Why libs should want to shut down the Department of Education

President Trump’s destruction of the federal Department of Education is overdue because the states, not the president, should decide education policy. Once the federal DOE is gone, we should get rid of the state DOE’s and let local school boards set the policies. Once the state DOEs are gone, we should have a beer and chill.

Of course there is too much money involved for this to happen. The money does not go to the classrooms but to six-figure school superintendents, contractors, union featherbedding, bureaucratic featherbedding and the like.

Education is the perfect place for scoundrels because no one follows the money and any proposal not to increase spending by at least the rate of inflation is reported by the media as anti-education. Hamas terrorists hide behind children. So do the educrats.

Oh wait. It’s DOCTOR educrat because they all have EdD’s now.

U.S. Government Spending reported, “In 1902 governments in the United States spent one percent of GDP on education programs. In the early 21st century, governments spend about six percent of GDP on education programs.”

We hit the 6% mark in the 1970s and test scores have stagnated ever since because as I said, the money doesn’t go to the classrooms.

That’s K-12 spending. Higher education is even worse as it exploded in the mid-1970s, a result of baby boomers going to college rose as never before and Congress opened the federal government spigot. The last I heard, we spent $108 billion a year—most of it in research grants—on colleges and universities, not to mention that $1.6 trillion ($1,600,000,000,000) we loaned students to pay their tuition and other expenses.

The money is coming in as if the colleges were Studio 54. PMA magazine reported last April:

The most seismic scandal struck in December 1978, when Studio 54 was raided by federal agents after investigations into Rubell and co-owner Ian Schrager. They were accused of skimming millions from the club’s earnings. In a scene that seemed straight from a movie, federal agents found bags of cash and drugs hidden in the club’s ceiling and back rooms. This raid brought to light the financial misdealings and tax evasion that Rubell and Schrager had engaged in, tarnishing the club’s glamorous image.

The subsequent trial was a media circus, capturing headlines and shattering the illusion of Studio 54 as merely a fun, albeit decadent, escape. Both Rubell and Schrager were convicted of tax evasion, resulting in prison sentences and fines, and their legal troubles signaled the beginning of the end for Studio 54’s era of unchecked excess.

Don’t worry. None of the idiots in the ivory towers are going to jail.

But money is power and the man in control of that power now is President Trump. The New York Times finally noticed.

It reported, “Trump’s Battles With Colleges Could Change American Culture for a Generation.”

Could? It has already begun. The Trump Triplets on the Supreme Court were behind the Students v. Harvard case. Justices applied the 14th Amendment and the discrimination against Asian and white students ended. Schools are using SAT scores to determine admission, not color.

And DEI offices are dropping like iguanas from trees when the orange groves ice over in Florida. Well, except for the part where the iguanas survive.

NYT is alarmed, of course, and it said, “The outcome of this clash over the purpose of higher education stands to shape American culture for a generation or more. If the president realizes his ambitions, many American universities—public and private, in conservative states and liberal one—could be hollowed out, imperiling the backbone of the nation’s research endeavors.”

Not to mention the impact on indoctrination of students into the weird world of radical leftism in which men get pregnant and physics is racist.

Oh, NYT gets around to mentioning that, reporting, “With presidential power magnified by a largely genuflecting Congress, Mr. Trump’s challenges to academic freedom and First Amendment protections have not provoked broad and visible public outrage. The sobering reality for university leaders is that Mr. Trump has the administrative upper hand, and academia has startlingly few vocal allies.”

Let’s talk about academic freedom and free speech, shall we? In the last election cycle, college professors at Harvard gave Democrat candidates $2,912,979 and Republicans $186,421.

For every buck they gave a Republican, they gave $15.63 to a Democrat.

Don’t get me wrong. It is their money and they can pretty much do what they want to with it. Just don’t lecture me on academic freedom.

Likewise, students can shout down conservative speakers. But spare me the hypocrisy of outrage over the First Amendment when Trump deports Hamas supporters.

Trump has grabbed colleges by their pocketbooks by withholding all that beautiful research grant money. The public loves it.

NYT reported, “Private polling conducted for universities shows that many people believe that these nonprofit institutions are anything but—one consequence of high tuition costs. Even though a college education almost always provides graduates with higher lifetime incomes, rising debt has made the value of a degree a matter of debate. Politicians have eagerly caricatured colleges as sanctuaries of intolerance and ‘wokeism’ where admissions processes have sometimes considered race or favored the well-connected.”

I blame FJB’s autopen. His repeated attempts to wipe of the books that $1.6 trillion in student debt—defying a Supreme Court order not to—have enraged taxpayers who really don’t care, Margaret, how high the tuition is is in the Ivy League. Legacy admissions also do not bother taxpayers because their kids have little or no shot at such an admission.

What taxpayers resent is having to pay the high tuition for the nepotism and DEI admissions.

And MAGA supporters reject what colleges produce: anti-American weirdos. There is a 40-point gap between college men and regular men, and a 52-point gap among women.

The Soviets and Red China forced their people into indoctrination camps. American communists improved that by having them go voluntarily and pay for it.

USA! USA! USA!

Roger L. Geiger, a professor emeritus at Penn State, told NYT, “Higher education has always been able to stand up and invoke its moral authority. What’s happened is they’ve simply lost that moral authority.”

They did not lose any moral authority. They gave it away. In December 2023—three months after Palestinians raided and raped, killed or kidnapped 1,400 people in Israel, the House called in Claudine Gay of Harvard University, Elizabeth Magill of the University of Pennsylvania and Sally Kornbluth of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to testify about demonstrations supporting the Palestinians.

NBC reported:

Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., the chairwoman of the House GOP Conference, asked Gay, Magill and Kornbluth whether a student’s calling for the genocide of Jews would violate student codes of conduct at their schools, but they repeatedly deflected the question.

Gay said in her testimony that “it depends on the context” in determining whether calling for the genocide of the Jewish people violates Harvard’s code of conduct.

How bad were they?

An FJB spokesman said, “It’s unbelievable that this needs to be said: calls for genocide are monstrous and antithetical to everything we represent as a country. Any statements that advocate for the systematic murder of Jews are dangerous and revolting—and we should all stand firmly against them, on the side of human dignity and the most basic values that unite us as Americans.”

Money ruins everything. Creating a federal DOE as an ATM helped destroy colleges. It is time to euthanize the agency. If Democrats were smart, they would help Trump end DOE.

But if Democrats were smart, they wouldn’t be Democrats.