President Trump can close the US Department of Education. Here’s how

U.S. Parents Involved in Education (USPIE) fully supports President Trump’s platform to close the U.S. Department of Education. Our organization believes we must maintain a balance of power between states and the federal government. America’s Founders wisely designed this balance to ensure the freedoms of our citizens. In many ways, the federal government has become too powerful, undermining our freedom to operate effectively.

Our mission since our inception in 2015 has been to close the U.S. Department of Education and end all federal education mandates because we understand that this is where the majority of nefarious pedagogies originate and are incentivized with federal dollars. A recent example is the perversion and decimation of Title IX forcing schools to allow boys to invade girls’ locker rooms and compete in girls’ sports with a threat to withhold federal funding for noncompliance.

Moreover, despite dramatic increases in federal intervention and funding in the government school system since the 1960s, educational achievement has not improved. The most widely used measure of school achievement is scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), which shows no significant change. Efforts to improve educational outcomes for low-income children have also been expensive and unproductive. Even the federal college grant and loan programs have been ineffective for students. The evidence is inarguable, the federal government’s intervention in education has been a dismal failure.

We’ve researched state versus federal education spending over time and on average, most states only derive 10% of their education budgets from the federal government and the cost for states to comply with excessive regulations could outweigh the benefits. The accumulation of federal rules has suppressed innovation and competition in state education systems while generating vast paper-pushing bureaucracies.

Although this experiment with federal control of local public schools has gone on for half a century now, it has failed. We need to stop treating children like guinea pigs in some social engineering laboratory and start embracing children as human beings to be supported and inspired to achieve their own dreams and aspirations.

The U.S. Department of Education has existed because it is about control and not about children. Control through federal dollars is used to bribe and blackmail states. It has also been about pushing the public/private partnership agendas leading to Crony Capitalism proliferating in toxic testing and data collection of students.

That is why our organization has developed a blueprint describing how to close the U.S. Department of Education (USED). Elimination of federal intervention can be achieved in five steps:

1. Send all program management and funding to the states, including Pell Grants for college.

States already have the needed infrastructure to operate most federal grant programs. State officials report that most of their staff simply oversee and manage federal education programs. In addition to managing USED programs, states have their own preschool programs and should be able to incorporate the funding for Head Start. The funding for Free and Reduced Lunch could be incorporated into the many food programs managed by states.

2. Repeal all laws permitting federal intervention in K-12 education starting with ESSA.

As programs are being moved to states, the U.S. Congress should repeal the Every Student Succeeds Act of 2016 (ESSA). Some claim ESSA was written to decrease much of the prescriptive federal control asserted under the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002 (NCLB), but it still authorizes the Secretary of Education the power to accept or reject state education plans.

3. Privatize college loan programs through savings and loan institutions.

Private lending would work like mortgage lending: students would be approved for specified funding based on the strength of their loan application, which would include future employment prospects. This will make loans realistic to future earning power. Students would learn to be more savvy consumers, and the private lending model would make colleges more responsible.

4. Eliminate all offices and divisions in the U.S. Department of Education and related spending.

The cost of overhead and bureaucracy to administer programs that have clearly not benefited children is truly a waste. In some regards, it is an employment program providing jobs for thousands of bureaucrats, but this money could be put to much better use.

5. Reduce federal tax collection, shifting education revenue responsibilities entirely back to thestates.

Since the federal portion of state K-12 education spending, though large in dollars, is about 10% in each state, restructuring tax collection to recover, or streamline, the funds needed is feasible. It is also necessary to finalize the extraction of the federal government from intrusion in K-12 education policy and regulation.

The USPIE “Blueprint to Close the USED” expands on our assertions and proposals. It is time to make education great again!