The left are totally aghast that President Trump’s plans to shut down the federal Department of Education are beginning to be put into action. “Students will suffer harm,” CNN told us, after department’s civil rights office was ‘gutted.’ Education professionals in Charlotte are “sounding the alarm,” “Ten percent of the district’s funding comes from the feds, used to pay for basic educational needs, staffing and professional development,” and “‘We really don’t know who, which department, what positions, who’s controlling what really, it’s up in the air right now,’ said Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools Board Vice Chair Dee Rankin.” readers were told, which raises the obvious questions: why are local schools being partially funded by the feds, and why should the feds be controlling anything? NBC News told us that “Experts say this week’s mass layoffs could lead to less research and support for children with special needs.”
But perhaps, just perhaps, it should be asked whether the Department of Education was actually improving education. From The Philadelphia Inquirer:
Lower Merion led racial equity efforts in the ′90s. But its achievement gap has only widened.
Lower Merion spends more per student than almost any other district in Pennsylvania, but Black parents say it’s not delivering the same caliber of education for all children.
by Maddie Hanna | Wednesday, March 12, 2025 | 5:00 AM EDT
One of Pennsylvania’s wealthiest and best-performing districts, the Lower Merion School District has billed itself as a leader in tackling racial inequity: from convening a committee to address how race affected its schools in the late 1990s to becoming one of the first local districts to prioritize closing achievement gaps in its strategic plan in 2009.
Yet those gaps between Black students and their peers persist — and have only widened since the district committed to closing them.
Fifteen years ago, Black students in third through eighth grades trailed white students by 28.4 percentage points in English language arts standardized tests, and 28.5 points in math. In 2024, the difference in English scores had grown to 33.4 points. In math, the gap widened to 42.4 points.
Administrators who presented the latest test results in December said they were well aware of the problem. “We know people are asking us questions about it, and we own it,” Scott Weinstein, acting assistant to the superintendent, said during the school board meeting.
So, the school district began its plans in 2009, when Barack Hussein Obama was taking office, and the measurements ended for this report in 2024, as Joe Biden was getting ready to retire back to Delaware. That was twelve years when Democrats were running the federal government, and four during President Trump’s first term. Did the federal Department of Education, including eight years under our first black President, someone very concerned about black achievement, help solve the problem?
I’ve done a little bit of concrete quality control work in Lower Merion, and I can tell you from personal experience: the place is dripping with money. I could afford to buy houses in Virginia, in northeast Pennsylvania, and in Kentucky, but I couldn’t even afford the driveways and garages in Lower Merion!
The Democratic presidential candidate carried Montgomery County, where Lower Merion Township is located, by margins of over 20% in 2016, 2020, and 2024, so it’s not as though evil, reich-wing Republicans have much influence there.
What evidence is there that the federal Department of Education, or that the Democrats being in charge of education, has had any positive effect on actual student achievement? We previously noted then candidate for the Democratic mayoral nomination Helen Gym, who was supported by the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers, campaigning in front of the Edward T Steel Elementary School, telling us how she saved that school from ‘going charter,’ but Steel Elementary, was ranked 1,205th out of 1,607 Pennsylvania elementary schools. 8% of the students scored at or above grade-level proficient in reading, and a whopping 1% of students scored at or above in math.
There is simply no evidence that the education bureaucracy in this country has improved actually educating students.
The left love the federal Department of Education for two main reasons: it has enabled the policies from liberal districts to be imposed on schools in conservative areas, and has allowed the liberal advocates to have to lobby only one set of bureaucrats, at the federal level, rather than fifty state education boards and thousands of local school districts for the policies they prefer.
The federal Department of Education has been a tremendous success when it comes to adding layers of bureaucrats and imposing leftist policies, but downright lousy on improving educational achievement in this country, but that’s no surprise; liberals foul up virtually everything they touch.
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