The Department of Kudzu

What dense, noxious, invasive perennial climbs, coils, and strangles the landscape unless you dig down and cut it out by the root?

If you live in the South, like I do, you might say it’s kudzu. But if you live anywhere else, you might say it’s the U.S. Department of Education, which President-Elect Donald Trump wants to get rid of in his new administration. All who value education should cheer him on.

President Ronald Reagan promised to abolish it nearly half a century ago, but never had the votes to accomplish the goal. He also warned us that “the nearest thing to eternal life is a government program.”

But after all the Marxist indoctrination and sexual grooming we’ve seen in our public schools over the last four years, this time, things may be different.

This Is Our Moment

To use another example from the Reagan administration: In 1983, Reagan sent U.S. troops to invade the Caribbean nation of Grenada to thwart a communist revolution and save the lives of endangered medical students on that island. History records that the Grenada invasion was a modest operation with huge worldwide effects. For decades, the Soviet Union had advanced its “Brezhnev Doctrine,” declaring that once a nation became communist, there was no turning back. When Reagan proved them wrong in Grenada, it emboldened resistance throughout the Evil Empire.

This is the effect America desperately needs today in combatting the unchecked growth of the federal government and its profligate spending. If we simply do a nip and tuck here and there, it’s only a matter of time before it grows back, just like kudzu. Rip it out by the roots and it’s gone for good, and a powerful message is unmistakably clear: Big, monstrous and ever-expanding government is not inevitable. The federal Department of Education would be the perfect place to start.

The only “education” this federal department provides is to teach those who will listen what a bad idea it was in the first place. It was little more than a political payoff in 1979 from Jimmy Carter to the teachers unions, whose corrosive influence on education is downright sinful.

The DoE’s nearly 5,000 bureaucrats otherwise educate nobody. No discernible improvement in student test scores traceable to the department has ever been discovered. Its mandates and interference, if anything, choke innovation in the schools. If we had simply burned the trillion+ dollars it spent since 1980, we could have roasted a few hot dogs with more satisfaction than we got for the money spent on the DoE.

An Idea to Oppose

Almost a century ago, the idea of a federal education department was first raised in Congress. We dodged that bullet in part because of the powerful testimony of Presbyterian theologian J. Gresham Machen. His prophetic remarks deserve to be remembered:

The department of education … is to promote uniformity in education. That uniformity in education under central control, it seems to me, is the worst fate into which any country can fall.…

It is to be opposed … because it represents a tendency which is no new thing, but has been in the world for at least 2,300 years, which seems to be opposed to the whole principle of liberty for which our country stands. It is the notion that education is an affair essentially of the State; that the children of the State must be educated for the benefit of the State; that idiosyncrasies should be avoided, and the State should devise that method of education which will best promote the welfare of the State.…If you give the bureaucrats the children, you might as well give them everything else as well.

Machen was exactly right a hundred years ago, and his advice should have been taken when the matter came up again under Jimmy Carter.

How It Works

The Department of Education blackmails states by dangling taxpayer money in front of them. Do what we say (which means adopting dubious, one-size-fits-all fads and cockamamie schemes like Common Core in the schools) or we won’t give you the cash.

Only a government agency can get away with a half-century of failure. A private operation with a record like the DoE’s would have filed for bankruptcy long ago.

Education is not a constitutional duty of the federal government anyway, and that’s for good reason. It’s a job done best when parents and teachers are empowered, not a distant bureaucracy.

Dismantle one useless government department, and we can set a valuable precedent. No longer would it be taken for granted that federal kudzu must grow no matter how counterproductive it is. With an unconscionable $35 trillion national debt staring us in the face, we better start doing something or it’s the poorhouse for us all.

Scrap the DoE in its entirety, posthaste. How could its absence be any worse than its presence? Let’s learn something from kudzu for a change.

Lawrence W. Reed is president emeritus of the Foundation for Economic Education in Atlanta, Georgia.