The Education Bureaucrats Are Still Coming For America’s Children

Last month, President Trump started making good on a campaign promise to end federal tyranny over American education. After his newly minted Secretary of Education Linda McMahon laid off roughly half of her department’s workforce, the president signed an executive order directing her to preside over the complete elimination of the department.

Needless to say, the usual suspects in the educational establishment are very upset by this move to crush an important revenue stream. After the mass firings, American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten whined that “denuding an agency so it cannot function effectively is the most cowardly way of dismantling it.” She made no mention of her own cowardice in the face of Covid-19, which provoked the revolution in education that she and her cronies have spent the past several years trying to suppress.

While the proposed demise of the Department of Education is certainly a reason for celebration, educational reformers must keep the pressure on. Educrats (especially teachers unions) still have very deep pockets combined with a complete lack of conscience regarding their effect on American children, so it will take more than just the end of the federal government’s covering fire to slay this dragon.

Unions Only Tell Half the Story

Weingarten’s complaint does have a little merit: A majority of Americans do not support eliminating the Department of Education. The reasons behind this are probably a combination of ignorance that its most vital functions (such as aid for special needs students) will be taken over by other departments, the usual leftist fearmongering, and simple bureaucratic inertia.

But there is another data point that we would do well to pay attention to: The American public overwhelmingly supports school choice programs, especially those that allow educational funds to follow the student in the form of school vouchers or educational savings accounts. When one looks at parents with school-age children, this support jumps even higher.

But as usual, the educational establishment doesn’t care what parents want. Unionized teachers are far less likely to support school choice than are non-unionized teachers, and the unions casually spend millions of dollars to defeat school choice initiatives like Amendment 80 in Colorado. Plus, we all remember how the educrats reacted in 2021 when parents started voicing their legitimate concerns at school board meetings.

The establishment also doesn’t care what the children in their charge need. The lockdown-induced drop in test scores continues to fester. (When the most prestigious university in the country starts offering remedial math courses to deal with pandemic learning loss, something is truly rotten in K-12 education.) Yet the educrats’ solution is the only one that they have offered for decades: Have taxpayers hand over more of their hard-earned money for the establishment to spend with increasingly dubious results.

Given these facts, it should come as no great shock that, according to the American Legislative Executive Council’s 2025 Index of State Education Freedom, the five top-rated states are all red states (Florida, Arizona, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Iowa), while the four out of the five worst states (Kentucky, Rhode Island, Oregon, Massachusetts, and New York) are deep blue. Where Democrats dominate, so does the educational establishment.

Educratic Culture Is Anti-Family

That domination extends beyond curricula and reading lists. The culture fostered by educrats in American schools actively seeks to destroy familial bonds and replace them with leftist ideology and toxic relationships.

We already know that educrats have no compunction about encouraging vulnerable kids to “gender transition” while hiding that effort from their parents. In Colorado, this blatant interference with parental rights has taken one dark step further. After an investigation by CBS News Colorado, the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office has launched a criminal inquiry into several officials at Columbine High School in Littleton for “falsely claim[ing] a student was homeless” three years ago. One possible motive was financial: Since 2022, Jefferson County Public Schools has been given more than $400,000 in funding for students who are homeless.

Another possible motive is far more disturbing. A district investigator reportedly discovered that teacher Leann Kearney —  who, according to the principal, “helps kids navigate their sexuality” — had been grooming the student in question, a claim bolstered by the student’s mother discovering “thousands of text messages and phone calls” between the two. The mother further claimed that “after her daughter turned 18, she moved in with another teacher” before going missing and reappearing with Kearney in California.

Through it all, school officials did not follow mandatory reporting laws. In addition, the investigator said that Principal Scott Christy displayed a “lack of urgency … possibly a lack of memory … and lack of follow-up” regarding the case and claimed that he did not contact the parents because of the student’s belief that they would not support her homosexuality.

Accountability Is Long Overdue

Admittedly, this is an extreme case of educratic malfeasance, but less extreme efforts against parents and children are happening throughout the country. This is because the educational establishment has come to consider itself the “true parent” of America’s children; actual parents exist only to fund the evil system they created and to cheer on whatever ridiculous lies they seek to impose on children.

Yet despite what they say in polls, parents keep consenting to have their children taken from them. In 2024, voters in Colorado, Kentucky, and Nebraska surrendered to the establishment, causing school choice initiatives to fail. Educational freedom is like any other freedom; it comes with responsibility. Apathy has only strengthened the establishment; parents need to be as involved in the education of their children as they are in other aspects of their lives.

Killing the Department of Education will not fully solve our educational crisis; it will simply make the educrats cling more desperately to the power they have in the states. Parents and their conservative allies must continue to hold state and local educational authorities accountable for their myriad failures by forcing the establishment to accept true school choice and the healthy competition that comes with it.

The only way to slay this dragon is to deprive it of its food: our children.

Robert Busek is a Catholic homeschooling father of six who has taught history and Western Civilization in both traditional and online classrooms for over twenty years. His essays have also been published in The American Conservative and The American Spectator. The views he expresses here are his own.