How Trump can teach the Department of Education a lesson

livemint.com:

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Donald Trump vowed during his campaign to dismantle the Department of Education. He said it to wild applause at his rallies, and it isn’t a crazy idea.

Nor is it a new one. President Jimmy Carter signed legislation establishing the department in 1979 after making a deal with the National Education Association for their endorsement. In 1980 Ronald Reagan ran for president pledging to kill the department—which wasn’t an agency that had outlived its usefulness so much as one that had no use to begin with.

The Education Department’s main functions include sending states money to help fund low-income school districts, though that’s something Washington managed before the existence of a stand-alone education department. It also enforces civil-rights laws and manages student loans. There’s no reason, however, that the Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights couldn’t be absorbed by the Justice Department, and the outstanding loan portfolio could be handled by Treasury.

Doubtless these are the kinds of efficiencies that Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy will recommend to the new administration. For Mr. Trump and many Republicans, however, the Education Department’s problems extend well beyond its redundancies.

In their view it and its personnel have come to represent much that is wrong with education today. Two-thirds of American children are unable to read with proficiency, yet education bureaucrats are obsessed with trans rights, DEI initiatives and ensuring that elementary-school libraries are stocked with pornographic texts. People who have a problem with someone who swam on the boys team last year swimming on the girls team this year are attacked as bigots.