Donalds: Eliminating the U.S. Department of Education would be a good thing
Free resources are available to encourage 47,000 churches in the Southern Baptist Convention to involve themselves in Christian K-12 education.
The U.S. Department of Education is an unconstitutional and wasteful bureaucracy that has not helped us to outperform other countries, Florida charter school founder Erika Donalds and wife of U.S. Rep. Byron Donalds told CBN News.
“In fact, since its existence, our student performance has actually decreased, only about a third of students in the United States of America are doing reading and math on grade level,” Donalds said.
Eliminating the Department of Education will “create a free market system in education that will allow for innovation and more competition among school options,” she added.
“We want to eliminate this unnecessary bureaucracy and send the power back to the States and hopefully into the hands of parents where the free market can actually have an influence and hopefully we as a country can be competitive on the world stage when it comes to our academic performance.”
President-elect Donald Trump has named business executive Linda McMahon as his pick to serve as the next secretary of the Department of Education. McMahon is a former head of the U.S. Small Business Administration during his first term as president and a co-chair of his transition team. It is a cabinet-level department administered by the Secretary of Education with 4,400 employees and a 2024 budget of $238 billion.
There is a correlation between a country’s educational system quality and its economic status, with developed nations offering higher quality education, according to worldpopulationreview.com.
However, despite ranking high in educational system surveys, the United States falls behind in math and science scores compared to many other countries. According to a Business Insider report in 2018, the U.S. ranked 38th in math scores and 24th in science. Discussions about why the United States education rankings have fallen by international standards over the past three decades frequently point out that government spending on education has failed to keep up with inflation.
The Department of Education was created during the Carter Administration after the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare was split into the Department of Education and the Department of Health and Human Services by the Department of Education Organization Act, which President Jimmy Carter signed into law on October 17, 1979.
When the department was created the U.S. was No. 1 in the world in education. Since then the U.S. has begun to lag behind other countries in math and science.
Donalds said people don't understand that the thousands of employees in the department only exist to create regulations that must be implemented by another layer of employees at the state and local levels. By eliminating the duplication and waste of the department the resources could be put back into the classroom to help better educate students, she said.
“But better yet,” Donalds added, “what President Trump has talked about doing is putting these dollars in the hands of parents to create a free market system in education that's going to allow for innovation and more competition among school options that's going to help our performance across the board in our country.”
It is a free market system that would encourage more faith groups to get involved in offering alternative education options.
An example of this growing trend is that the North American Mission Board recently made free resources available to encourage 47,000 churches in the Southern Baptist Convention to involve themselves in Christian K-12 education.
Watch the entire interview with Donalds on the CBN News YouTube Channel:
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