It is very likely that the United States Department of Education (DOE), which was begun in 1979 under President Jimmy Carter, is soon going to be gone. President Trump has repeatedly spoken of transferring its student loan portfolio to the Treasury Department and returning the responsibility for public schools to the states.
It is difficult to argue that the DOE has done much of anything to improve student academic outcomes over the past 46 years—public education has, sad to say, been in a free fall for many decades—but it should be pointed out that the three biggest factors that have wrecked our public schools have been entirely outside the control of the bureaucrats in Washington, D.C., although it is likely the case that their ideological rigidity pushed them toward solutions that only exacerbated the problems they claimed to fix.
The single most important cause of declining educational standards and outcomes is one that has caused a great many difficulties beyond the schoolhouse doors of our nation: the apocalyptic breakdown of many America’s families.
Every day in every way teachers are struggling against a killing tide of single parenthood, divorce, toxic boyfriends and girlfriends, household drug and alcohol abuse, generational dysfunction, and the inevitable financial devastation and emotional damage inflicted on children and adolescents by deficient or absent parents. A child who has spent the evening desperately trying not to cry is not going to be ready to learn in school the next day; a teenager who has been in a physical confrontation with a caregiver who doesn’t care enough to control their own rage will be primed to explode in class tomorrow instead engaging with the school’s curriculum and teachers.
No federal or state program with a clever acronym and abundant grant funding can reverse the daily toll of familial catastrophe inflicted upon the fragile psyches of our country’s youngest and most vulnerable. The emotional scar tissue left behind by a lifetime of neglect and abandonment will make even the most well meaning efforts to teach necessary academic content seem both irritating and inconsequential to a young person damaged by the damaging adults around them.
It is perhaps little wonder that for many decades victimhood has come to define so many individuals, and mental health problems afflict an ever growing segment of our society, many of whom are ready to inflict the next generation of trauma on their own children.
The national rejection of personal accountability and responsibility in favor of blaming others for one’s mistakes and missteps is an understandable outcome of the harms done by disastrously bad parenting. However, the consequence has been a societal embrace of finger pointing and blame deflecting, which has opened the door for divisive—and ultimately futile—programmatic responses to individual pathologies such as Critical Race Theory and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion bean counting that proposes our nation as a whole is to blame rather than one’s own inability to easily rise beyond the grievous damage done by moronic parents. The monetization of victimology has further entrenched the refusal to look inside oneself for solutions; after all, the “experts” are continually assuring us that some bigot is to blame for the wreckage of our lives.
Finally, if one bundles together the collapse of American families and the sad belief that everyone else is to blame, the result is what is driving teachers across our nation out of their classrooms: a steep decline in student classroom behavior and academic expectations that has turned teaching into a job for martyrs. If you happen to know two public school teachers, you probably know one who is dreaming of quitting the profession and regaining their sanity.
Spending the day dealing with students’ emotional breakdowns and rage is understandably exhausting and leaves little room for actual teaching and learning, so the school day becomes a shuffle from one boring and noisy classroom to the next instead of an adventure for the mind and soul. Given that most administrators and local school boards prefer passing students to flunking them, the steady erosion of academic standards has created the worst of all possible outcomes: We spend an enormous amount of money per pupil, roughly 40% more than the average for Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) member countries, yet we produce high school graduates who rank 18th on international tests.
Moreover, although excusing bad academic performance and classroom behavior might seem compassionate, it is no kindness to permit so many young people to grow up ignorant and uncouth, and this does nothing to prepare students for the rigors of higher education and the globalized and unforgiving workforce, which only perpetuates the cycle of dysfunction that is causing horrific harm to our nation as a whole. Although we can be thankful that a substantial percentage of students still grow up in solid, two-parent families that emphasize self-reliance and the development of a mature sense of personal responsibility, the harsh truth is many schools are barometers indicating a national storm right over the horizon, one which requires a dramatic change of course—right now.
The sad fact is that educational outcomes and classroom behavior will not be automatically improved by returning the responsibility for public education to the states. The same societal headwinds that have vexed our public schools for decades will not disappear if the bureaucrats overseeing the system are state employees rather than federal ones. The educational establishment’s dogged embrace of DEI, which teaches students their successes or failures are determined by a bigoted society instead of their own efforts, must be quickly excised, but this would not mean that parents and children long accustomed to blaming others for their woes and failures will change overnight. Personal responsibility means accepting blame for one’s own missteps, which involves painful self-reflection that few will welcome.
However, setting aside the obviously unnecessary expense of continuing to maintain an ineffectual DOE, state control of education will provide more opportunity for local innovation and allow for the electoral accountability that must naturally follow. Fifty “laboratories of democracy” cannot do worse than one sclerotic federal civil service, and more opportunities will exist for Governors and legislatures to align educational policies with other state priorities and programs, which might multiply the power of their expenditures. This will not be a miracle cure for all the societal problems that are reflected in the chaos in our classrooms, but it should put the responsibility for change squarely on local elected officials who are far more accountable to voters than a faceless and faraway bureaucrat.