What are your biggest worries if Trump does away with the US Department of Education?

From what I can gather, the Department of Education is one of the larger departments (budget-wise) of the entire government. Our country is getting dumber by the year. I’d suggest they aren’t doing their jobs correctly.

Also from what I can gather by reading what Trump was proposing is to set out some basic guidelines for what education should and shouldn’t be. The rest of the education is up to the states with the government being the administrators (at best) for the education system. And if a state wants to go totally radical they are allowed to do that, but then they don’t qualify for federal funding. This is much how Sweden set up their education system. There will still be some semblance of a Dept of Ed, but what Sweden did was let the states figure out what they wanted to do for schools. This was often outsource to companies that had all the plans for the education in a school. These companies would make bids for providing and overseeing their plans to the state. The state would review the bids and then tell the Feds what they were doing, submitting a proposal to them which included the plans, the curriculum, etc. The Feds would review this, ensure it met the basic guidelines, and provide money. That step would be done by a Dept of Ed. Apparently this works very well in Sweden and their populace is getting smarter every year.

@seawulf575 Department of Ed is not one of the largest budget wise. Plus, I think you just wrote even if the DoE is dismantled the fed would still give money to the states, so then it would still need a budget. Actually, you wrote there would still be a Dept of Ed, so I am really confused. The charter system already has schools show plans to the state and then funds are given to the charter. At least that is how it works in Florida, and I am pretty sure other states too. What you wrote sounds like the goal is to actually privatize more schools using tax funds? More private companies in there being the middle men or actual school ownership.

@JLeslie The lefty talking point is that Trump wants to do away with the Dept of Ed. That is probably true for many of the reasons I listed. But he has repeatedly stated that the Feds will continue to provide funding to the states for education. So whether he guts the Dept of Ed or just cancels it, some federal entity will pick up those things that he thinks are important for the Feds to get involved in with education.

And yes, I imagine there will be quite a big push towards privatization or at least accountability to the school boards to ensure the students are taught, taught well, and not subjected to political activism all day. In the end it’s very simple: what we are doing is failing our children and our country. It is time for major changes. The DoEd is about 3% of the budget. That’s more than international affairs, housing, energy, science or labor get. 3% of the budget is about $135B. That would be a stack of $1 bills that stretched over 9000 miles. That is a chunk of change to be spent on something that isn’t working.

In NY, my daughter attends public school. We live in an affluent district. As far as I know, the kids were taught “be kind” and about not bullying. I don’t think they were taught any political agenda beyond that.

@jca2 I know politics have crept into schools for years from my own personal experiences. When I was in 3rd grade (1968?) my teacher started talking to the kids about an upcoming election and who she thought we should go home to tell our parents to vote for. When my boys were in 2nd grade (an entirely different school system), they came home one day asking me how I was going to vote on a referendum that was on the ballot. ??? I asked them why they were asking. They told me that their teacher told them that it was very important for that referendum to pass and that if the parents didn’t vote for it then it meant they didn’t love their kids. Needless to say I went to the school to chew out the principal who brought the teacher down to share in the dressing down I was giving. She actually tried to say she didn’t say anything like that. Yet when I asked her how my 2nd graders could possibly have known what referendums were on the ballot, she balked. She finally admitted that she talked to them about it but claimed she never said that the parents wouldn’t love the children. So when asked about how they came to that conclusion…two boys, independently (in two different classes with this same teacher)...she finally admitted she may have made it sound that way.

And when you see videos like this where teachers are going on rants because Trump won, you know political agendas are being pushed. Videos like this also show that political stuff is being pushed in schools. This one truly amuses me because the teacher is an idiot by believing the Gadsen Flag had anything to do with slavery.

I don’t doubt that there are politics discussed in public schools, @seawulf575. I’m just saying that in my daughter’s school, which is public, there hasn’t been anything like that, so not all public schools have this issue. It’s possible that what’s told to the teachers in her school is not to discuss it, since it’s so divided. Not sure what year your kids were in school.

More people believing pseudoscience, dogma and propaganda.

That the brain drain from Canada to USA gets worse.

If you don’t already know how Trump feels about education you can get a pretty good idea from his money making “Trump University” scam that was accused of misleading marketing practices and aggressive sales tactics. Trump settled out of court in 2016 for $25 Million.

