Both Republicans and Democrats are spectacularly wrong about the Department of Education, though, as with most things in American politics, they’re wrong in very different and revealing ways.
Let us begin with our trusty Republicans, many of whom have grown fond of declaring that the Department of Education should be “abolished.” It’s a punchy slogan, well-suited for CPAC stagecraft and the loud echo chambers of talk radio. But like most populist mantras, it wilts upon contact with reality. The political appetite for eliminating the Department is, at best, tepid, and at worst, it provokes angry, hysterical reactions from voters.
Recent polling from Quinnipiac, Ipsos, and Inside Higher Ed all tell the same story: roughly 60% of Americans oppose abolishing the Department of Education. Even among Republicans, support is far from unanimous. Independents are overwhelmingly against it. And among college-educated voters, those most likely to influence suburban elections, the opposition reaches 70%. Simply put, there is no groundswell. The average voter, who may struggle to name a single Secretary of Education, nonetheless associates the Department with education itself. To propose its abolition, then, is to seem anti-education in the eyes of the public. And that’s a high intensity issue. It’s one thing to provoke 60% of the voters on some third-tier issue like U.S. Postal Service reform that nobody cares about. It’s quite something else to attack schools, and the children in them.
This is a case of ideological insularity. Too many Republicans mistake the mood of the room for the mood of the country. To borrow from Norm Macdonald’s wry assessment of Donald Trump, they often behave like they’d rather govern the room and the audience they’re in front of, than govern the whole country. They listen only to voices that echo their own, then assume those voices represent a national consensus. They don’t.
Now, none of this is to defend the Department of Education on its merits. Quite the contrary — it has, by almost every available metric, failed at its most essential task: improving student outcomes. For an agency with a $70 billion annual budget, the results are not just disappointing but scandalous. Literacy and numeracy remain stagnant, achievement gaps persist, and bureaucratic bloat thrives. It is difficult to think of a federal program with a more dismal return on investment.
But failure does not always call for annihilation. There remains a legitimate national interest in education—if only because an ill-educated citizenry is a danger to itself and others. Rather than abolish the Department, we should gut it, reform it, and reimagine it. A streamlined agency could exist to collect and disseminate transparent data, enforce standards of accountability, and most importantly, empower school choice through charters, vouchers, and competitive alternatives. In other words, the Department should become a catalyst for innovation—not a central planner.
And then there are the Democrats, who, upon hearing any critique of centralized education policy, reach for the same tattered playbook. “States’ rights,” they warn, is code—thinly veiled, they say—for segregation, slavery, or some other moral obscenity from American history. It’s the sort of rhetoric that flatters the speaker while insulting the listener’s intelligence.
Yet these are the same people who tremble at the idea of Donald Trump—or, in their fevered imagination, Elon Musk—having control over national education policy. And now that Trump is actively gutting the Department of Education, they’re in full panic mode. But this is exactly what they asked for. When you centralize power in Washington, you don’t get to act shocked when the wrong people win elections and wield that power against your values. So let me pose a question: If you believe the federal government is now run by malevolent lunatics, why would you want those same people deciding what your child learns, thinks, and reads? Wouldn’t you prefer local control, where you might actually have a say? Or are we to believe that authoritarianism is only dangerous when it comes dressed in red?
In truth, Republicans are no longer just fantasizing about dismantling the Department of Education—they’re actively doing it. And the base is cheering them on. But cheering isn’t planning. There is still no serious blueprint for what replaces the federal role in education beyond returning power to the states with, what, no accountability at all at the federal level? That’s the plan? Meanwhile, Democrats cling to centralized authority, even as they fear and loathe those now wielding it.
What’s needed isn’t more ideology, but more humility. Education policy must be judged by results, not slogans. And right now, the results speak for themselves.
The question is not whether the Department of Education deserves to exist. It is whether it can be salvaged from its own ineptitude, redirected toward empowering families, and reminded that its job is not to indoctrinate or administrate—but to educate.
