Time to Pull Plug on DOE Drain?

A WSJ op ed recently torched the US Dept of Education as President Trump is reported to be mulling an executive order to begin dissolving it so as to halt decades of education decline.

Columnist Kim Strassel held nothing back in agreeing with “an overdue Trump embrace of one of the boldest conservative movements” to emerge in response to horrific “report cards” revealing student incompetence: “Never has a department been more deceptively titled. To listen to this week’s wailing, the federal Education Dept is the beating heart of our nation’s schools, its demise a straight line to an illiterate nation. The reality: Our federal education bureaucracy takes no part in the daily, hard-fought grind of teaching. It doesn’t step in classrooms, interview teachers, or debate pedagogy. It doesn’t meet with parents, coach sports or set bus schedules. [Its] only job is to act as keeper of education treats.”

Quite an indictment. And, quite a drain, Ms. Strassel stresses, on the taxpayer’s pocketbooks to the annual tune of $80 billion. Perhaps most galling, she says, is how the bureaucrats “hive off a dollop for their own salaries, while the rest they dispense as if rewarding a pet.” The result? Concluded Strassel: “Today’s inane system, in which kids from Taos to Tallahassee are held hostage to a counterproductive maze of federal rules that dictate dollars yet waste resources & stymie local innovation … The money, ostensibly for ‘the children,’ all goes to the adults – to hire more counselors” and other hangers on, all controlled by the teachers union chief Randi Weingarten, Jimmy Carter’s thank you for the union’s endorsement” way back when. And you wonder why student test scores stink as much as the Department of Ed? Congress, Strassel suggests, it’s time to help Trump pull the plug.

Davd Soul