Should We Close the US Department of Education?

And to kick us off, we have Lindsay Burke.

Great.

Well, thank you, Nat.

I am not going to rehash arguments about how education is not an enumerated power of the federal government or how the department was born of a pact between a teacher's union and Jimmy Carter to secure his ascent to the presidency and their stranglehold over education.

You all know that.

I want to make three points as to why having US Department of Education has not served students well.

First, since 1980, there has been a fundamental misalignment between program expertise and program administration due to the creation of Ed as a cabinet level agency.

For example, Ed was never intended to operate as the nation's fifth largest bank, overseeing a $1.7 trillion outstanding student loan portfolio.

Winding down the department works to correct this fundamental programmatic misalignment, situating programs and partner agencies better equipped to manage them and to deliver results for taxpayers and students.

Through our interagency agreement with Treasury,

for example, Treasury, we are leveraging Treasury's expertise in managing highly complex financial systems to collect delinquent and defaulted student debt.

There are numerous other examples like career and technical education programs now being co-administered with the Department of Labor.

Section 117 foreign gift reporting now being administered by the national security experts at the Department of State.

and our partnership with DOJ on civil rights enforcement.

Because second, we know that having Ed as a cabinet-level agency has not delivered results.

Only one-third of students can read and do math proficiently.

We're still in the middle of the pack internationally, and the gaps between student groups are as large as ever, as Paul Peterson has documented.

The gap between the top and bottom decile by socioeconomic distribution, the 90-10 gap, was the equivalent of four grade levels worth of learning in 1965.

Today, it is still four grade levels worth of learning.

Centralizing education programs at ed simply has not improved outcomes for students.

But third, the onus is now on defenders of this status quo.

46 years after the Department of Education was established, what do we have to show for it? The thousands of web pages and assets related to the DEI agenda that were on the Department of Ed's website, which we've now removed.

the two-thirds of students who cannot read or do math proficiently, the reams of bureaucratic red tape that have mushroomed over the decades, binding the hands of state and local leaders.

By contrast, we have seen a historic increase in the number of applicants for numerous grants now being operated out of partner agencies.

Billions of dollars in grant funding is now flowing out of those agencies successfully.