President-elect Trump nominated Linda McMahon last Tuesday to lead the Department of Education, an agency which he has repeatedly expressed the need to reform. McMahon, the head of the Small Business Administration during Trump’s first term, will be presumably tasked with transferring education policy from the federal government to the states as well as implementing the proposals outlined in Agenda 47.
The President-elect has stated numerous times that he plans drastic changes for the Department of Education, including possibly disbanning it, but he has yet to release an official plan.
Voices on the left and the right speculated that the proposals laid out in Agenda 47 will dismantle the Department of Education. Outlets on the right focused on the reasoning behind the eliminating it, whereas outlets on the left speculated if the move is even possible.
Ingrid Jacques (Lean Right bias) wrote an article for USA Today (Lean Left bias) arguing, “in the decades since the creation of a federal education department in 1979, taxpayers have spent hundreds of billions of dollars and not gotten much in return. The department consumes roughly $80 billion a year, and that number keeps going up even as test scores have gone down. The department employs more than 4,000 people, and this bureaucracy has saddled states with lots of red tape. All the oversight, however, hasn’t translated into better results for kids.”
A Vox (Left bias) writer wrote, “much of what Trump and MAGA activists claim the agency is responsible for… isn’t actually the purview of the DOE; things like curriculum and teacher choice are already the domain of state departments of education. And only about 10 percent of federal public education funding flows to state boards of education, according to Valant. The rest comes primarily from tax sources, so states and local school districts are already controlling much of the funding structure of their specific public education systems.”
An article in The Federalist (Right bias) argued, “getting rid of the DOE or at least diminishing its role would only be the first step. The next, much harder step would be voting for politicians and policies that would implement school vouchers for students, merit pay for teachers, expanded school accreditation, and much more standardized testing to hold educational institutions accountable.”
In Bloomberg (Lean Left bias) Matthew Yglesias (Lean Left bias) said, “The Department of Education is not above criticism, especially its policies concerning student loan relief and student discipline. But it mostly does boring stuff like administering grants that support disabled students or school systems with a lot of poor children. And it’s not a major line item in the federal budget. If the president-elect wants to seriously reduce federal spending, he needs to look at either the military or programs for the sick and elderly.”
