WASHINGTON — Who needs the U.S. Department of Education to stay just the way it is?
Not Education Secretary Linda McMahon, who sees it as her mission to be “the last secretary” of a vast bureaucracy known more for its aspirations than its successes.
In the meantime, McMahon wants to cut the behemoth down to size. So, in keeping with President Donald Trump’s agenda, McMahon ordered nearly 1,400 layoffs. Predictably, the usual suspects protested. The case made it all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which issued an unsigned order Monday that allowed the layoffs to proceed, pending further litigation.
The three justices picked by Democratic presidents dissented. Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote, “When the Executive publicly announces its intent to break the law, and then executes on that promise, it is the Judiciary’s duty to check that lawlessness, not expedite it.”
Lawlessness? It tells you everything when Sotomayor, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, thinks it’s illegal for a president to cut the bureaucracy. At least without the participation of Congress.
It’s hard to watch this scrap and not think about how much good will Big Education has squandered in the course of my career, particularly since COVID-19 closures showed work-from-home parents how the sausage was made.
More than 40 years ago, the then-new federal education bureaucracy was supposed to improve student learning. Yet only 31% of fourth-graders performed as proficient or better at reading in last year’s National Assessment of Educational Progress test; 40% of fourth-graders were below basic.
No surprise: According to a recent Gallup poll, 73% of adults are dissatisfied with the quality of public education.
“A lot of money gets spent paying people in the bureaucracy” as opposed to the classroom itself, Bill Evers, a senior fellow at the libertarian-leaning Independent Institute, told me. And, Evers reminded me, he’s a former assistant secretary at the Department of Education.
There’s a lack of rigor in public education, but also, too much politics.
Evers is a veteran of the Math Wars and the Reading Wars of the 1990s that pitted concerned parents against an establishment that wanted to reshape classroom instruction to echo its left-wing politics.
The education establishment tried to turn math into a political exercise, for which there were no wrong answers, but too many essay questions.
Trendy elementary schools embraced “whole language,” which, to the disadvantage of some young learners, was short on phonics.
Prolonged COVID-19 school closures, supported by teachers unions, kept students out of the schoolhouse. As Evers offered, “Under the supervision of the department, a year and a half of learning was lost, particularly with low-income kids.”
I don’t think that today’s K-12 students are going to be shortchanged because of some D.C. layoffs, at least not the way kids were left out in the cold during COVID-19.
In her dissent, Sotomayor wrote of her belief that the Department of Education safeguards “equal access to learning.”
But that’s not how the system really works.
Contact Review-Journal Washington columnist Debra J. Saunders at dsaunders@reviewjournal.com. Follow @debrajsaunders on X.