After spending 13 years as a professor, Department Head, and College Dean at the University of Illinois, I learned a lot about higher education, its benefits, and its faults.
Don’t get me wrong. The University of Illinois is a first-rate institution. It is home to world-class faculty and facilities, including the nation’s most extensive public university research library, which contains over 15 million volumes.
But as with other colleges and universities, it has fallen victim to wokeness, political correctness, and weaponization by leftist Department of Education bureaucrats and policymakers, according to a new and damning report by the National Association of Scholars.
The NAS, which I belong to, is a non-partisan network of scholars and citizens united by a commitment to academic freedom, scholarship, and excellence in American higher education.
What its findings say about the Department of Education is disturbing but unsurprising.
“The Department of Education has grown like mold on the walls of a flood-ravaged house,” said NAS President Peter W. Wood. “With each new administration, with each new Congress, more and more responsibilities were heaped upon it. As the directives have heaped upon each other, rarely has anyone stopped to sort through the damage and take account of what should remain, what should go, and plan for a much-needed renovation.”
The Department of Education, commonly referred to as the Education Department (ED), has grown exponentially, much to its detriment, the report says. From its beginnings under the Carter administration to today’s bloated department, it has shown it cannot fulfill its primary purpose—disbursing funds to students and local education agencies.
What ED actually does with its powers has mixed effects. Most of what ED does centers on disbursing money. Its four largest responsibilities, which consist of the vast majority of the funds it handles, are:
- Title I funds for disadvantaged K–12 students, disbursed by complex formula grants to local educational agencies (LEAs) and states (2024 Annualized CR: ca. $18 billion);
- Special education funds for physically and mentally handicapped students, disbursed by different formula grants to the states (2024 Annualized CR: ca. $14 billion);
- Pell Grants for disadvantaged postsecondary students, disbursed directly to individual students for use at eligible postsecondary institutions (2024 Annualized CR: ca. $29 billion); and
- Direct student loans to postsecondary students, disbursed directly to individual students for use at eligible postsecondary institutions (2024 Annualized CR: ca. $106 billion).
“This sounds all well and good, but these funds rarely make it to students, states, and postsecondary institutions without steep subtractions. Much of the money disappears into red tape or arrives with socially engineered directives,” said NAS Director of Policy Teresa Manning. “ED has created an ever-growing number of grant programs that divert taxpayer funds to the imposition of progressive political agendas.”
And therein lies the tale. Rather than focusing on its core missions, the Department of Education has wandered into a swamp of leftist, woke, and socialist ideology. It has inflicted those radical positions and policies on K-12 schools, colleges, and universities.
For those and other reasons, President Trump insists that the education of America’s youth should be the province of the states, not a central government.
“It’s not working,” Linda McMahon, Trump’s pick to be the new Secretary of Education, told the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee last week. “I am all for the president’s mission — to return education to the states. I believe, as he does, that the best education is closest to the child.”
The NAS report cites the following as examples of the ED’s abusive political compulsion.
- Informal race and sex quotas;
- Disparate impact theory, especially as applied to race and sex;
- The textually unwarranted expansion of the scope of antidiscrimination law to include (sexual) harassment, sexual orientation, gender expression, and gender identity, and
- Corollary abrogation of liberty (due process, free speech, and religious freedom).
“ED activist bureaucrats and policymakers have done much to turn ED into an unaccountable and arbitrary vessel for progressive political goals,” the report continued. “The very structure of ED, which makes states, Local Education Agencies (LEAs,) and postsecondary institutions financially dependent upon the federal government, tends to degrade the localized structure of American politics and society and replace it with centralized and counterproductive control by the federal government.”
While the NAS report does not fully embrace the complete dismantling of ED, it favors “substantial action to rein in ED’s discretionary power. Policymakers should focus especially on restraining ED’s lawless “forgiveness” of student loans and its ever-increasing abuse of the Office for Civil Rights (OCR). ED has acted without textual statutory warrant for much of what it does for many decades—especially regarding the Biden administration’s policy on student loans—in ways that seem completely lawless.”
The NAS report says ED is now so sprawling and complex that federal lawmakers or the public cannot properly hold it accountable. ED has done particular damage by perverting civil rights law to enforce race and sex discrimination within and impose gender ideology on K–12 schools, colleges, and universities.
The report concludes by saying, in part:
“The United States Department of Education (ED) wastes much and harms much. It funds a tangle of programs, which range from the ineffective to the counterproductive. It has imposed a progressive political agenda on the states and school districts by tendentious misinterpretations of the meanings of “sex” and “discrimination.” The Biden administration ED has illegally “forgiven” billions of dollars of student loans.
“ED cries out for reform. It has acted increasingly egregiously, with ever greater reliance on procedures such as Dear Colleague Letters and case resolutions that sidestep the accountability requirements of the Administrative Procedure Act. At least since the Obama administration, it has engaged in extraordinarily tendentious misinterpretations of the meaning of “sex” and “harassment.”
“The Biden administration has slipped into outright illegality in its “forgiveness” of student debt. ED’s investigations, lawsuits, Dear Colleague Letters, and other means of administrative pressure have worked piecemeal—but the cumulative effect threatens to become revolutionary. If ED cannot be reformed, and swiftly, the case for eliminating it will become far more persuasive.”
NAS adds that reform cannot be timid. Policymakers must eliminate dozens of ED programs, which collectively disburse billions of dollars. Specifically, it suggests an end to all ED programs and regulations that foster race and sex discrimination. It proposes rescinding all ED policies that rely on flawed theories, such as Critical Race Theory and those that redefine harassment as discrimination and sex, to include sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression. It also proposes ending the lawless forgiveness of student loans.
As a former member of the Academy, I agree with what the NAS has reported and recommended. As a College Dean, I found that the obsession with diversity, equity, and inclusion sometimes distracted faculty members from their responsibilities as educators and students from their duties as learners.
I was often appalled at students’ dearth of knowledge of basic American history and their ability to use English in written assignments effectively.
I shouldn’t have been surprised. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), US students have had a concerning decline in reading and writing proficiency in the past few years.
I believe that deficiency is attributable to teachers and schools failing our students. During the Biden administration, the ED and America’s leftist teachers’ unions continued to focus on DEI, transgenderism, and gender dysphoria nonsense rather than proven educational curricula.
In some of our largest cities, only 30-35 percent of K-12 students are reading or doing math at grade level, which should be an earsplitting wake-up call. It isn’t.
It makes me wonder if we aren’t heading to a post-literacy society—especially when it comes to young people. Generations of K-12 children have put down books in favor of smartphones. Instead of turning pages in a book, they scroll on their mobile phones and watch inane videos.
I find it sad that American kids are not reading books for pleasure today. According to the NAEP, in 1984, the first year for which data is available, 35 percent of 13-year-olds reported reading for fun “almost every day.” By 2023, that figure was down to 14 percent, and 31 percent of respondents said they never read for fun. Kids are also faring worse on tests that measure their information literacy, including their ability to recognize reliable sources of information.
Even though the Department of Education does not dictate what educators teach in the classroom, it is clearly failing to oversee the implementation of the Every Student Succeeds Act, which requires states to monitor their schools’ progress and intervene in poorly performing schools in exchange for federal money.
Someone once said insanity is repeating the same mistakes over and over and expecting different results. That seems to be a fitting description of the Department of Education.
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Exactly!