Do you want facts or rhetoric? Or: Why would anyone want to eliminate the U.S. Department of Education?

Once the hype and hysteria about “woke agendas” clears, it’s important to ask what the USDOE has done to warrant its closure because of this alleged agenda.  It’s interesting to me that this is happening at a moment when people really don’t know what the department does.  Is it really a clique of leftist agitators who use the department to further their socialist agenda?  Has it really been a government agency that espouses values that are contrary to the nation’s? 

Let’s start with what department isn’t:

• It doesn’t have curriculum that’s required to be taught in schools.  That’s done by states and local schools.
• It doesn’t establish standards for who’s qualified to be a teacher.  That’s done by states.
• It doesn’t mandate what materials are used by teachers.  That’s done by states and schools.

Its job is actually pretty straightforward.  USDOE is responsible to manage the funds and programs mandated by Congress and the President.  As such, it can’t go off and do what it wants to do.  If you don’t like what it does, go tell Congress and the President because they set the USDOE agenda. 

 

The best way to know whether the claims of a “woke agenda” are true is to take a few moments and review its budget – you know, follow the money.  Remember:  It can only do what Congress and the President give it money and a mandate to do.  At the time this essay is written, you can get the budget proposed for 2025 by the past administration online at:

 

https://www.ed.gov/sites/ed/files/about/overview/budget/budget25/summary/25summary.pdf

 

If the department removes that link, e-mail me, and I’ll send the document to you.  The past administration’s budget is instructive because it shows the priorities that Congress and the President gave to the department historically.  To show that history, the budget provides a comparison of the two prior years.  As with any government agency, understanding what an agency does is best accomplished by seeing how it spends its money.  The current administration has yet to propose a new budget. 

 

How to read a budget:  Start at the budget summaries on page 71.  There’s a lot on the pages which follow that specifies exactly what the USDOE does.  Those summaries are where you have to look to find if there’s “woke agenda” money being spent.  Like everything else in life, how the money gets spent determine what gets done.  The pages before page 71 give details on each item in the summary.  After you see the summaries, go back through the entire document.  Read through the document and find where the “woke agenda” gets implemented.  If you can’t find it, forward the link and ask your friends and relatives who fear the “woke agenda” to find it for you.  If their answer is that the “woke agenda” is hidden, have them ask the experts they follow to show exactly where it's hidden.

 

It's one thing to make a claim, and it’s another thing to support the claim with facts.  The USDOE is being used as a red herring to support an evil versus good story.  Additionally, some commentors find a specific issue they have in the budget and then overgeneralize that to the whole organization.  Overgeneralizations and red herrings are well-established rhetorical tricks to get folks to believe a point of view.  Looking at facts shows there’s no evidence of a “woke agenda.”  The money in that budget goes to goals like supporting special education students or underwriting loans for college students.  If you believe the “woke agenda” story, you’re accepting what someone else told you instead of looking for the truth. 

 

Here are the categories of key initiatives that this budget would have supported.  For detailed explanations of these categories, read the budget document, beginning on page 7. 

 

The proposed budget for K-12:

• EXPANDS ACCESS TO HIGH-Q UALITY PRESCHOOL FOR UNDERSERVED CHILDREN

• PRIORITIZES THE HEALTH AND WELL-BEING OF STUDENTS

• INCREASES SUPPORT FOR CHILDREN WITH DISABILITIES 

• EXPANDS SUPPORT FOR FULL-SERVICE COMMUNITY SCHOOLS

• INVESTS IN EDUCATOR RECRUITMENT AND RETENTION 

• SUPPORTS MULTILINGUAL LEARNERS 

• FOSTERS DIVERSE SCHOOLS 

• REIMAGINES THE HIGH SCHOOL TO POSTSECONDARY TRANSITION

For education beyond high school, the budget:

• PROPOSES HISTORIC I NVESTMENTS IN COLLEGE AFFORDABILITY

• MAKES SIGNIFICANT COMMITMENTS TO POSTSECONDARY STUDENT SUCCESS, COMPLETION, AND SUPPORT

• INCREASES EQUITABLE FUNDING FOR HBCUS , TCCUS, MSIS, AND COMMUNITY COLLEGES

• BOLSTERS OUR NATION’ S SKILLED WORKFORCE WITH EXPANSIONS TO CAREER AND TECHNICAL TRAINING AND ADULT EDUCATION 

• INCREASES SUPPORT FOR CIVIL RIGHTS ENFORCEMENT

I put the categories in all caps because I copied and pasted them directly from the document so that I could be most accurate.  So which of these “woke” items should be eliminated?  Please do read the document that describes each item before responding to that question. 

