Leaving No Child Behind
Confronting, not just complaining about, an unaccountable Department of Education can help all American students.
By Emile Doak, the executive director of the Chelsea Academy Foundation in Front Royal, Virginia, and a contributing editor at The American Conservative, where he previously served as executive director.
Two recent headlines illustrate where American education may be headed. First: “Trump signs executive order to dismantle Department of Education.” And second, a development that has received less attention—but is arguably more notable: “Trump’s DOJ signals support for St. Isidore charter school.” Taken together, these two news items paint the clearest picture yet that American education may finally emerge from its half-century-long decline.
Dismantling the Department of Education (ED) has long been on the Republican wish list. Since the department’s creation during the Carter administration, nearly every Republican president has formally called for its abolition. (George W. Bush, who greatly expanded ED with his “No Child Left Behind” program, is the ignoble exception—a common theme of the 43rd presidency.)
Most often, Republican arguments against ED have been made on procedural grounds. These arguments sidestepped normative considerations of the purpose of education, and instead placed ED question within the broader debate over the size of government and the proper limits of our constitutional framework. As early as 1982, President Reagan used his first State of the Union address to call for the end of ED, arguing that the department represented wasteful “non-essential government spending.” The 1996 GOP platform similarly stated, “the Federal government has no constitutional authority to be involved in school curricula or to control jobs in the market place. This is why we will abolish the Department of Education.” These procedural arguments are still prominent in libertarian corners of the Right today. The Cato Institute’s recent praise of Trump’s education executive order centers on concerns of efficiency, constitutionality, and expense of the federal bureaucracy.
It’s worth noting that Cato ran essentially the same argument 20 years ago, while Republicans and Democrats alike continued to grow ED. In contrast, and in what’s becoming a theme in the second Trump administration, the argument that actually accomplished the decades-long GOP pipe dream was far more substantive than procedural.
President Trump’s March 20 executive order focuses not on the constitutional minutia of the department’s existence, but on its disastrous effects on American children. It highlights the precipitous decline in academic achievement among American youth overseen by ED: while the department’s budget spiked, American reading and math scores plummeted to near historic lows. This has created a real crisis for the now-young adults that the system has failed. Forget job skills—our public education system is failing to impart even the most basic skills necessary for citizenship. We now have multiple public high school graduates suing their school districts, alleging that they were passed through without even learning to read.
The Trump administration also takes aim at the most nefarious aspect of ED, the Office of Civil Rights. For decades, the OCR has been a vital tool in the left’s quest to remake American society. Its federal workers loom over school districts across the country, allowing alleged victims of discrimination to circumvent local remedies to their objections and instead leverage the power of the federal government to unilaterally change policy toward progressive ends. At best, the OCR has been responsible for nationalizing what should be minor local indiscretions, often to the lasting detriment of the reputation of insufficiently “enlightened” teenagers. At worst, it has played a leading role in pushing confused boys into girls-only spaces for well over a decade now, all too often to tragic effect.
The Trump administration countered OCR’s harm head-on. The March 20 executive order directs the Secretary of Education to ensure that any program receiving federal assistance “terminate[s] illegal discrimination obscured under the label ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’, or similar terms and programs promoting gender ideology.”
In other words: Republicans argued for decades that ED was unnecessary, and it only grew. Trump argued that ED was bad, and he effectively eliminated it.
Yet perhaps even more important than its efficacy, the Trump administration’s substantive argument against ED has prompted the necessary debate over what a more effective mode of education should look like. Effectively eliminating the department is not a retreat to a libertarian neutrality in education policy; rather, it creates the conditions necessary for better policy to emerge. And it’s here that the St. Isidore case is instructive as to what that better policy might be.
St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School is a project of the two Catholic dioceses in Oklahoma. It was conceived during the dark days of the COVID-19 shutdowns, when traditional public schools abandoned their duty to the next generation by closing their doors, causing irreparable harm to the students unfortunate enough to have no other educational options. In response, the Catholic bishops of Oklahoma seized the opportunity presented by their state’s permissive school choice environment and applied for a public charter for an unabashedly Catholic virtual school. In doing so, the dioceses forced a question: can religious schools receive public charters?
The Oklahoma Statewide Virtual Charter School Board answered yes. On a 3-2 vote, the board approved a contract with St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School in 2023. The school was scheduled to open for the 2024-25 school year.
Predictably, the project was quickly tied up in litigation by those who prefer that public schools advance the liberal rather than true religion. After a setback for St. Isidore and the Oklahoma Charter School Board at the Oklahoma Supreme Court, the U.S. Supreme Court granted certiorari in the case last fall. Oral arguments are set to begin later this month.
It’s unclear whether St. Isidore will prevail, especially given Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s decision to recuse herself from the case. But regardless of the outcome, the case is a watershed in education policy—not only because of the precedent it could set, but because of the Trump administration’s active position on the case. The administration, through Acting Solicitor General Sarah Harris, submitted an amicus brief to the Court in support of St. Isidore and the Oklahoma Charter School Board.
The legal arguments in the case center around the Free Exercise Clause and the state’s obligation to treat religious groups equally to non-religious groups when seeking a public charter. It’s a strong argument. Underlying the legal argument, though, is a deeper recognition that education is never truly neutral. It is both an inculturation and an indoctrination, in the literal sense of both terms. It seeks to pass on a particular culture, a civilizational inheritance, which in turn provides a lens through which to examine the world.
The classical education movement understands this and is growing. Parents are increasingly opting out of a public school system that is either academically inept (at best) or actively corrupting (at worst). Yet despite the promise of these independent schools, they remain a defensive measure. They are a practical solution for astute families navigating a broken educational system, downstream from a broken culture. But as education is an inescapably political pursuit, a political solution is needed.
The Department of Education was bad, and it needed to go. Far more important, though, is pursuing policy in its stead that will supplant the broken public education system. Voucher programs are a necessary immediate remedy for families navigating a bad system, but they are not a sufficient policy solution. Instead, it’s far past time that we cease to pretend to a public neutrality over the kind of citizens our schools should seek to form. Education is an inescapably normative act; it will shape souls one way or another, and therefore must be oriented toward the good. We should pursue policies that will ultimately provide every American student with that traditional understanding of education—not just the fortunate few whose parents choose a better school for them.
By siding with St. Isidore Catholic School in its fight for state funding, the Trump administration shows—however implicitly and imperfectly—that it understands this. If the administration’s recent moves are any indication, we may soon have the widespread, public revival in true education that this country so desperately needs.