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CV NEWS FEED // Former Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos recently wrote an op-ed explaining why the Department of Education (DOE) should be shut down.
In her op-ed, published in The Free Press, DeVos explained that closing the DOE would not mean less funding for public schools.
She explained that the DOE is not responsible for directly funding schools; instead it redistributes billions of dollars provided by Congress.
“The department’s bureaucrats take in those billions, add strings and red tape, peel off a percentage to pay for themselves, and then send it down to state education agencies,” DeVos wrote. “Many of them do a version of the same and then send it to our schools. The schools must then pay first for administrators to manage all the requirements that have been added along the way. After all that, the money makes it to the classroom to help a student learn — maybe.”
She added that the DOE essentially functions as a middleman. “And like most middlemen, it doesn’t add value. It merely adds cost and complexity,” she commented.
DeVos also noted the dismal state of literacy and mathematical proficiency among students, pointing to the DOE’s failure to help students.
“How bad is it? Seven in 10 American fourth graders are not proficient readers, meaning they struggle with reading grade-level literature and comprehending informational texts,” DeVos wrote. “Forty percent graded out at ‘below basic,’ meaning they struggle with basic comprehension. In math, the picture is similar: six in 10 fourth graders are behind in math.”
She continued, “The gap between the highest and lowest performers has grown by 10 percent since 2019. Don’t be fooled into believing this is a Covid-19 by-product. The lowest performing eighth-grade readers are significantly worse off than their peers were in 1992, the first year the NAEP [National Assessment of Educational Progress] was administered.”
DeVos then noted the many cultural failures of the DOE, such as allowing men to participate in women’s sports, and failing to address attacks on Jewish students after the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
DeVos argued that each of the DOE’s functions could be better performed by other institutions. Congress could send funding directly to states and schools; the Department of Justice could address civil rights issues such as racism; and banks in the private sector could take care of student loans, providing better interest rates than a government agency.
“With those issues solved, a federal Department of Education would no longer have any pretext to exist,” DeVos concluded. “While it is true that no federal agency has ever seen its doors closed, there must be a first for everything. On the merits, the Department of Education has earned such a historic distinction.”