 

People who demonize the Department of Education are either misguided or misguiding others.  If you believe what right-wing media sources and agenda-driven demagogues tell you, you’re misguided.  If you’ve actually seen what the Department of Education does and are telling others of its evils, you’re intentionally misguiding people.  The other term for that is “lying.”  Using a lie to get people to focus on something other than what you’re doing is yet another rhetorical device.  It’s called a stalking horse strategy.  The people who use these rhetorical devices to lie about the USDOE want you to see it as evil and, thus, further their narrative that the nation needs them to rescue us from such evil organizations. 

 

If we want to have discussions about a particular program or use of funds, that’s always good.  Let’s talk about whether the $400 million proposed for charter schools is the best use of resources (see page 20).  Or whether Comprehensive Centers are worth the $50 million proposed (a reduction of $5 million from the prior year – see page 26).  But avoiding such conversations by using rhetorical sleight of hand to vilify anything or anyone is always a bad idea.  It’s actually a signal to me of a weak argument when I see people using rhetoric instead of making a fact-based case for their ideas.  In this case, it’s a blatant attempt to further an agenda of fear. 

 

The folks who are lying about the USDOE want to show us that this agency is further proof of an out-of-control leftist plot to erode freedoms through a “woke” agenda.    Actually, you should read the budget with an understanding of the political environment of the past 50 years that the agency has navigated.  You’ll see funds for the support of testing and assessment, funds for charter schools, and funds for research into innovation – all topics that have been pushed into the budget in the past by conservatives.  If I focused on those, I could make a claim that the USDOE is rampantly conservative.  But that would be using rhetorical trickery.  The truth is that the USDOE reflects the full spectrum of political thought over the past 50 years as different Congresses and administrations shaped it. 

 

I’ll illustrate from a personal experience.  I was hired to be the external evaluator on a five-year grant funded by the USDOE during the current president’s first term.  By the way, when I do that kind of work, I also look at whether the funded organization is spending its funds as they were approved to spend them.  I’m an independent contractor whose reputation is on the line if I fail to report malfeasance.  Having an independent contractor write an external report that’s sent to USDOE provides an additional layer of protection against fraud.  This specific award was to a community college which proposed to look at how it was retaining and graduating students.  The project established a set of activities and goals to determine whether the college met its aims.  In order to be funded, however, the USDOE required the college to add an additional activity for all new students to complete training in financial literacy. 

 

Teaching people about check book balancing and how best to borrow money is never a bad idea.  However, there is no evidence in the research which shows that offering financial literacy supported the college’s aims in that project.  The requirement was one made by the administration at the time, based on that administration’s interests – even if it wasn’t something that met the aims of the project.  Nonetheless, the college included that component and successfully met its goals in meeting the requirement.  And that’s how the USDOE works.  I’ve evaluated many grants as well as managed them over the years where there was a mandated activity that reflected Congress or the President’s priorities.  USDOE is an agency that follows what it’s asked to do. 

 

So let me reiterate the challenge:  Go read the budget and find the pervasive leftist agenda that the current administration wants to convince us exists.  Then write your own essay that explains where the “wokeness” lives.  Make certain, as I’ve done, to include specifics and references.  And if that seems daunting, send a note to the people who have previously convinced you about the USDOE and ask them to do that.  Ask for facts, not rhetoric.  Then compare with what you’ve read in the budget. 

