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Boston Globe

Eliminating the Department of Education won't harm children

Done right, the department's elimination wouldn't harm our children. Some progressives who were present at its creation in 1979 Advertisement I glimpsed this forgotten history while covering the late representative Pat Schroeder, when the Coloradan made a 1990s swing through my New Hampshire newspaper's region. She surprised me by saying that, while fully supporting federal aid to local schools, she'd considered a centralized bureaucracy with say in how it was spent to be a mistake. Representative Advertisement Unsurprisingly, the rival to that teachers union, the National Federation of Teachers, opposed the department, as did, perhaps more surprisingly, the editorial board of 'No matter what anyone says, the Department of Education will not just write checks to local school boards,' Schroeder Rather, the legitimate concerns about the current plans for the department are two: First, the agencies onto which Trump The administration's school funding commitment hides in the will-he-or-won't-he miasma darkening so many Trump policies. Education Secretary Linda McMahon Advertisement Progressives should stress adequate funding, smartly spent, not reflexive support for a bureaucracy and department that some of their ideological forebears opposed. Certainly, the savings from eliminating DOE jobs, like other elements in the so-called Department of Government Efficiency's phantom that big a waste is not a hill anti-Trumpers should die on. If education advocates work to ensure such necessary funding, Schroeder, Chisholm, et al. will rest easy in their graves.