Or, in the immortal words of Ripley nearly 40 years ago, "Nuke the entire site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure." 

For even longer, conservatives have argued to close down the Department of Education, although the Wall Street Journal developed amnesia on that point this week. They have made two arguments: first, the federal government has no jurisdiction on education policy, and second, their intervention makes things worse. 

Betsy DeVos, who served as the Secretary of Education in the first Trump administration, writes today at the Free Press to confirm the second argument. Despite over a trillion dollars in spending, mandates, and other interventions during that period, outcomes are getting worse rather than better. DeVos provides the data and calls the situation irretrievable:

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[.]

How can this level of investment in education have come up with no improvement at all? First off, DeVos reveals that it wasn't an investment in education at all. It was an investment in bureaucracy featherbedding, and that investment succeeded beyond almost all measure:

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.

DeVos has even more criticism for the DOE's handling of higher education. I don't want to excerpt any more from an excellent essay that should be read in full, but she raises many of the broader concerns I raised in my October 2023 essay, "Decolonize Academia Now!" DeVos has more specific criticisms over how the previous administration politicized and radicalized the DOE the last four years that should be read in full, as well as the department's attempt to hijack legislative power in self-appropriating $400 billion to pay off student loans. 

That past four years and the exposure of corruption within the federal bureaucracy already have Republicans in Washington cheering on dramatic cuts. DeVos' argument may finally break the logjam of action on the status of the Department of Education, Fox News reported earlier today:

Republican lawmakers who spoke with Fox News Digital this week named several federal offices that they wanted to see audited or scaled back by Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

Rep. Andy Biggs, R-Ariz., rattled off a list of suggestions when speaking to Fox News Digital, "OSHA, EPA, Department of Education, ATF."

But most coalesced around the Department of Education as a worthy next target, amid rumors that Trump could soon sign an executive order dismantling the Cabinet agency.

"In order to get buy in, you could eliminate the Department of Education, but you would take at least a portion of the money and give it back to the states in the form of block grants or something like that," Biggs suggested.

DeVos also suggests that the DOE funding be transformed entirely to block grants. That seems like a dangerous idea, however; it will not take long for left-wing media to cherry-pick outcomes from that in an attempt to regenerate the administrative state to manage the spending. And to some extent, that argument is valid; we've basically block-granted USAID for decades, and how well did that work out?

Instead, we should just eliminate DOE and its funding altogether. Since not much of the existing funding actually reached the education process, the only impact its absence will have is to dry up resources for bureaucrats. States and local communities should fund schools, so that they can exercise the greatest possible local control over their operations and policies. That is precisely what school boards are for, and why parental engagement with them used to be crucial until Merrick Garland and Joe Biden declared it to be "domestic terrorism." 

As for higher education, the case for any continued federal involvement is even weaker. Let colleges and universities compete in an open market with full restoration of pricing signals. They can teach whatever they want and charge whatever they want, but without the massive subsidy spigots of student loans and federal grants, they will have to make the case for a return on investment for their Academia indoctrination ... or start offering a real education at a fair price instead. 

In other words, decolonize it all from the Washington DC space. It's really the only way to be sure.