The Department of Education does not control public schools.
However their funding (indirect through third parties like states or localities or non profits) can have the same effect—since schools like money.
Eliminate the department and the money and a lot of bad things stop happening.
That’s correct.
"However their funding (indirect through third parties like states or localities or non profits) can have the same effect—since schools like money."
The states have never expressly constitutionally given the feds the specific power to dictate policy, regulate, tax and spend in the name of INRAstate schooling.
In fact, President Thomas Jefferson had clarified, in a State of the Union address, that the states would first need to appropriately amend the Constitution before Congress could stick its big nose (my words) into intrastate schooling, something that the states have never done.
"The great mass of the articles on which impost is paid is foreign luxuries, purchased by those only who are rich enough to afford themselves the use of them. Their patriotism would certainly prefer its continuance and application to the great purposes of the public education [all emphases added], roads, rivers, canals, and such other objects of public improvement as it may be thought proper to add to the constitutional enumeration of federal powers.” —Thomas Jefferson: 6th Annual Message, 1806." (Jefferson is indicating that Congress cannot tax and spend in the name of intrastate infrastructure imo.)
"From the accepted doctrine that the United States is a government of delegated powers, it follows that those not expressly granted, or reasonably to be implied from such as are conferred, are reserved to the states, or to the people. To forestall any suggestion to the contrary, the Tenth Amendment was adopted. The same proposition, otherwise stated, is that powers not granted are prohibited [emphasis added]." —United States v. Butler, 1936.
That being said, the post-16th Amendment ratification (direct taxes) feds have also been ignoring that the Supreme Court had clarified that Congress cannot appropriate taxes in the name of state power issues, public school policy uniquely (military training aside) a state power issue.
"Congress is not empowered to tax for those purposes which are within the exclusive province of the States." —Justice John Marshall, Gibbons v. Ogden, 1824.
And since elite desperate Democrats and RINOs have also weaponized public schools against the family unit imo, if I understand correctly, it's good that PDJT47 is going to get rid of Education Department.