The Department of Education has given the Left dangerous power over schooling in the U.S., and the next president should aim to abolish the nearly 45-year-old federal agency.
So says Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts on this week’s edition of his podcast, “The Kevin Roberts Show.”
Roberts, himself a former K-12 and college educator, made the case for abolishing the Cabinet-level department in an interview with podcast co-host Tim Kennedy. Roberts called that policy goal his “life’s work.”
“The Department of Education got it wrong on the first minute of its existence in 1979,” he contended, “because it is such a terrible idea to centralize or attempt to centralize education policy, education funding, [and] curriculum questions.”
The department was created near the end of the Carter administration at the behest of the teachers unions.
Roberts said “radical” professors like those he once knew as colleagues became the administrators” of the Education Department. “What happened in the intervening generation or two is that American culture deteriorated,” he added.
“We’ve spent several trillion dollars as a people on public education” at the federal level, Roberts added, only to find that “every demographic group in public education has seen their educational attainment decline.”
Roberts, who taught college-level history in Texas and founded a private, coed Catholic K-12 school in Louisiana, told Kennedy that “education should be as local as it possibly can be” and that funding should follow individual students.
“If you’re not interested in dismantling the Department of Education, Heritage doesn’t think you should be running for president,” he said.
Watch the full episode of “The Kevin Roberts Show” for an inside look at the foundation’s education agenda.
