Jimmy Carter utterly failed us in creating the U.S. Department of Education

His promises to us may not have been lies, but they didn't result in what he promised. We need to do something different.

Democrat President Jimmy Carter issued a statement on October 17, 1979 on signing the Federal law that created the U.S. Department of Education. You can read it for yourself here. It is clear 46 years later that Carter’s pollyannaish experiment in education bureaucracy has been an utter waste of time and resources, as the agency has failed to live up to any of the basic promises its’ Democratic backers, led by that President, made to us.

Chief among the failed promises was Carter’s promise that the Department of Education will save tax dollars “eliminating bureaucratic layers, the reorganization will permit direct, substantial personnel reductions. By enhancing top-level management attention to education programs, it will earn improved educational services at less cost.”

So let’s examine and compare the facts about whether the Department created “substantial personnel reductions,” “improved educational services” and at “less cost.”

In 1980, there were 3.171 million people employed at all levels of education in the U.S. But by 2024, that number had ballooned to 13.574 million. Though the population in the United States has grown about 47% since 1980, it has nowhere neared the more than tripling of education personnel employed in the nation over the same period. So the Department failed mightily to reduce personnel. The result was actually the opposite of what was promised. But did this massive increase in personnel help improve things? Did it, for example, raise test scores?

On “educational services", let’s look at the deliverables, which are revealed in student testing. In 1980, in math and science, U.S. students ranked near the bottom in international comparisons. Pew Research found in 2017 that U.S students academic achievement continued to lag that of students in other countries, ranging in what Pew optimistically termed “in the middle of the pack,” ranking 38th out of 71 countries in math and 24th in science. Today, after 46 years of the U.S. Department of Education, U.S. students’ test scores in comparison to foreign nations (which spend far less per pupil than us) “generally falls in the middle to lower tiers among developed nations.” The truth is test scores hardly budged as a result of the establishment of a whole new Federal Department whose creators promised otherwise.

Less cost? In 1980, the total government expenditure on education in the U.S. was approximately $2,491 per pupil, according to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) (.gov). In fiscal year 2022, the average public school spending per pupil in the U.S. was $15,591. Has this remarkable increase in spending per pupil, far exceeding inflation, measurably raised test scores among U.S. students? You should know the answer by now.

Education in general over the years since the Department of Education was established has become more expensive, more bureaucratic, more bloated with personnel (think administrative and not classroom personnel) and it has not improved educational outcomes in the slightest. That is by the true math. It is about time that Ronald Reagan’s vision to abolish D.O.E. came to fruition. We need to stop repeating the insanity if we want to give all our kids the tools to a successful future. To better educate America, we need to do something different. We could learn from other countries like South Korea, which pay a lot less per pupil for learning, but get better results. Families there are more engaged, and students do better. Perhaps modeling after other nations that get better results might be a more fruitful step than simply doing the bidding of teachers’ unions, again and again, who tell us to pour more and money into the current system, to '“do it for the kids”, yet continue to deliver failure, such as in Los Angeles, where only 43.1% of students met state proficiency targets in reading in the 2023-24 school year. Time for a new approach. Let’s “do it for the kids.”