US student report card proves we must abolish the Department of Education

My 101-year-old mother taught first through eighth grade in one-room schoolhouses in Montana, later moving to Wyoming to teach. She did not have today’s technologies available, but she successfully gave the children under her tutelage an excellent education that served them well throughout their lives.

Many of them became highly successful in business, agriculture and academia. And she was not alone, with thousands of teachers in both urban and rural settings being highly skilled at educating our students to excel and building this great nation in the process.

We know how to educate children and have historically succeeded in doing so, turning out engineers, hydrologists, medical professionals, lawyers, businessmen, ag producers, resource managers and other professions by the droves. We know this because the U.S. is unrivaled in the quality and skill of our workers.

The National Center for Educational Statistics, which administers the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) every two years to fourth and eighth graders, just released the “Nation’s Report Card.” And the outlook is not good.

It must prompt us to ask ourselves: Why are we failing now? What has changed in the last 40 years that led us so far astray in the education arena?

Following the COVID-19 pandemic, our children continue to slide in their reading skills, and there is barely perceptible improvement in mathematics. Our schools were already in decline before our political and educational leaders forced school closures. But now, our students are also failing to make up ground since the schools were reopened.

And the problems are worst exactly where you would expect them to be. The best-performing students are returning to form, but those who lagged before are losing even more ground now. In math, among eighth graders, you can see this disparity clearly. The top 10 percent of students have increased their scores by 3 points on average, whereas the bottom 10 percent dropped by twice that amount (6 point). And one-third of American eighth-graders are rated below “basic” for reading.

These test scores are not only tragic, but unacceptable. We must demand better. We simply cannot prepare our students to lead the most powerful nation on Earth if they cannot read or do math.

Are these children somehow less capable of learning than previous generations? I reject that notion and so should you. It is the adults who have failed them — our educational elite — and they have been doing so for a long time.

As the product of an excellent education received at a rural school in middle America, I am a testament to the fact that we know how to teach our children and our children are capable of learning — but only if we return to the classic education model and get the bureaucrats out of the way.

I have highlighted my mother’s role as a teacher to illustrate and underscore her ability to educate the children in her charge — educate, mind you, not indoctrinate — without the benefit of a federal Department of Education. Some may find it quaint that those of us who grew up far from Washington could properly function without the guidance of a federal bureaucracy, but we did — and we thrived.

We have been thriving for generations, largely because of the education that we received — reading of the classics, mastering calculus and trigonometry in high school, using our hands to build and weld what we needed to succeed in agriculture and construction, designing dams and irrigation systems to water the West.

Our education system was developed to make us productive and successful members of our communities and our country. It was not created to push social justice nonsense or to focus on things that only matter in the faculty lounge at liberal arts schools in Vermont.

I often encounter people who are shocked to learn that the Department of Education is relatively young, created by President Jimmy Carter with the stroke of a pen in 1979. The department has since become an out-of-control behemoth, staffed by individuals who pushing an educational philosophy directly at war with the foundations of our country and our Constitution. It is thus legitimate to question whether it should exist at all.

In 2024, the department boasted 4,400 employees and a budget of $238 billion. In the post-pandemic world, Congress allotted an additional $190 billion to elementary and secondary schools to help them recover any learning losses. Those funds have obviously been wasted, as proven by the disastrous NAEP test scores just released. That money, in other words, hasn’t been effectively used to educate our young — it has disappeared into the maw of the Department of Education with no accountability for failure.

The department’s not-related-to-education activities are also well known. Federal bureaucrats, for example, spent three years seeking to replace “sex” in federal education amendments to the Civil Rights Act with “sexual orientation and gender identity.”

They have interfered with teachers’ ability to remove disruptive and dangerous students from their classrooms. And they have promoted a seemingly endless stream of “woke” policies at the expense of our cohesiveness and to undermine pride in being an American. The result? They are turning out generations of children who can’t read or do math and believe that America is evil.

Just as frightening, there is a section on the department’s website titled “Birth to Grade 12 Education,” exposing their intent for the government to parent our children, God save us all.

Common sense and practicality seem to be making a comeback, perhaps in response to the panic exposing the failures of our Department of Education. So this is the time to act. We must abolish the U.S. Department of Education and work directly with the states to develop and implement a world-class educational system that serves all students and our families, while disempowering the teacher’s unions and parasites that have engorged themselves for far too long on a broken education system.

This is the only viable long-term solution to save and revitalize education in America.

Harriet Hageman represents Wyoming at large in the U.S. House of Representatives.

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