Reagan's and Trump’s vows to defund government education . . .
Government budgeting debates used to be about whether the benefit of a particular expenditure, such as an upgrade to public roads or military radar systems, was worth the tax burden entailed.
Stop the bleeding
As covered by Frontline News in Pay twice to escape government education?, the debate about government educational spending is no longer about whether to fund beneficial programs. Rather, the debate is about whether to use taxpayers' hard earned money to fund programs that are literally destructive to youth. Today there are “educational” programs that harm their minds with violent Marxist indoctrination and exposure to deviant subjects like incest-themed pornography. Today's government funded schools expose children to physical threats in a dangerous environment replete with increasingly common mass brawls and sexual assault.
What would you do with over $100,000 to educate your kids?
All this damage comes at a cost of over $28,000 per student for a 9-month school year in cities like New York, amounting to $112,000 for a family with four children. Seems like an easy case for defunding.
Reagan tried to nip the new department in the bud
Ronald Reagan campaigned for the presidency on a platform that included abolishing the Department of Education, which had only come into existence that very year. Here is what the platform has to say.
Next to religious training and the home, education is the most important means by which families hand down to each new generation their ideals and beliefs. It is a pillar of a free society.
But today, parents are losing control of their children’s schooling … The result has been a shocking drop in student performance, lack of basics in the classroom, forced busing, teacher strikes, manipulative and sometimes amoral indoctrination …
[our party] encourages the elimination of the federal Department of Education.
Trump on board
President Donald Trump similarly campaigned on a promise to cut the department’s budget:
A lot of people believe the Department of Education should just be eliminated — get rid of it. If we don’t eliminate it completely, we certainly need to cut its power and reach.
Education has to be run locally. Common Core, No Child Left Behind, and Race to the Top are all programs that take decisions away from parents and local school boards.
These programs allow the progressives in the Department of Education to indoctrinate, not educate, our kids.
What they are doing does not fit the American model of governance.
I am totally against these programs and the Department of Education. It’s a disaster.
We cannot continue to fail our children — the very future of this nation.
Trump's Failure
Both presidents failed to deliver on their populist driven promises and the Department of Education has instead grown exponentially.
Opinion writers wondered aloud at what held back President Trump:
The Republicans now control both houses of Congress, right? They also now control the presidency, right?
So, what’s the problem? Just introduce a bill in Congress to abolish the Department of Education, the position advocated by conservative icon Ronald Reagan, pass it, and have President Trump sign it into law.
Voila! No more Department of Education.
President Trump’s former chief strategist, Stephen Bannon, blames the failure to achieve Trump’s promises on a misplaced trust in establishment politicians to staff the administration:
In the 48 hours after we won … you might call it the original sin of the administration.
We embraced the establishment. I mean, we totally embraced the establishment.”
Hence, Trump’s choice of Betsy DeVos to lead the department of Education. Though supportive of school vouchers, she also supported the continued funding of the Department of Education, despite its unconstitutionality, claiming only that the (ever increasing number of) taxpayer dollars would be spent “wisely and efficiently.”
Reagan's failure
Reagan’s pick of Terrel Bell to head the agency he vowed to terminate was even more curious. As the Washington Post noted at the time:
His nomination and confirmation were not without controversy, primarily because as U.S. commissioner of education from 1974 to 1976 he supported the creation of the $14 billion Department of Education he is assigned to abolish.
Sen. William Proxmire (D-Wis.) in particular, delighted in reading quotes of Bell's from previous years, gathered from columns by The Wall Street Journal, Evans and Novak and William F. Buckley, in an attempt to discredit him when his confirmation came up for a vote on the Senate floor.
The Wall Street Journal called Bell Reagan's "most perplexing" nomination.
"This nomination is really hard to believe and hard to understand," Proxmire said during the Senate debate. Proxmire claimed that Bell's previous statements did not match Reagan's promises, criticized the nominee for not giving specific timetables for cutting down regulations and eliminating the department, for contradicting himself on whether the federal government or the states should have the balance of power in education …
Not only was Bell diametrically opposed to Reagan’s plan to abolish the Department of Education, he even pushed for Outcome-Based Education (OBE) in every school in America. Washington, DC Associate Superintendent of Schools James Guines, who led the design of the OBE program, explained that the new curriculum was based on the behavioral psychology theories of Harvard University’s B.F. Skinner, a professor who received $7 million in government funding for,
developing and marketing … elementary school courses featuring promiscuity, cannibalism, murder, mayhem, adultery, extermination of the weak and elderly, and wife-swapping.
Still room for hope?
Ironically, the pouring of funds into programs like OBE may, in the end, lead to the very impetus for a spreading homeschooling movement as the “results” of the government programs come to fruition:
One of the most notorious failed Mastery Learning [OBE] experiments is the one that demolished the Chicago public schools … hailed as “a program that may be a pacesetter for the nation” ... Five years later, Learning magazine reported the grim results:
A growing number of students, many teachers said, were entering high school having successfully completed the … program without ever having read a book and without being able to read one.
The pandemic led many parents to check more carefully what their children were learning, and what they weren’t learning, in government schools. The AP reported on one parent’s experience:
My kids have a lot of questions about different things. I’m like, “Didn’t you learn that in school?”
They’re like, “No.”
Future, and past, of education
Visit us soon for the continuation of our series on homeschooling to explore:
- How do homeschooled children do when they get to college and the work world?
- How do teachers unions and education officials work to thwart homechooling?
- Who are the eugenicists and socialists who framed the structure for government education?
Previous articles from our series on government education vs. homeschooling:
‘It’s upon us’: Kirk Cameron introduces homeschooling with new documentary
