For 45 years, the Department of Education has claimed to speak for the nation's teachers. This month in Dallas, the secretary running it sat in a ballroom full of them and let them speak for themselves.
Linda McMahon came to the Teacher Freedom Summit to argue that the best decisions in education are made closest to the child, and that the department she leads should hand its authority back to the states. She made the case, then spent the afternoon in roundtables asking classroom teachers what that shift would mean for their students. The willingness to ask is itself the news. An institution built in teachers' name spent four decades deciding what teachers needed without much bothering to consult them.
That gap is worth sitting with, because it runs to the department's origins. Jimmy Carter had promised the National Education Association something it had chased for decades, a Cabinet-level agency of its own. The union answered with the first presidential endorsement in its century-long history. Carter delivered, and the department opened in 1980. The department was a political achievement before it was ever an educational one.
Four decades later, the returns are in. Washington has spent well over a trillion dollars through the department, and the country has little to show for it in the skill that matters most. On the 2024 Nation's Report Card, only 31 percent of fourth graders read at NAEP's demanding Proficient standard, and 40 percent could not clear even the Basic benchmark. The national reading line has barely moved from where it sat in 1992. An agency that cannot point to progress after 45 years is in a weak position to demand more of it.
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The alternative is already being tested, and it starts by trusting the people closer to the classroom. Iowa received a waiver to merge four federal funding streams into one, cutting nearly $8 million in compliance costs and redirecting it to classrooms over four years. Louisiana followed, freeing more than $18 million through 2029. In January 2027, a new federal scholarship tax credit takes effect, offering taxpayers up to $1,700 for donations to organizations that fund K-12 scholarships in participating states. Each measure moves a decision away from a federal reviewer and toward a state, a school, or a family.
The unions' sharpest objection is that pulling back the department would abandon vulnerable kids. It would not. Title I dollars for low-income schools, special education under IDEA, Pell Grants, and civil rights enforcement all exist by statute, and none depends for its legal existence on a standalone Department of Education. Interagency agreements have already begun shifting day-to-day administration to departments with relevant expertise while those protections stay in place. Congress can protect the dollars and retire the department. Treating the two as inseparable is a political preference dressed up as a legal command.
This is the divide Dallas exposed. Union officials built their influence around an ever-larger federal role in education. The teachers who filled that summit want the reverse, and they said so directly. Trust us with our classrooms. Spend the money on students instead of paperwork.
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