Posted on 02/26/2025 8:08:47 AM PST by SeekAndFind
Speaking from the Oval Office, President Trump was asked how soon he wanted the Department of Education to be closed.
He responded:
Oh, I’d like it to be closed immediately. Look at the Department of Education. It’s a big con job. They ranked the top countries in the world. We’re ranked 40, but we’re ranked No. 1 in one department: cost per pupil. So we spend more per pupil than any other country in the world, but we’re ranked No. 40… if we’re ranked No. 40, that means something is seriously wrong.
There are two important points being made in this statement.
The first is the simpler one, and it is that the education Department is costly and hasn’t produced positive results.
And he’s certainly not wrong.
Consider that, since 1980, $3.6 trillion were confiscated from American taxpayers and deployed by the agency, and the outcome is that roughly 30% of American eighth graders can read at grade level. Only 26% of American high school students are proficient at mathematics.
But many of us have known for a long time that the education Department is an expensive failure. The second, more important point that Trump is making, is that it has always been a Democrat con job.
Democrats sold the Education Department to the public as an agency that is designed to help improve student outcomes and ensure access to education for poorer students. What it really is, unfortunately, is a machine for laundering money via patronage schemes to promote Democrat policies nationwide.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
One can only hope.
How does the con-job work?
In very specific and historical terms, it works like this:
Say, Barack Obama decides that some states have adopted what his administration believes is a very progressive and exciting new set of standards for education called Common Core, and they want to apply this progressive standard nationwide. Problem is, some states don’t agree that it’s a good idea, so they don’t voluntarily adopt the standard. So, they bury billions of dollars for education purposes in a $700-plus billion piece of legislation that no one in Congress took the time to read.
Then, the Department of Education works closely with selected friendly tribunals like the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) to decide which states would be awarded those allocated billions for education. PARCC is, as you might have guessed, foundationally tied to Common Core.
Common Core was all just a voluntary program, Americans were told. “State adoption of the standards was by no means mandatory,” said the Common Core State Standard Initiative at the time. But if a state decided not to adopt Common Core standards in public school curricula, the federal government would threaten to withhold federal money from the state.
This understandably pressured state and local politicians to adopt what was being pushed by the federal education Department, so by 2010, 40 states had adopted the Common Core standards for English and math (and we know how that turned out). If they didn’t comply and accept the money, then it would be reported that the state didn’t get however many millions of dollars from the federal government, and the politicians’ reelection would be in jeopardy.
Dept of Education is a progressive-marxist social-engineering political agency.
As such, it actually HURTS real “education.”
I KNOW I kneejerk with this response every time I see The Great One’s name being compared to Trump.
The guy saved the country or there might not be one to save for the great President Trump.
He was a man of great courage, a class act, and he LOVED this country...he started a market surge that except for brief periods hasn’t ended.
He freed half a billion people and the words “tear down this wall”...when he said them, I thought he had lost his mind.
Could never happen
I LOVE what Trump is doing.
But let’s not forget..The Great One saved our butts, just like Trump is doing now.
Anything that the Demonicrats are for (and Republicans are not) should be voted down or eliminated, because it would soon end up as totally corrupt or traitorous.
Yes.
For those not old enough to remember, before the Departments of Education, Health and Human Services, and Urban Development, there was the Department of Health Education and Welfare, established in ‘53 under Eisenhower. So the Feds have had their nose in education for a while now.
Big difference, I think, is teacher unions and professional educrats couldn’t dominate HEW like they do DOE.
As a retired teacher, I have watched and done my best to resist, the decline in standards and expectations over the course of my career. I certainly got a better education from my teachers in the 50s and 60s than kids get today. Don’t even get me started on education via Chromebooks.
George W Bush pushed Common Core and No Child Left Behind and the man is a congenital idiot. What he has to do with education is solely that his father had the connections to push him into schools where he didn’t belong and made him feel that he was intelligent.
Bill Gates belongs in prison.
Keeping with the theme:
Return To Sender: A Letter for the U.S. Department of Education
https://torrancestephensphd.substack.com/p/return-to-sender-a-letter-for-the
That’s why I have said that ending DOE is only part of the problem and no longer the largest part. The educrat\unionista cartel now controls education at the state and county level. You could end the DOE today and nothing much would change.
