. And then they need to give block grants to the states that encourage states to decentralize education. Right now, most of the bureaucrats and most of the money is at the state level … The federal government is a force for them to build more central authority. It should be a force for them to devolve down toward the schools. That’s where education happens.” 

As his order indicates, Trump’s overall intention is to allow “States and local communities” to determine most of their own education policies. But, as The Washington Stand reported Tuesday, some parents and conservative education advocates worry that those who live in Democrat-controlled states could see their lawmakers implementing even worse curricula than has been delivered by the federal Department of Education.  

As a result, these individuals are asking the president to consider bypassing state governments and directly fund “local school districts or parents through school vouchers,” the report states.