For some folks, this is a new feeling, but I’m okay with that because…

Until now, the story among folks on the left seems to have been that the U.S. made a mistake in 2016 that it fixed in 2020.  2016 was a detour on the road to progress.  That 2020 correction showed that the country wasn’t as loutish as the outcome of the 2016 presidential contest might suggest.  Besides, liberals could live in the comfort that the popular vote hadn’t really elected the man who became the 45th president.  It was a quirk of the antiquated electoral college system.  Then, in 2020, it was okay if 74 million people voted for him because 81 million voted for President Biden.  The belief was that the 2020 majority didn’t agree with the misogyny, racism, homophobia and cynical mistrust of anyone who didn’t fit into a White nationalist view of the country.  

 

Now those explanations don’t hold. 

 

That’s because 77 million of our neighbors and relatives voted a convicted felon, serial liar, adjudicated sexual assaulter, and con man into the nation’s highest office after seeing all that for eight prior years.  He’s someone who would’ve been considered too toxic to run for any office in any other era.  Yet the results are unmistakably an endorsement of this person.  No aberration here.  The punch-to-the-gut feeling that people who voted against him now experience is stronger than 2016 because it’s clearly not a mistake.  He received 77 million votes.  As bad as the feelings were in 2016, this is worse because the election confirmed an undeniable truth of who the nation is. 

 

Pundits explain it as a vote on the economy, or on voters’ need to know that their government puts them first, or the limited news sources of some voters, or Democrats’ failure to tell their story.  However, all those are secondary to how well the Republican candidate played to voters’ fears about immigrants, transgender people, or people of color’s supposed criminality.  That message was central to Republicans’ ad campaigns in this election cycle. It’s a strategy that Republicans have been building for decades, and this time it worked perfectly.   Other explanations of the causes are, at best, secondary.  People agreed with the fear pitch that was at the core of that campaign.  Or, at the least, that central message wasn’t important enough for them to vote against it. 

 

Let’s be clear.  The nation didn’t suddenly veer to the right.  Actually, little changed in the intervening time between when the president-elect was voted out of office in 2020 and now.  He didn’t win by gaining large numbers in 2024 from 2020, and despite what the electoral college count says, this wasn’t a landslide.  About the same number of people voted for the then-president in 2020 as they did in 2024.  There’s a slight increase of three million votes in the president-elect’s 2024 numbers.  That increase was enough to elect him since he won by two million votes – that’s a 1.48% margin of victory. 

 

The difference is that Vice-President Harris didn’t receive all the votes that went Democratic in 2020.  In 2020, President Biden received seven million more votes than his opponent.  In the recent election, Vice-President Harris had six million fewer votes than Biden did in 2020.  If Harris had attracted the same numbers as Biden had in 2020, she would have won.  But six million people chose not to vote or changed their vote away from the Democratic ticket, leaving Vice-President Harris with that two-million-vote deficit.

 

The president-elect did win, and the numbers suggest that a lot of people have supported him all along.  If you’ve lived in the fantasy that the U.S. was immune from the autocratic impulses expressed by right-wing leaders in places like Hungary, this election ended that fantasy.  If you thought we’d continue unabated with the progress that began with the abolitionist movement and continued to the Seneca Falls Convention, Pullman porters, bus boycotts, and Stonewall without interruption, this election should have disabused you of that.  If you thought that the right wing was a small group of over-stimulated vandals waving tiki torches and playing pretend militia, this election extinguished that illusion. 

 

The votes that elected the 47th president came from a broad range of voters who were unwilling to vote for Vice-President Harris and were willing to ignore the president-elect’s many personal flaws, past actions, legal convictions, and stream of lies.  These voters didn’t just appear.  They’ve been here.  They most likely voted for him in the past and voted again for him now.  These are people from cities and suburbia and farmlands.  They heard what he said, and they want what he offered.  The U.S. majority is no longer silent.  It spoke. 

 

I’m not offering you comfort.  This isn’t the time to be comforted.  This may be the first time you’ve experienced helplessness and despair of this magnitude.  It’s my guess that the feeling may be heightened by knowing that what you see as true is not seen by over half the people who voted – and by people who didn’t bother to vote.  That means you’re in the society’s minority now.  This is a little of what it feels like to be far removed from that majority and the way it thinks.  It may be a new feeling for you; however, your current feeling is what people already at the margins already feel every day.  It’s not a new feeling for us to live on a knife’s edge under the daily scrutiny by a society that sees us and our ideas as exotic or even dangerous.  You may have had past empathy for excluded groups.  However, it’s one thing to have empathy, and it’s another thing altogether to experience and feel exclusion. 

