Shut Down the Department of Education
The Free Press, Betsy DeVos, 06.02.2025
Since its creation in 1979, the Department of Education has sent well more than $1 trillion to schools with the express purpose of closing the gaps between the highest and lowest performers. Today, those gaps are as wide as they have ever been, and by many measures, even wider.
Last week, the latest Nation’s Report Card came out, giving us a clear assessment of where student achievement stands. The report, published by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), tells us that in reading and math, most students were even further behind than they were in 2022. Which was worse than where they were in 2019. Which was worse than 2013.
How bad is it? Seven in 10 American fourth graders are not proficient readers, meaning they struggle with reading grade-level literature and comprehending informational texts. Forty percent graded out at “below basic,” meaning they struggle with basic comprehension. In math, the picture is similar: six in 10 fourth graders are behind in math.
The gap between the highest and lowest performers has grown by 10 percent since 2019. Don’t be fooled into believing this is a Covid-19 by-product. The lowest performing eighth-grade readers are significantly worse off than their peers were in 1992, the first year the NAEP was administered. In fact, their scores this year are the lowest in recorded history:
Consider this “Exhibit A” as to why the Department has failed at its mission and no longer needs to exist.
I can understand how that idea, which President Donald Trump is committed to advancing, might sound a bit radical. But having spent four years on the inside as secretary of education, struggling to get the department’s bureaucracy to make even the smallest changes to put the needs of students first, I can say conclusively that American students will be better off without.
Nothing could be more important to our success as a nation than having well-educated citizens. But don’t be fooled by the name: the Department of Education has almost nothing to do with actually educating anyone.
The Department of Education does not run a single school. It does not employ any teachers in a single classroom. It doesn’t set academic standards or curriculum. It isn’t even the primary funder of education—quite the opposite. In most states, the federal government represents less than 10 percent of K–12 public education funding.
So what does it do? It shuffles money around; adds unnecessary requirements and political agendas via its grants; and then passes the buck when it comes time to assess if any of that adds value.
Here’s how it works: Congress appropriates funding for education; last year, it totaled nearly $80 billion. The department’s bureaucrats take in those billions, add strings and red tape, peel off a percentage to pay for themselves, and then send it down to state education agencies. Many of them do a version of the same and then send it to our schools. The schools must then pay first for administrators to manage all the requirements that have been added along the way. After all that, the money makes it to the classroom to help a student learn—maybe.
In other words, the Department of Education is functionally a middleman. And like most middlemen, it doesn’t add value. It merely adds cost and complexity.
The only certain benefactor of the DOE’s existence is its patron saint: the teachers unions. After all, it was the endorsement of President Jimmy Carter by the biggest teachers union—the National Education Association—that gave us a federal education department in the first place. That original sin explains much of what’s transpired since.
We all know how unacceptable the situation is in K–12. But the results aren’t much better in higher education.
Consider the colossal fiasco the Biden administration made of FAFSA, the college financial aid form. Every parent of a college-aged student is painfully aware of the mess this became—as a result of a congressional order in 2021 to simplify the form, no less. The prior administration screwed it up so badly that even Sen. Bernie Sanders was left with no choice but to criticize them.
Simultaneously, the agency focused on “canceling” student loans, despite being told explicitly by the Supreme Court that its schemes were plainly illegal. A department so brazenly willing to defy the rule of law and the separation of powers is one whose existence should most certainly be reevaluated.
These financial and operational calamities alone make the case to shutter the department. But closing down the DOE would also bring an end—at long last—to federal ideological intrusion.
Look no further than the Biden-Harris administration’s radical Title IX regulation that, among many other defects, allowed men to play on women’s sports teams and invade their private spaces. This was ostensibly done in the name of civil rights protection, but it deeply eroded civil rights protections for women. This is only one example of how even a straightforward law like Title IX can be weaponized by the Department of Education’s bureaucracy against students, schools, the law, and common sense.
Title IX is not the exception to the rule. Think about the department’s negligence in responding to antisemitism as campus protests interrupted—and in some cases brazenly prevented—learning following the October 7, 2023 Hamas attacks. Or the department’s effort, in the early days of the Biden administration, to effectively bribe schools into teaching the discredited 1619 Project under the guise of a “civics instruction” grant.
Other examples are legion—and from both parties. Educators resisted the heavy-handed No Child Left Behind mandates from the Bush administration as much as they did the strings-laden Race to the Top program from the Obama administration. While they shared vastly different goals, they both featured the same core defect: heavy-handed federal intrusion into what have always been state policy matters.
The department’s mere existence as a political body—and make no mistake, what happens inside the DOE is very political—creates a magnetic pull toward overreach. As we are beginning to learn from the Department of Government Efficiency, when there is a lever of power that can be pulled, people in Washington just want to pull it.
Fortunately, there is a clear remedy.
First, Congress should send education funding straight to states and schools as a block grant. This would take away more than half of the department’s duties, while materially increasing the amount of funding going to educating students. Congress should also waste no time in passing universal school choice—giving education funding directly to families, not to schools or the education system—further improving the education landscape without growing the government.
Next, give the responsibility for enforcing civil rights law—from preventing discrimination to protecting students with disabilities—to the Department of Justice. It already has its own civil rights division that, unlike the DOE’s, can actually sue schools when they break the law. This would lead to more law enforcement and fewer agenda-driven “Dear Colleague” edicts that aim to reshape society, rather than enhance education.
Finally, put the student loan program in the hands of bankers, not education bureaucrats, ideally at actual financial institutions, or at minimum, under the purview of the Department of Treasury. The private sector, in particular, can offer better rates, terms, and quality than the federal government has proven capable of doing. This would also serve to curb runaway tuition increases, which have been fueled in no small part by the perception of “free” government money.
With those issues solved, a federal Department of Education would no longer have any pretext to exist. While it is true that no federal agency has ever seen its doors closed, there must be a first for everything. On the merits, the Department of Education has earned such a historic distinction.
Betsy DeVos served as the 11th U.S. secretary of education and is the best-selling author of Hostages No More: The Fight for Education Freedom and the Future of the American Child.