The National Association of Scholars (NAS) commends the Trump administration for its Executive Order declaring its intent to close the Education Department (ED). NAS has been cataloguing the malign effects of ED since we were founded in 1987—not long after ED itself was founded in 1980. ED is bureaucratically inefficient and dysfunctional; it is a captive of teachers unions and other education special interests, whose welfare it prefers to the actual education of students; its regulations have imposed ideologically extreme policies on America’s K-12 schools, colleges, and universities; and its funding has hyper-charged the growth of politicized academic administrations within each institution of education to enforce those ideologically extreme policies. There’ll be many a dry eye when it’s gone.
At the same time, we must note that the Executive Order contains the phrase that ED will be closed “to the maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law.” As we have noted in Waste Land: The Education Department's Profligacy, Mediocrity, and Radicalism and Waste Land: Legislative Guide dozens if not hundreds of statutes underpin ED’s programmatic structure and spending. We do not wish to underestimate the short-term effectiveness of the Trump administration’s campaign to eliminate ED. But a long-term solution must include legislative repeal and reform of these statutes. Large numbers of statutes name the Secretary of Education as the responsible official for Program X or an ex officio member of Board Y. At the serious level of programmatic spending, the statutory infrastructure of ED can be revived in an instant by any hostile administration—unless it is repealed. Slash-and-burn is not enough: if it is to be closed forever, ED must be rooted out, statute by statute.
The Trump administration knows as much, and we wish them godspeed on this campaign. And, in the midst of daily headlines about the latest news of ED reform, we would like to take a moment to restate some general principles for ED policy reform that we believe should be kept in mind during the next months and years.
Find a Secure Administrative Home to Continue Reform of Colleges and Universities. The Trump administration is doing admirable work to reform education institutions by exercising ED’s powers to condition fund disbursement on effective protection of civil rights. If the Trump administration does succeed in closing ED, this work will have to be continued from different federal departments—perhaps the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division? We expect that the Trump administration has plans for how to transfer enforcement of education institution reform, but we wish to underscore that it is necessary that some federal body be prepared to oversee education reform, if and when ED closes.
Start Practical Work to Transfer ED Functions to the States. Governor Glenn Youngkin of Virginia already has announced that “Virginia is ready to take full responsibility for K-12 education.” We are sure that many other governors already or soon will announce the same. We urge taking advantage of these offers as quickly as possible. ED should coordinate with state bureaucracies to delegate as many ED functions as possible to the states and demonstrate that the states can do ED’s work. ED should make a priority of delegating ED functions to individual states eager to take on these responsibilities. Procedures modeled in one state then can be made a template for all states—especially including those states reluctant to take on these responsibilities.
Continue Civil Rights Reform. The Trump administration began with admirable initiatives to rescind “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) and gender theory (including “transgenderism”). It has not yet addressed deeper, structural distortions in ED’s misinterpretation of civil rights law. ED, and the Trump administration generally, should declare that “disparate impact” theory has no legal standing at ED; rescind the Title IX “prong” requiring “substantial proportionality” in athletics; declare that civil rights laws concerning sex do not concern sexual orientation; and declare that civil rights laws concerning sexual discrimination do not concern sexual harassment or sexual violence. All of these policies are substantively wrong, and they provide essential support for arbitrary oppression by ED and by academic bureaucrats. But what matters more is that all these policies are statutorily unwarranted—and so long as they continue, ED will have precedent to “interpret” civil rights law to mean anything it likes. The civil rights reforms ED already has undertaken will not endure unless it (or a successor agency) enacts these more systematic reforms.
Establish Guidelines for Program Review. ED has demanded that Columbia University root out policies and programs that green-light anti-Jewish discriminatory conduct. One of its demands was that Columbia put the Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies (MESAAS) department into academic receivership. We think that program review generally is appropriate for academic programs that aim to change policy rather than to discover truth; disciplines such as Gender Studies, Ethnic Studies, and Social Justice Studies provide nothing more than an academic fig-leaf for political activism, and should be defunded forthwith. People of good will can differ about whether program review ought to be conducted by the federal government, state governments, or university administrations. We believe that if ED is going to demand academic receivership more generally than at Columbia that it (or a successor agency) ought to establish guidelines for such program review.
Make American National Interest a Priority. We urge swift and thorough enforcement of this Trump administration priority. ED (or a successor agency) should:
- enforce existing law that requires postsecondary institutions to report foreign gifts of $250,000 or more;
- lower the gift-reporting threshold to $50,000 and apply it to “pass-through” institutions operating on behalf of educational institutions;
- investigate tolerance by educational institutions of foreign espionage and other illegal actions and enforce existing laws to punish such hostile acts;
- limit Chinese influence in American educational institutions;
- require educational institutions that receive Title VI area studies grants, especially those to Middle East studies, to live up to their commitments to educate students capable and willing to support American foreign policy;
- require educational institutions to report, and render deportable, foreign students who engage in illegal actions—especially foreign students engaged in Jew-hating intimidation; and
- forbid “sanctuary campuses” for illegal aliens.
ED (or a successor agency) should establish an Office of National Education Security (ONS), dedicated to addressing all these national security threats to American education.
Rescind the “Right to Protest”. Freedom of speech is not “freedom of protest”—and pretending that it is has destroyed the university. You cannot have freedom, or even education, where thugs chronically intimidate and threaten violence, and go unpunished. ED (or a successor agency) should condition disbursement of federal funds on education institutions’ successful enforcement of the principles enunciated by Edward Strong, Chancellor of Berkeley in 1964, when he wrote about what must be done to restore order at Berkeley, in the face of the challenge of the Free Speech Movement. Educational institutions should not receive federal funds so long as they maintain their symbiosis with activist thugs.
As we say, we wish the Trump administration godspeed with its reforms, which—with a speed and thoroughness that exceeds our wildest dreams—are bringing government policy into accord with NAS ideals and priorities that we have championed since our foundation in 1987. We want these reforms to endure—not least by incorporating the larger strategic principles described above. We expect that Trump administration personnel already have many of these ideals in mind—but we think it is worthwhile stating them explicitly. Policymakers and the public both should know what should be the long-term goals of education policy reform.
Then too, we are suddenly eager to state ambitious goals for education reform. When the Trump administration declares that it will close the Education Department, it’s time to think big. We put down these goals with the seductive thought, Maybe these will be accomplished by next week’s executive order. And if not next week’s—well, there are still a great many weeks to go before January 2029.
Photo by Andy Feliciotti on Unsplash
