The Case For Abolishing the Department of Education—in One Tweet

When you accidentally make the perfect case for your political opponents.

Last month, US Senator Mike Rounds (R-SD) introduced a bill to abolish the Department of Education.

Titled the “Returning Education to Our States Act,” the legislation is described as a “roadmap” for shutting down the department, which began operating in 1980.

“The federal Department of Education has never educated a single student, and it’s long past time to end this bureaucratic Department that causes more harm than good,” Rounds said in a press release. “Local school boards and state Departments of Education know best what their students need, not unelected bureaucrats in Washington, DC.”

The case for abolishing the Department of Education is strong, as Neal McCluskey recently pointed out at Cato. The department’s creation was almost an accident, a favor to teachers unions that fulfilled a campaign promise from Jimmy Carter. After eeking out a 20-19 vote in the House Rules Committee, it narrowly passed in the House (210–206) in 1979.

“In 1980, Republican Ronald Reagan ran for president pledging to kill it, but there was little congressional Republican desire to fight again,” writes McCluskey.

So the Department of Education survived, and kept growing. In 1980, the Department had a $14 billion budget. By 1990, its budget was $25 billion. By 2001, its had ballooned was $42 billion, and by 2010 to $63 billion. In 2019, its budget was $81 billion. In 2023, the Department of Education’s budget was $274 billion.

What did we get for this spending? Not much.

While those memes showing that the United States was #1 in the world in education until the Department of Education established are bogus, an abundance of data show there has been a steady decline in education achievement in the US that stretches back to the 1960s.

“After rising every year for fifty years, student scores on a variety of achievement tests dropped sharply in 1967. They continued to decline through 1980,” writes Linda Gorman in The Library of Economics and Liberty. “The decline was so severe, John Bishop calculates, that students graduating in 1980 had learned ‘about 1.25 grade-level equivalents less than those who graduated in 1967.’” (Bishop’s research can be found here.)

What’s astonishing is that, as Gorman notes, the decline occurred during a period in which class sizes were shrinking and education spending was surging.

All sorts of data demonstrate the precipitous decline in education over the last half century. (Ignore graduation rates, which are a meaningless metric.) NPR, for example, noted last year that reading and math scores had fallen to their lowest levels in decades.

But this is hardly necessary. Declining educational achievement is a reality even supporters of the Department of Education acknowledge. Consider this tweet, which I recently shared on Notes (where it has blown up):

“oh btw middle schoolers can't read. high schoolers can't write a proper essay, college students can't differentiate a scholarly based article vs propaganda, and adults cant tell when a picture is AI but sure, get rid of the dept. of education LOL”