We’ve all seen the outrageous stats for the Department of Education.
Until Donald Trump’s White House hit man Elon Musk sicced his Department of Government Efficiency on it, the Education Department had an annual budget of between $238 and $268 billion and employed about 4,100 bureaucrats.
This week, the department my father tried to kill in its infancy 45 years ago laid off about 2,000 Education Department employees. What will happen to all the billions the doomed department spends each year still must be figured out by DOGE.
Most of it – $68 billion to $150 billion – goes to higher education in the form of student aid. The rest is divvied up among K-12 schools ($40 to $60 billion) and smaller amounts for things like special ed and early childhood education.
Liberals are making the Education Department sound like it’s indispensable to America’s present and future.
But everyone in D.C. has always known that despite its huge budget, it doesn’t run classrooms or teach kids a thing. It funds public schools indirectly by sending the tax money Congress gives it back to the states, schools and students.
The Education Department has spent trillions on education in 45 years. Literally. Many other trillions have been spent by states and localities. And what has America got in return? More teachers, more administrators and dumber kids.
Fewer and fewer of our students can read or count at their grade level. In global rankings we come in 36th in math and 13th in reading. Our minority and poor kids are the biggest victims. Trapped in terrible city schools, too often they “graduate” with zero skills and no future except as a lookout for a drug gang.
The bureaucrats at the Education Department have slightly increased the number of poor students who get access to college and special programs, but it’s been at a huge cost.
It’s not just the money they’ve wasted. They’ve protected a rigid and outdated system of schooling and done nothing innovative or revolutionary to help our kids get smarter or give parents more choices.
Parents are not blameless for the failures of our public education. They’ve put up with lousy schools, lousy teachers and lousy school boards for decades, even in the red suburbs.
It took pornographic children’s books being placed in their kids’ school libraries before conservative parents woke up en masse and staged a political revolt.
One thing that has always bugged me about parents is that so many of them are afraid to hold their kids back a grade.
They are willing to risk their kids’ educations in the long run because the stigma of keeping their child back is too great, even if it’s exactly what he or she needs.
I was lucky as a kid to have smart parents who did what was right for me, not what looked good for them among their famous Hollywood friends.
For a bunch of personal and scholastic reasons, my father and my mother Jane Wyman had me repeat fifth grade in Los Angeles and 11th grade at a boarding school in Arizona.
It was not always easy for me or them at the time, but their decisions changed my life.
By the time I was a senior in Scottsdale, I was the smartest kid in the class, a member of the National Honor Society and the star quarterback who led our football team to the state title.
I finally became a success in school because my parents were wise enough to treat me like an individual, not a member of a group. So sometimes the best answer for a kid is what my dad and mom’s answer was – “Repeat the grade.”
At this point, no one is certain if the Trump-Musk tag-team will ever fulfill their campaign promise to make the Education Department disappear forever, but we can pray for a miracle.
One thing we know for sure, however, is that the unnecessary department Jimmy Carter created in 1979 has flunked out. It deserves to die and make my dad’s dream come true – 40 years too late.