Trump should keep his promise to scrap Department of Education

OPINION:

One of the first things President-elect Donald Trump says he will do when he returns to the Oval Office is close and disband the Department of Education.

He said: “We are going to send all education, [along with its corresponding] work and needs, back to the states. We want them [i.e., the states] to run the education of our children because they’ll do a much better job of it. … We spend more money per pupil, by three times, than any other nation, and yet we are [approaching] the bottom; we’re one of the worst. … We are going to end education coming out of Washington, D.C. … We are going to send it all back to the states.”

To this, everyone who cares about their children and the nation’s future should shout: “Amen! Please, Lord, may it be so!”

Getting education out of the hands of the federal government and giving it back to the states and local communities is one of the best ideas coming out of a politician’s mouth in the last 50 years.

An old saying holds that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting different results. What our federal government is doing right now in education is insane, and if we don’t change it, it will result in the collapse of our constitutional republic and doom our nation as well as our progeny to the dustbin of history.

Since 1979, when President Jimmy Carter established the Department of Education, America’s educational standing has been a disaster. On almost every scale, our nation’s schools are failing.

The National Center on Education and the Economy, for example, reports that on nearly all measures, public school students in the U.S. are outperformed by their counterparts in Canada, China, Estonia, Finland, Hong Kong, Japan, Poland, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan. In science, technology and math, our scores continue to plummet. Educational performance in the United States compared with the rest of the world is average at best, and in many cases a failure.

Time magazine agrees, as does U.S. News & World Report, The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and other news outlets. Even our government is forced to acknowledge that the preponderance of American students can no longer perform at basic proficiency levels.

Forty-five years after taking education away from local communities and thereby forcing its social engineering on the entire country, the Department of Education has effectively destroyed our nation’s ivory tower. The result is that today’s average high school graduate can’t do basic math, can’t read at grade level, doesn’t know the difference between a constitutional republic and a democracy and can’t even tell you what the ontological difference is between a man and a woman.

The Department of Education has doubled down on dumb and done precisely what the British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge warned of. We have educated ourselves into imbecility. This is not good education; it is insanity.

The only way to fix it is to do what Mr. Trump has said he would do. We must take education away from the swamp and return it to the people.

If we are to save our schools, local control and local government are the only solutions. Decent teachers don’t need Washington telling them what or how to teach. Competent school principals don’t need bureaucrats far away telling them what curriculum to use or what books to assign.

What makes anyone think that some oligarch knows more about how to educate our children than those trained educational professionals that the local school board has hired to do so? 

In my nearly 20 years as a university president, I never once had one of my professors tell me that they wanted the government to tell them how to do their job. They didn’t even want me to tell them how to do it, let alone some pompous politician. 

George Washington’s favorite Bible verse was Micah 4:4: “Everyone will sit under his own vine and under his own fig tree, and no one will make him afraid.”

This is the only solution to America’s educational emergency. It’s your vine and your fig tree. It’s your town, your community and your school. And they are your kids.

Only by taking all of this back and telling Washington to stay out of your business will we be able to make America and American education great again. 

• Everett Piper (dreverettpiper.com, @dreverettpiper), a columnist for The Washington Times, is a former university president and radio host. He is the author of “Not a Daycare: The Devastating Consequences of Abandoning Truth” (Regnery).