 

That feeling you have now is what people of color, LGBTQI folks, immigrants, and the disabled live under every day.  It didn’t go away when the Voting Rights Act got passed in 1965, or when Barack Obama was elected.  My daily life under the gaze of a society that devalues me has always been the same.   Those 77 million people have always been there.  I interact with them on jobs, in schools, in grocery stores, in cafes – everywhere and every day.  My experiences with them didn’t start in 2016 or the most recent election, and how they interact with me hasn’t changed.   That means that while I’m saddened by the recent election results, I’m not surprised by them. 

 

The struggle for justice hasn’t been for a particular law, candidate, party, or election outcome.  The struggle is for ideals that are counteracted in the daily lives of marginalized people throughout the society.  It’s good when a particular party or candidate commits to supporting inclusion and justice.  But the election of one candidate or party hasn’t ever meant that our struggle is over.  This current election has, for those of us living in the forces that attempt to devalue us, just made what we experience daily more starkly visible to many who haven’t previously experienced marginalization.  The election helps other people experience what we experience.  So I’m okay with other people feeling this weight. 

 

It has been, is, and will be a long struggle.  Remember that the commitment to universal rights is a relatively new one in this country’s history.  Despite Jefferson’s assertion that “all men are created equal,” we know he didn’t intend women as part of that, nor did he mean the millions of enslaved people, including those he personally enslaved.  And he certainly didn’t include Native people.  The list of those excluded from participation at the nation’s founding is longer than the list of included people.  When the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments were added to the Constitution after the Civil War, Congress attempted a correction toward inclusion for all.  However, those amendments were thwarted by states, municipalities, and federal actions for 100 years afterward, well into my lifetime. 

 

This demand for including everyone in opportunity isn’t one that the nation has had for very long.  It’s a demand that’s come from those who are excluded, not from people who benefitted from that system.  It’s not a surprise to any of us at the margins that we’re experiencing this latest backlash with the election of someone whose racism, homophobia, and misogyny are only outpaced by his narcissism.  His election isn’t the cause of the problems; it’s a symptom of who the nation is.  We’ve always known that the majority isn’t with us.  If they had been, these issues would’ve been resolved in 1865 or 1965. 

 

Let me offer some advice as someone who’s lived daily with the feeling you’re now experiencing:  First, and most importantly, be aware that this isn’t an easily resolved struggle.  The next election will not fix the problem.  Yes, the nation may once again elect a Democratic House or Senate.  But remember that 77 million of your fellow citizens voted for a self-announced autocratic government that devalues people at the margins.  In the future, the nation can elect Democrats to manage both houses and the presidency, as they did in 2020, but those 77 million people are still there.  Those 77 million people aren’t monolithic.  They represent a spectrum of thought, but the core of that thought will always devalue historically marginalized people.  That said, giving up isn’t an option.  Acknowledging the struggle and being aware of its future longevity is the starting point. 

 

Secondly, acknowledge that your feelings are real, but they’re not what’s going to change anything.  They can, however, be a catalyst.  I can’t tell you how to manage this feeling so that it catalyzes you to action.  I can only tell you how I’ve survived decades of living with these feelings.  I use them to commit to leading change.  Not participating in change.  Leading it.  I continually explore how I can act and when I can best act.  I don’t wait for invitations.  I take the anger, rage, pain, and dejection I feel and plan action. 

 

I don’t know what that means for you, but experience tells me that action is the only remedy.  For me, it shaped my choices of jobs, what I did in those jobs, and where I continue to act.  The only other choices are less healthy if I try to ignore or rationalize what I feel.  Instead, I use my experiences as impetus to remain engaged in changing what I don’t like – even though I know that it won’t change in my lifetime.  That’s a commitment I make to myself which is why I see this as leading.  Even in those moments when I have no idea where I can lead change, I go find people who are working for change and support them.  I may not change anything, but I guarantee that I find more peace than being stuck with this feeling or ignoring it.