The fight over abolishing the Department of Education isn’t about saving money or giving parents more choices. It’s about power. The truth is, the wealthy and powerful benefit when regular people don’t understand how the system works. The people in power want schools that produce obedient workers, not critical thinkers. They want parents too busy struggling to pay bills to question why their kids’ textbooks are full of lies. And they’ve convinced millions of Americans to cheer as they destroy one of our last tools for fighting back.
The idea that we need to cut the Department of Education to balance the budget is a lie. The federal government can fully fund education instead of leaving kids to the mercy of the zip code their parents can afford. The United States creates its own money. It can never run out of dollars the way a family can run out of savings. When politicians claim we “can’t afford” good schools, what they really mean is they’re duty bound to their wealthy donors and powerful lobbyists to spend on tax cuts for billionaires and endless wars while making us believe there isn’t any funding left for things like education. Alan Greenspan, former Chairman of the Federal Reserve even admitted under oath, “There is nothing to prevent the federal government from creating as much money as it wants and paying it to somebody.” But they don’t want us to know that. If we understood how money really works, we’d demand better schools, universal single-payer healthcare, and truly livable wages.
The Department of Education, for all its flaws, is the only thing stopping some states from completely abandoning public schools. Without federal rules, places like Mississippi and Alabama would let their schools crumble while wealthy suburbs hoard all the resources. Federal programs help ensure that kids with special needs are accommodated, that girls have equal opportunities in sports, that all students’ nutritional needs are met and that poor students can get help paying for college. When these protections exist at all it’s because of federal oversight and federal dollars. The politicians pushing to eliminate the Department of Education don’t want parents to have any control. They want to let corporations and religious extremists take over our schools.
Study after study proves that America isn’t really a democracy. Princeton researchers found that what the rich want becomes law; everyone else is ignored. The average American has virtually zero influence on public policy. This isn’t an accident. It’s by design. When only 25% of adults can name all three branches of government, when half the country reads below a sixth-grade level, when 41% of young people don’t know what Auschwitz was, that’s not a failure of individual students. That’s the system working exactly as intended. An ignorant population doesn’t fight for unions, demand healthcare, or question bottomless funding for forever wars. It blames immigrants, falls for conspiracy theories, and keeps electing politicians who make their lives worse.
If we let them destroy the Department of Education, here’s what will happen. First, corporations will turn schools into profit centers. We’ve already seen this with charter schools that take public money but answer to billionaire investors. Next, religious extremists will rewrite history books to pretend slavery and colonialism were not so bad, that climate change is a hoax, and that evolution is just a crackpot theory. We’re seeing this happen now in states like Florida and Texas. Finally, the gap between rich and poor schools will grow even wider. Kids in wealthy neighborhoods will get small classes and new technology while everyone else gets overcrowded, under-resourced classrooms with overworked, underpaid teaching staff.
Who benefits from this? The same people who always benefit when regular people lose. The billionaire owners of charter school companies who get rich off local taxpayer dollars and inappropriately redirected federal subsidies. The corporate bosses who need workers too desperate and uneducated to demand better pay. The politicians who rely on voters being ignorant of basic historical or scientific facts. They’re all counting on us to believe the lie that public education is the problem, when in reality public education is one of the last things standing between us and complete corporate control. It’s one of the last surviving public services.
This isn’t just about schools. It’s about what kind of country we want to live in. Do we want a nation where every child gets a real education, where facts matter, where people understand their rights? Or do we want a country where the rich get richer while the rest of us fight over scraps? The attack on the Department of Education is part of a much bigger fight. It’s a fight between the people who profit off our ignorance and division, and the people who believe education should set us free. It is yet another battle in the ongoing class war.
We need to stop falling for their tricks. The money exists. The resources exist. Saving public education means more than just defending the Department of Education. It means seizing control and demanding 100% federally funded schools that teach critical thinking and the scientific method as well as communication skills, reading, art, and history free of whitewash. Anything less means abandoning our kids and any hope for the future.
