If and when the Department of Education disappears, there will be few taxpayers to share in the tumbler of tears public education activists will shed. Photo Credit: U.S. Department of Education/X.
Having spent over 30 years as an educator in various roles, this author doesn’t think he is especially qualified to assess the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) cuts to the Department of Education. But curiously, many in the legacy press would like to avoid discussing what has motivated the urgency to reduce funding to this agency and possibly eliminate it. Many conservatives prefer small government in size and scope, believing that a government closer to the people delivers better service and understands local needs more comprehensively than those in far away bureaucratic centres like Washington, DC. The Department of Education’s (DOE) founding in 1979 illustrates the problem with large government bodies and burgeoning budgets.
The 10th Amendment states, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” Nowhere in the Constitution is education listed as a federal responsibility. For a century prior and then with the establishment of the Department as a cabinet-level agency, the executive had flirted with sticking its proverbial nose into the business of teaching children in local schools. Collecting data, funding, and ensuring federal government initiatives are followed have been reasons for its existence. Sadly, as Chris Rufo, Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, found out recently, the depths of the Department’s activism justifies DOGE’s interest in cutting funding and President Donald Trump’s executive order to end the boondoggle that the Agency represents.
As Ben Shapiro clarified on his podcast Friday (Feb. 14), “Whether you’re in private school or public school, the reality is, the more local the education, the more it reflects the needs, desires, and wants of the parents, who of course are the ones most aligned with the interests of their children. Instead, we in the United States have increasingly devolved authority to the federal government. And the federal government, virtually all of its agencies, have been hijacked, as we’ve now been learning, by a left-wing bureaucratic mess designed as a permanent pipeline of cash to the friends of the Democrats.” Rufo provides the proof for this assessment (at least as it applies to the DOE).
Rufo and his team have spent two months pouring over the various aspects of funding at the DOE, its subsidiaries, and grantees. The Department functions as a left-wing patronage machine, handing out money to liberal causes, left-wing think tanks and progressive activists. The clips that Rufo has posted repeat the usual bromides of the equity officers of DEI who call America racist and that white people think like white supremacists unless they embrace anti-racist ideology. Funding programs like this do not align with what the federal government should be doing and have nothing to do with teaching children to read, write, compute, and think. The propagandizing of America’s children rests on Rufo’s findings.
In one of the clips, a Department of Education employee compares American education to a concentration camp during the Holocaust: “We are working in a structurally (racist from its beginning) system. It’s like, sometimes I feel like I’m in the like I’m working in this concentration camp, and there’s the gas chambers everywhere, and I’m part of that system. And so you have to make that decision about how far you’re willing to push or whether you need to get out and do something different. The anti-racist teachers recognize that the system is designed, the public education system is designed to harm black and brown children. It is not designed in their best interest. It never has been. And look, I benefit from public education. I get that. I’m the exception, not the rule. We are heavily focused on how to get police out of schools. We also heavily focused on how we defund policing and SROs. Ibram X Kendi has done a great job of putting words to this idea that a lot of us have known for a long time, that there is no not racist. There is no non-racist. You’re either contributing to racism, or you’re pushing against racism.” Strange, but these equity centres are receiving grants of 8 million dollars supporting anywhere from a dozen to two dozen gender activists who advise thousands of public-school districts. It does not seem unfair to call this indoctrination and ask why the taxpayer should be asked to hand over money for this kind of partisan project.
How about another clip where these educators explain the importance of sex work in the LGBTQ community? In this session, they attempt to emphasize the importance for children to learn about sex work. After speaking to a couple of other issues, the worker states, “Our third point that we do bring up and cover in this mini presentation is understanding the importance of sex work in the LGBTQ plus community and LGBTQ survival. Because especially for queer and trans people of colour and, most emphatically, black trans women, this often is a means of income. And by not talking about it and avoiding talking about that, we’re making that worse and making it easier for people to be stigmatized who need support. So we want to make sure that that’s something as educators that we’re aware of so that we’re able to support our communities.” Rufo points out that the educators, in a misguided moment (practice?), are suggesting young people be supported in legitimizing sex work to avoid being stigmatized if they are making a living as prostitutes. Decriminalizing and destigmatizing sex work for black transgender children is the new noble calling. People have differing opinions, but why should federal taxpayers subsidize it? As Rufo observes, “…every taxi driver, line cook and electrician around the country that’s working hard to feed their family is…chipping in for this idea that we should de-stigmatize sex work for children.”
The final clip this author will share looks at adultism. What is adultism? As I recently learned in a lengthy explanation, adultism presents a big problem for young people trying to express themselves. “For LGBT young people, adultism is uniquely important because a huge part of where adultism meets homophobia and transphobia is the notion that as a young LGBT person, you are not in charge of yourself, you are not in charge of your body, you’re not in charge of your medical care. Denying or trying to control LGBT young people’s ability to express themselves as who they truly are often leads to things like people running away from home, as we’ve discussed and shared with you about our personal lives. This often leads to homelessness. This often leads to and creates a lot of the systems that we all hear, I would imagine, are trying to prevent. Say, for example, an LGBT child comes out to their parent and their parent is Christian, and their parents are like, oh, you know, well, you know, it could just be a phase, you might grow out of it, right? That’s something that is commonly heard by LGBT young people. That is not just homophobic and transphobic, it’s also adultist because you’re presuming, due to that young person’s age, that they are unable to recognize themselves as an LGBT person.”
In effect, the educators in this clip are telling parents not to parent their children. In consultation with educators like her, kids/students are fully capable of deciding to change their gender, identify their sexuality, and make life-long decisions about important matters. The exposé did not end there. Babies are capable of having racist tendencies and making decisions as well if you subscribe to these theories. These ideas go back to the Chinese Communist Party wanting to radicalize children against their parents. If people want to hold to these ideas in a free society, no one can banish or prevent them from doing so. Funding this perversion with federal money? That is a different matter, and the backlash against this spending has been brewing for some time. No one should be surprised when these matters are aired DOGE gains popular support. Any federal department this far off the rails needs more than a simple nudge. If and when the Department of Education disappears, having never been necessary, there will be few taxpayers to share in the tumbler of tears these public education activists will shed.
Dave Redekop is a retired elementary resource teacher who now works part-time at the St. Catharines Courthouse as a Registrar. He has worked on political campaigns since high school and attended university in South Carolina for five years, where he earned a Master’s in American History with a specialization in Civil Rights. Dave loves reading biographies.