Common Core was all just a voluntary program, Americans were told. “State adoption of the standards was by no means mandatory,” said the Common Core State Standard Initiative at the time. But if a state decided not to adopt Common Core standards in public school curricula, the federal government would threaten to withhold federal money from the state.
Now, consider that Common Core is all but dead today, and it is yet another failure on the ash heap of progressive failures. But take the methodology by which Common Core was wedged into nearly every state in America, and substitute Common Core with Critical Race Theory (CRT) or transgender ideology, both of which are unpopular, yet still infecting public education everywhere in America today.
I had to work in San Diego out of necessity after Obama was inaugurated. All of my contracts were canceled late on the afternoon of Jan 20, 2009. It was a very expensive separation from my family who stayed in our home in Idaho while I paid $750/month for a 10x14 bedroom in a private home. I retained my employment and assets.
During the 2009->2014 exile, I observed San Diego politics. The schools were provided large numbers of iPads. In short order, they were stolen, damaged, used to view porn. Hardly the fabulous boon to education that was touted. It sounds like Chromebook became a successor to iPad with a bigger screen and keyboard.
I isn’t what is being spent but what it is being spent for.
That 10% of funding that does come from the department, as small as it is, is targeted to help the nation’s most vulnerable kids in big cities and tiny, one-stop towns. It also helps pay for costly special education services. But that isn’t quite the use.
Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, who reminded her colleagues that the Education Department doesn’t control schools. In fact, federal law makes it illegal for the department to tell them what or even how to teach, she said. So they can’t force a school or a state to conform to DOE ideas. It is the systems that are conning the parents and students. So it isn’t matter of education value, it is fraud and misuse of the system by the schools, governors, and state legislatures for that 10% by using it for content that is not within the scope of the department. And both of them, DOE and the locaL schools, are making money while the parents pay for it from both angles and get a substandard education because something has to be given up for programs not within the objectives of the determination of what the DOE is supposed to be.
wy69
"Democrats sold the Education Department to the public as an agency that is designed to help improve student outcomes and ensure access to education for poorer students. What it really is, unfortunately, is a machine for laundering money via patronage schemes to promote Democrat policies nationwide."
FR: Never Accept the Premise of Your Opponent’s Argument
Respectfully to PDJT47, he needs to quit relying on the hearsay, rumors and gossip about the Constitution that he is evidently getting from his Ivy League-indoctrinated “constitutional” advisors.
Let's close down the Department of Education with three excerpts from the writings of respected constitutional experts concerning state sovereignty regarding schooling.
From related threads ...
Both President Thomas Jefferson, in a State of the Union address, also Justice Joseph Story, had both indicated that the states would first need to appropriately amend the Constitution in order for Congress to be able to dictate, regulate, tax and spend, and otherwise stick their big noses 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, 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 [emphasis added].” —Thomas Jefferson: 6th Annual Message, 1806." (Jefferson is indicating that Congress cannot tax and spend in the name of intrastate infrastructure imo.)
"The power to regulate manufactures is no more confided to congress, than the power to interfere with the systems of education, the poor laws, or the road laws of the states [emphasis added]." —Justice Joseph Story, Commentaries on the Constitution 2, 1833.
"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.
I KNOW I kneejerk with this response every time I see The Great One’s name being compared to Trump.
The guy saved the country or there might not be one to save for the great President Trump.
He was a man of great courage, a class act, and he LOVED this country...he started a market surge that except for brief periods hasn’t ended.
He freed half a billion people and the words “tear down this wall”...when he said them, I thought he had lost his mind.
Could never happen
I LOVE what Trump is doing.
But let’s not forget..The Great One saved our butts, just like Trump is doing now.
*******************************************************************************
Ah - “The Great One”.
Yeah, he did some things I didn’t like, but they were tiny things.
He won The Cold War. That sets him in the history books.
I am satisfied. And grateful.
Trump has done a few things I don’t like, but in the grand scheme these little things don’t count for much.
He’s trying to save our butts and I support his efforts, Hope he wins.
For those doubters, take a look at Argentina and Milei. If that doesn’t convince you there is NO HOPE for you.
Can’t help industrial-strength stupid.
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