On Saturday, Amuse-X posted an article reviewing some of the history of the Department of Education and the impact it has had on America children’s education. The formation of the Department was an attempt to get President Jimmy Carter re-elected in 1980. Obviously, it didn’t work.

The article reports:

The Department of Education was not born of an educational emergency. It was born of a campaign promise. During his 1976 run for the White House, Jimmy Carter pledged the National Education Association that he would create a stand-alone, Cabinet-level education department, and in exchange the NEA gave the first presidential endorsement in its history. This was a union that had wanted a federal department for roughly a century, and that had never before put its weight behind a candidate. In 1976 it did, and the payoff in raw political muscle arrived immediately. Some 172 NEA delegates sat at the 1976 Democratic convention, the largest single bloc in the hall. Walter Mondale, whose own brother worked for the union, carried the promise to the membership. The transaction was not subtle, and the principals did not pretend otherwise.

…Now follow the money, because the scale is the point. When the Department opened in 1980 its budget, in constant 2024 dollars, stood at roughly $56.9 billion. By 2024 that figure had climbed to $268.4 billion, nearly a fivefold increase in real terms. In nominal dollars the jump is starker still, from about $14 billion at the founding to $268 billion today. Summed across more than four decades of outlays, cumulative federal education spending runs into the trillions, more than $4 trillion by reasonable accounting. And this is only the federal slice. Taken as a whole, American education spends at levels no other nation approaches. In 2024 the US led the world with $1.353 trillion in government education spending, with China a distant second near $906 billion. Our K-12 systems spend an average of $20,387 per pupil, third highest among 40 developed OECD nations. At the college level we spend $37,400 per student, behind only Luxembourg and more than double the OECD average. By every measure of inputs, we are not merely generous. We are first.

The article concludes:

So the conclusion writes itself, and it is not a call for one more reform or one more reorganization, the traditional Washington ritual of renaming failure. It is a call to finish what Reagan started. Gut the Department of Education. Return its genuinely necessary functions to the states that ran them competently for generations, and return its dollars to the families and classrooms the agency was supposedly built to serve. We have run the experiment. We tripled the money and we froze the mind. The kindest thing we can say about the Department of Education is that it faithfully served the adults who created it. The truest thing we can say is that it was never built for the children, and after 50 years and more than $4 trillion, the children’s own results have told us so.

Please follow the link to read the entire article. It tells a story we all need to be aware of.