After 30 years advocating for Dept. of Ed abolition, it’s finally here

For 30 years, being a lonely voice in education to call for the Department of Education to be shuttered, it’s satisfying to finally see its demise as President Donald J. Trump put his signature to the executive order.

Having the honor of teaching college for decades, I’m one of those who received a graduate degree in education partway through the journey. Teaching has been one of the most gratifying experiences of my life, watching students “get it.” There’s something special about seeing the “wow” factor cross the face of a listener, telling the teacher the student’s brain has been penetrated with a bit of knowledge that will benefit their lives down the road.

What’s truly heartbreaking is having to witness the downward spiral of student comprehension as curricula were invaded with convoluted and illogical lesson plans instituted purely for social engineering. The agenda was slowly implemented over time, but took a pincer-like hold in the mid-1980s that accelerated over the last 20 years, over which time our ministry has exposed the corruption through infonovels and articles.

Instructing education majors in the 2000s, it was already apparent how much the texts had replaced common sense with redefined verbiage and incomprehensible concepts. In the master’s program where I was enrolled, politics took the lion’s share of focus. Teaching standards were based on half-baked ideas of dispensing with “authoritarian” doctrine and replacing it with “feminist” philosophy that was never defined. It was a nebulous feeling that had evidently been retagged SEL (Social Emotional Learning) which concentrates on emotion to problem solve. Yes, eye rolls are appropriate when one considers how emotion clouds critical thinking instead of enhancing it.

Thankfully, after being in the teaching field for a couple decades prior to receiving the M.S., I managed to garner a modicum of respect from professors when diplomatically challenging the nonsense that, frankly, was refuted by some text authors within their own treatises. Professors often cherry pick the chapters within their chosen textbooks to justify their conclusions, some of the papers and books which they write themselves. (That’s the ‘publish or perish’ motto.) When a contradiction is pointed out by a student who is more a peer than a captive mind, some, if they are openminded, will vacillate or compromise.

The outcome was that, while teaching ed majors, I was able to sidestep much of the folly enshrined in the national standards in favor of practical classroom applications. There were individuals who took umbrage with the idea that they had to submit competently completed assignments in order to receive a high grade. Being a product of the “everyone’s a winner” teaching philosophy, there were students who believed they deserved an “A” just for periodically showing up to class, and could be combative if an “A” was not received.

Despite that, in an era of shipping kids through class to graduate without developing serious skills, my peer and student reviews remained outstanding. There’s reason to believe that was attributable to supplying individual attention and true interest in seeing students achieve their goals, using the same teaching style that had been taught to me, and was being passed on to them.

During all those years in college classrooms, teachers’ unions had power to negotiate every instructor’s pay, whether or not they held membership, and I never did. The unions drove the creation and allocation of grants, most of which were managed and doled out by the Department of Education.

As a grant writer for educational programs, the dozens and dozens of pages of grant opportunities listed very few that directly benefited students, especially K-12. It was appalling to read through grants designed for administrative augmentation (spending options), retreats (vacation), continuing teacher education (indoctrination), and a pitiable few to benefit K-12 equipment, building improvement or construction, and rarest of all, student learning activities.

Media is crying about the department’s dissolution causing problems with federal grant programs such as the one renamed the Pell Grant in 1980, after the DoEd was created. Prior to that time, the HEA (Higher Education Act of 1965) enabled the distribution of funds to individual states via Title IV – Student Assistance, and was determined by a Commissioner of Education. Students like myself were recipients of these college scholarships and work-study grants.

Also, unlike today, academic performance was scrutinized to make certain the recipients fulfilled their obligations. Within the last ten years, college instructors have reported directly to me about Pell Grant fraud they’ve witnessed, where students even drop out but continue to receive their checks.

The point is that these grants were administered by the states until the HEA was amended to create a federal apparatus to retain control of the funds in Washington, D.C., cutting down states’ input. Centralizing allocation of funds to a seat in D.C. made the new Department of Education’s operations subject to the heavy hand of teacher union lobbies, which focused on the welfare of education administrators rather than students.

Creating the department established the flourishing of educator-driven (no longer true teachers, in this opinion) agendas for elementary through college classrooms that were brought about by union influence. Parent and student engagement was diminished in the process.

There should be a reversal of how federal funds are awarded, if federal funds continue to be awarded at all, renewing their direction to the states for distribution where local involvement makes a difference to address educational needs in the community.

The department serves (hopefully, ‘served’) as a distribution center for funneling money to unions and colleges, where funds found their way back into pension plans, PACs, and politicians' pockets to supply more cash for the never-ending cycle. Most tenured professors were (still are) well subsidized, while adjunct faculty filled out a full curriculum on wages based on capitation or credit-hours incapable of sustaining oneself, let alone a family. Tenure isn’t based solely on an educators’ CV. Politics play a vital role.

It’s not certain that dissolving the Department of Education will impact tenure tracks or adjunct pay scales with unions still in full control of faculty hiring and remuneration. What it will do is deny the communist unions of a major slush fund for their pet projects.

Thirty years of calling for the abolition of the department may finally be in the cards, but it will take even more to dismember the unions and their influence over curricula. This is where states and local school boards must be populated by motivated parents and student advocates willing to battle the union beast that has devolved schools into indoctrination camps over nearly 170 years. That’s when the first teachers’ union was formed in New York.