patrick.net

Newly confirmed Education Secretary Linda McMahon has leapt into the educational ring holding a folding chair. “The Trump administration,” the Times reported, “has begun dismantling the U.S. Department of Education by laying off about half of the agency’s employees.” In San Francisco, the regional branch of the department’s Office for Civil Rights will be closed.

It shouldn’t surprise anyone. Immediately after her confirmation, McMahon issued a staff memo titled “Our Department’s Final Mission” — which was shutting itself down. But the LA Times’ article was packed with Chicken Little quotes about this being the latest worst thing that has ever happened. “These reckless layoffs will sow chaos and confusion throughout our nation’s public school system,” promised Guillermo Mayer, president of Public Advocates, a California-based law firm and “advocacy group.”

Trump plans to delete the Department of Education and simply send the money straight to the states instead. Every Republican president has promised to cancel the Department of Education since long before I was a fetus and before Linda McMahon grappled with her first costumed wrestler.

Now, for the first time, it is actually happening. Cage match. ...

But sending lump sums (“block grants”) to the states instead of the DOE’s splintered system will delete Washington’s ability to micromanage school policy. States can set their own priorities—like funding charter and home schools, scrapping DEI bureaucracies, or (in red states) focusing on actual academics, like STEM. Yet the federal government will still keep broad powers to condition the block grants — boundaried by Supreme Court limits on coercive federal funding — to trim ideological overreach.

Not only that, but under the DOE, a shockingly small fraction of federal education dollars actually reaches the states anyway, after the massive agency consumes its generous bureaucratic portion, and after paying for a dizzying array of loony, progressive pet programs only slightly related to primary education.

This should be good news for education activists. But, you know. Hysteria! Another progressive gravy train is pulling into its terminal station.