Movement to Abolish the Education Department, Decades in the Making, Lives On

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

61% : Under the proposal, public charters seeking federal money would have to prove that their neighboring district schools are "over-enrolled," which would be impossible since public schools have been losing students nationwide because of the COVID-19 pandemic shutdowns.
56% :The largest portion of the department's K-12 budget goes to what's known as Title I, which supplements state and local education funding for children from needy households.
56% :"Charter schools have incentives to do a good job, because their customers aren't residentially assigned to them like most government-run schools," DeAnglis said, noting that the very existence of those schools, which typically hire non-unionized teachers, challenge the teachers' unions' monopoly on the teaching profession.
48% :The United States had no federal department devoted exclusively to education for nearly 200 years until October 1979, when a Democrat-majority Congress narrowly passed a bill to create a stand-alone cabinet-level bureaucracy out of the existing Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.
47% :Proponents of the federal intervention in education cite the "spending clause" of the Constitution, which authorizes Congress to raise taxes and spend money to provide for the general welfare.
44% : "This is another good argument for abolishing the department: Why should the Biden administration be able to protect the status quo teacher' union's monopoly at the expense of parents by regulating the teachers' unions' competition, which happens to be the charter schools?"
37% : Still, critics warn that these priorities leave the DOE a potential leeway to deny funding to charter schools.
34% : Meanwhile, the DOE under President Joe Biden recently tried to tighten regulations on public charter schools, which many financially disadvantaged families rely on to get their children a high-quality education they otherwise cannot afford.

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