And now this guy is president elect with the power to comprehensively wreck the American education system. Very peculiar.

@seawulf575 Sweden’s formerly impressive education system is, unfortunately, on the decline. It’s been going downhill since the government (amidst protests) decided that instead of guaranteeing a national standard, it would have communities handle their schools independently. So if anyone’s telling you Trump is copying Sweden, know that he’s copying Sweden’s decline. If he copied what Sweden did very well in earlier decades, you’d get things like admirable teacher support, no grades until high school, schools for students of all backgrounds (no private school to opt-out), free lunch programs, and a national curriculum set by knowledgable and experienced educators.

@seawulf575 If it makes you feel any better, every Democrat I know would be completely against any teacher talking to students about their own political bias or having political paraphernalia in class with the exception maybe of a government class, but then it would have to be both or all candidates and neutral instruction.

^I think that is most true.
I just want the children taught what is considered factual. They can form their own opinions.

That’s how we raised most children in my friends circle.
Some turned out religious.
Some are somewhere in the LGBTQ + spectrum.

It’s unfortunate, because just because one doesn’t indoctrinate their children, doesn’t mean someone else will.

I can’t recall almost any, current politics talk, when I was in school. My class had some lady come talk to us, about George H. Bush (not the fuck up tard Bush.) She gave us all cookies, and that’s all I really remember.
I really liked GHB, and fully supported the first Iraq War.
I was young, and ignorant…

@longgone No one that I know (except me) has said that Trump is imitating Sweden. However, take a look at the links you provided. What they tell is a story of a change, the one that I said looked like what Trump was copying, that took Sweden to one of the better performing models in the world. It started to fail based on, what looks like (according to your first link) “more than a decade of manifestations of deep-seated and overlooked problems followed.”. In other words, they got slack. It goes on to say that one of the biggest contributors was that teachers weren’t really teaching and didn’t really care. Your second link seems to bear this out and show that they are attempting to put more controls in place to correct the course or fix the problem, if you will.

None of that negates the fact that the program itself actually did work. It does show a weakness you have to address. In fact, I might suggest that in many places the issue of teachers not teaching or caring might be a problem in the US school systems today. What I see with the articles is really more of a warning. You can’t put something in place and then walk away. You have to monitor it and question things that point towards a problem when they arise, not after they have festered for years.

But thank you for the links. It did make interesting reading.

@MrGrimm888 I think that is what Trump is actually trying to get at in our education system: teach kids how to think, not what to think. And I believe it is an uncomfortable truth that way too many levels of education have been taken to teaching what to think these days.

I have no worries about that. Leaving it up to the states is proper. The ultimate responsibility for educating children lies with the parents. The state is more accessible to them than a federal

I know when my husband was in the military that there was already a difference in education from state to state when my kids went to school. If it wasn’t for the board of education setting some national levels of education to be met then there will probably be huge differences of education from state to state. Meaning some states will do severe cut backs and kids in certain states will suffer for it. For one I can see some schools not bothering with advance science or math because only God matters and science is fake. Or history isn’t needed to be taught or only polite history is taught. An example may be. WWll happened but no mention of the holocaust or the cruelities. But I no longer have children in the game and if the country is okay with dumbing down our future generation then that’s on them.

@Pandora that is what Trump was talking about when he said to set standards. Basic goals without drastic variations. But his vision doesn’t take a whole Department of Education to set the standards and allocate funding. Things like revisionist history would be on the variations we shouldn’t have. But if you set goals, it should be up to the states how they get there. There shouldn’t be a huge difference in end product, but there might be different ways that different states go about it. Wyoming likely has different needs than New York so one size doesn’t fit all.

Unfortunately Wulf, it doesn’t matter if your assumption about Trump is correct.

His conservative underlings have been waiting for him, so they can insert Christianity not just back into, but in the forefront of education.

Texas is already trying to change public schools, and apparently they have the individual sate right to ignore the separation of church and state. Not sure how, but they do.

THIS is Project 25 Wulf.
It’s going to be a rush to try and make the country Christian.
This is going to be much easier, with Trump’s people getting him to strategically place conservative judges in the government.
That should stall/stop most legal efforts from people who want the constitution to be followed.
But. The constitution is now the second most important document in the US government.
The Bible, and people’s interpretations of it, are all that matter now…

School choice and the privatization of education will decimate public education.

