On July 18, 2022, Twitter’s top “trending” for the day was about former Trump-era Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, who suggested the Department of Education be abolished.
Last Saturday, she doubled down by telling a room of school choice activists in Tampa that the federal Education Department should not exist.
DeVos was one of the prominent speakers at the event, which provided training to members from across 30 states on how to transform school boards from teacher union-led bureaucrats into majorities focused on the best way to educate children and return more parental control into the educational system. The group, Moms for Liberty, was founded in Florida by parents who object to their children being required to wear face masks at school during the COVID pandemic.
Tiffany Justice, co-founder of the group, interviewed DeVos and said, “We love teachers here at Moms for Liberty,” but she added that teacher unions are the “K-12 cartel,” and are “imposing politics in the classroom.”
Moms for Liberty has T-shirts emblazoned with a quote from President Calvin Coolidge, who asserted, “Liberty is not collective, it is personal. All liberty is individual liberty.”
Betsy DeVos and Moms for Liberty understand that parents — and teachers — are sick of the highly partisan, radical agenda being forced down their throats by far-Left political labor union leaders masquerading as educators.
At the Freedom Foundation, we’re working tirelessly to help these teachers who simply want to teach their students how to read, write, and navigate math problems.
The Freedom Foundation’s mission is to help public-sector employees know their rights in the workplace and help them leave if they’re not satisfied with their union. Many teachers have no idea their union is using their dues dollars to control and promote the teacher unions’ destructive agenda at the Department of Education.
That’s why we’re running a national campaign to educate teachers and expose where their money is being spent. The effort is paying off. In the last two years alone, 2 percent (over 80,000) of teachers dropped their affiliation with the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT).
DeVos is spot on. There’s no reason we need a federal agency making policy for the nation’s schools. Those decisions are best made at the local level, where parents and the communities in which they live are far closer to the students and far more invested in quality outcomes.
The current top-down model has nothing to do with education and serves only the objective of turning schools into indoctrination centers — small wonder the unions are so devoted to preserving it at all costs.
At best, the Department of Education simply adds another needless layer of federal bureaucracy in a town that flaunts this sort of unaccountable inefficiency. At worst, the agency is a wholly owned subsidiary of a powerful special interest actively working to stymie the very ideals Department of Education apologists claim to hold dear.
Either way, we don’t need it. Get rid of it.
