Linda McMahon–the last U.S. Secretary of Education?
Many of you have surely heard this news already; but I’ve looked forward for years to write this story.
President Donald Trump is expected to sign an executive order to dismantle the federal Dept. of Education (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/education-department-executive-order-eliminated-trump/). It was first reported that he would do this today, but it hasn’t happened yet, so who knows?
Why abolish the Dept. of Education?
America, the president said, is No.1 in the world when it comes to per-pupil costs, but only No. 40 (out of forty!) in the quality of the end product. Some $881 million–including $101 million for teachers’ “DEI training”–has vanished down the rabbit hole: according to Trump, “hundreds of millions of dollars in wasteful spending.”
Well, we always knew that about the Dept. of Education, didn’t we? Classroom hours squandered on belting the students with left-wing propaganda, programs to “transition” children to the opposite sex without parental knowledge or consent, etc., etc.
Can the president do this? Can he make it stop?
Frankly, I’m not sure. Congress created the DOE. A bill to get rid of it, we presume, would also have to pass through Congress. Donald Trump knows this. He must have something up his sleeve.
Meanwhile, Democrats and teachers’ unions are screaming bloody murder.
America rose to greatness without a federal Dept. of Education. It didn’t exist until the feckless Jimmy Carter ushered it in.
We’ll have to wait and see what happens next.
The DOE was first created by executive order and then codified by Congress. So Congress will have to back up whatever executive order the President issues. But Secretary McMahon has said her first goal is to reverse what the agency has done, to get educational direction back into the states, and then ultimately to oversee the elimination of the federal agency.
Once the federal DOE came into being, you should’ve seen how fast the state of NJ created a department of its own. I was a reporter at the time. I interviewed MANY local school board members who were dismayed by all the so-called “improvements” that were rung in.