It’s easy to understand why it’s so popular with many Americans to cut the power and influence of the Department of Education. The return on investment from our massive investment of scarce taxpayer dollars has been children who can’t read and are not progressing but are politically indoctrinated by the left. 

For too long, the Department of Education (DOE) has abused the privilege of partnering with parents and states to provide high-quality education and instead manipulated metrics and outcomes for a leftist agenda. Students for Life of America (SFLA) and Students for Life Action (SFLAction) have been fighting this for years and met with leaders in the DOE during President Trump’s first administration because of the long-term infiltration of pro-abortion programs and bias. For those who want to cut the DOE’s power and funding, we feel your pain. 

Case in point: the misuse of Title IX (Title 9) programming to push abortion rather than empower pregnant and parenting students. Pregnancy is not a disease cured by abortion, and it is not the mandate of the DOE to eliminate generations of future students. And yet, many school websites and Title IX counselors push abortion and abortion vendors. This bias is so extreme that SFLAction has championed the Pregnant Students Rights Act, a bill with no cost, but that would demand schools include life-affirming support and not just push abortion. 

So extreme is the abortion bias in America, a bill that would require that pregnant women get information on their options only passed the U.S. House and languished in the U.S. Senate. 

Title IX is the foundation of our Standing with You initiative, offering life-affirming resources to women in all 50 states. We highlighted those protections in our Pregnant and Parenting Students Bill of Rights, but they’ve been at risk. The Biden-Harris Administration attacked Title IX to manipulate the definitions to embrace an agenda that essentially erased the women it was supposed to protect. SFLA and SFLAction fought back, but the bureaucrats had the inside track.

“(T)he Department of Education rewrote Title IX rules to expand the definition of ‘sex’ discrimination to include ‘gender identity’ and then handed enforcement over to the Department of Agriculture, which threatened to withhold school meal funding from institutions that refused to embrace this radical ideology,” reports the Heritage Foundation’s Kevin Roberts, Phd, and Lindsey Burke, PhD. 

So, no food for kids unless pro-abortion rhetoric is weaponized?

And that brings us to the DOE’s failure to educate. Roberts and Burke note: “The agency’s mission is ‘to promote student achievement and preparation for global competitiveness by fostering educational excellence and ensuring equal access.’ Yet, nearly 45 years after its creation under former President Jimmy Carter, high school seniors’ math and reading outcomes remain stagnant. Worse still, the academic achievement gap between the United States’s poorest and wealthiest students, a gap of four grade levels, has not narrowed since the department’s inception.”

The failure to protect children’s education – reading, writing, and arithmetic – combined with an obsession with ensuring those children never have a family of their own explains a lot of the frustration many have with the DOE. 

For those who say they want to cut out or cut down the Department of Education – We feel your pain. 

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