This country will either rise or fall with our public education system.

Trump has made it clear that he loves the uneducated masses. This is not a man who will invest in public education.

They would like to privatize and profit from the whole institution like has sadly happened to the prison system.

Quite the contrary @raum , the powers that be want more gullible people. There will funding be incentives, for schools that adopt the agenda.
I’ve already heard that some Texas schools will essentially be missing out on a $40/student incentive to play ball.
Obviously, most public schools have been neglected by the fortunate, so they will likely jump at the money.

They’re going to force changes through, as fast as they can.
Some American children will be given a Christian based education. Easier to control…

Public schools cannot push religion. That’s why they’re pushing for vouchers, to move public funds into private Christian schools.

@raum Yup, tax money paying for religious education and/or tax money paying private corporations to educate children. Many Republicans want to believe the competition will improve schools, but all it does is take money and attention away from public schools. I lived in the Bible Belt, and a large portion of the white people out in the suburbs felt nothing could be done to help “those people” and didn’t want their tax money paying for their schools.

I stand corrected.

Texas just joined two other red states approving Bible-based curriculum.

I don’t even know which parts of the constitution are still applicable.

^I couldn’t believe it either.

Project 25….

@raum Did you ever watch that CNN Special report about Texas that I keep linking on Q’s? I highly recommend it if you haven’t.

@seawulf575 Trump is going to leave it up to each state to decide what they want to teach. And just because a child may be growing up in farm country doesn’t meant that he or she shouldn’t have the same education available as the rest of the country. Maybe they don’t want to grow up to be farmers. No child deserves to be pigeon holed because they live in an ignorant area. But like I said. I have no fight in this. If people are okay with raising ignorant children than that’s on them. I made sure mine were well educated. Both are college graduates and doing well career wise.

@Pandora Only going on what Trump has said, it sounds like he wants to set standards for education and will provide funding to states to help with the education. How the schools teach is entirely up to them. The only stipulation seems to be that they have to at least meet the standards. So the standards in the Hamptons will be the same as those in the middle of the wheat fields of Nebraska or the wilds of Wyoming.

@seawulf575 In other words it sounds like Trump isn’t closing down the DOE and he was just saying whatever people wanted to hear at whatever group he was talking to. The “close down the DOE” central government haters liked to hear Trump say he would do it and cheer him on, and the liberals had a fit and so Trump gets more time in the press. It’s so classic Trump.

@JLeslie I’m not sure if he is shutting down the DoEd or not. He could and then just move whatever things still need to be done under a different umbrella. My guess is that Linda McMahon will go through and figure out everything that is not required, revamp the entire thing and we will end up with some version of the DoEd that will not be so overreaching.

Those that want the DoEd shut down aren’t really caring if it is shut down or not. What they see is a bloated bureaucracy that keeps getting bigger without really showing any results. They see that as a huge waste of money. Add to that efforts to push DEI, CRT, and exclusion of parents in the education of their children show the current version of the Dept is more focused on ideology than education.

@seawulf575 I think some people who were saying close it down will decide it’s ok to keep the DoE if Trump decides to keep the DoE. That group of people will twist themselves into a knot or develop amnesia to make it ok in their heads. I’m not accusing you of that, I don’t remember what you said before on the topic.

I think if Trump can give a friend a position in government or if a department will help the extreme religious right have control, they will keep that position in place.

@JLeslie Actually there are many that think like me that the DoEd (I avoid DoE as that is Dept of Energy) isn’t particularly unnecessary, it’s just way to big and bloated with way to much overreach and is giving us a horrible final product. But I view this the way many on the left viewed “Defund the Police”. There were some that wanted that done literally…stop paying the cops, get rid of them. There were some that felt they were paid way too much and were getting too much power and needed to be reined in. And there were some that felt they were just great the way they were. If you go back and substitute “Dept of Education” for “Cops/police” and you have the same discussion

@seawulf575 You’re correct I should be using DoEd.

I don’t agree it is like Defund the police, but it doesn’t matter for this conversation. I never agreed with Defund the police, and don’t want to get off on that tangent.

Just saw this interview with the Secretary of the Department of Education and I thought people on this Q might be interested. https://youtu.be/3PtHm2e5uNQ?si=tRLRCrhN8V2xkc5S