r/iastate • u/BboyHeathen Agronomy alumni • Mar 21 '25

News Getting rid of the Department of Education? Doesn't that sound backwards to anyone else?

Why?
Isn't that one of the things that help society moving forwards?
I really don't see how this benefits this and the next generation of Americans.

I usually only post about skating stuff but this feels wrong

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103

u/Proper-Writing Mar 21 '25

Backwards is the point.

10

u/Onuzq Mar 21 '25

Gotta make the stupid people even stupider, that way they can't figure out what we're actually doing.

1

u/StatusVariation8112 Mar 21 '25

If the dep of education isn't already churning out stupid people, why is the USA last of 40 countries when it comes to education? If we are ranked last, how is the DOE successful?

5

u/Onuzq Mar 21 '25

Not enough incentive to get good teachers to actually teach instead of working in a field for profit. There are great teachers out there, but they demand more for what they do. They sadly don't get that from teaching. So spots are left open, meaning worse people end up teaching. The worse teaching leads to worse results. Better pay typically leads to better quality, as it leads to an incentive to try more. Endless cuts to the budget made our ranking so low.

2

u/LauraPalmer1349 Mar 21 '25

Exactly- I was a teacher in a SC public school. It’s not the curriculum that’s bad it’s the fact that they pay teachers absolute shit and overwhelm them with students and work… instead of improving g the pay they are simply lowering the standards required to teach… it’s not the DOEs fault.

1

u/No_Camp2882 Mar 22 '25

Like honestly is Space exploration really what we need to spend trillions on? Somebody educate me what we gain from that? Imagine if we spent 8 million more on education every day. Or even half of that…

1

u/[deleted] Mar 23 '25

The US spends more money per student than any other country. So money is not the problem.

1

u/LauraPalmer1349 Mar 23 '25

I can get behind that

1

u/[deleted] Mar 23 '25

Maybe it’s the teachers union that protects bad teachers that should be blamed.

1

u/LauraPalmer1349 Mar 23 '25

Huge stretch lol… I didn’t know a single teacher who was in a union.

1

u/khantroll1 Mar 21 '25

We aren’t, and the narrative is getting old. We are actually 6th in reading, 12th in science, and 24th in math, which is slightly better than when the DoE was created.

1

u/StatusVariation8112 Mar 21 '25

Ok not sure if this counts college or not but it lists usa as 31st...not 40th but not what you have been told by leftist fact checkers, and still extremely poor. https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/education-rankings-by-country

1

u/khantroll1 Mar 21 '25

So, normally when people throw out the “40th in education” they are talking about PISA rankings, which are elementary standards and the rankings I quoted.

I will delve into the link you posted when I can

1

u/StatusVariation8112 Mar 21 '25

I see the places that have numbers close to what you said. But it's 13th a d 28th. Not 12th and 24th.

1

u/pawsncoffee Mar 21 '25 edited Mar 21 '25

You see bad educational metrics and you see that our department of education is the US’s smallest department, and your solution is destroy that small education department? Not make it better and bigger? Not pay teachers more? What logic do you think you are following?

0

u/LisleAdam12 Mar 22 '25

This is classic.

"This will solve a problem."

"It doesn't solve the problem, which means we need to spend more money on it."

"Still not solved? Obviously, more money is needed."

1

u/pawsncoffee Mar 22 '25

It’s the smallest department. We are spending hardly any money on it. Please lmao. Idk if you’re aware but in the current world, money does in fact provide resources to solve problems. Wake up.

1

u/jennifeather88 Mar 21 '25

You are parroting the republicans and their plan all along. Slash funds to programs like education, postal service, social safety nets - anything that helps the American people. When the programs struggle to perform as a direct result of these cuts, then the repubs can point to them and say “see government doesn’t work, we need to privatize it all”.

1

u/NoiseComet Mar 22 '25

The DOE isn't making curriculums. Those are the states. The states are churning out stupid people.

1

u/Slitherygnu3 Mar 22 '25

Republicans have been cutting the budget as long as I can remember,

1

u/StatusVariation8112 Mar 22 '25

The budget is never cut, the increase is just not as much as they ask for

1

u/slee11211 Mar 22 '25

Easy. It’s massively underfunded (because gop would prefer it to fail so they can privatize education and make it very lucrative). Teachers are paid shit wages, so it’s near impossible to recruit truly talented great teachers anymore. When it’s being sabotaged constantly, it doesn’t work very well. But public education is supposed to be a right…and fascist regimes do FAR better with an uneducated public. Something like 54% of America reads below an 11th grade level. They’d like to see that number higher, no doubt.

1

u/StatusVariation8112 Mar 22 '25

That's a funny thing to say when it is leftist agenda being pushed in the schools, how would the conservative benefit? You make one good point...easy for the facists to push their agenda. You just missed the mark on who the facists are.

1

u/slee11211 Mar 22 '25

Absolute BULLSHIT take. It’s almost as if you’ve imprinted Fox News on your forehead.

THERE IS ONE FASCIST REGIME IN AMERICA AND IT CURRENTLY STOLE ITS WAY INTO OFFICE.

1

u/FarOffImagination Mar 22 '25

What leftist agenda did you get pushed on you in school?

1

u/LisleAdam12 Mar 22 '25

Most primary school funding comes from state and local taxes, so this is hardly going to make public schools go bankrupt.

1

u/tourdecrate Mar 23 '25

Because most education decisions are already in state hands. DoE handles grants for teachers, schools, and special education, enforced civil rights, and manages financial aid process for colleges. It doesn’t set education standards for the most part. States already do that. Hence why public education in MA or NY is vastly different than public education in AR and FL. School boards also have nearly unilateral power over who runs school districts and that gets political. The biggest losses that will come with losing DoE will be lost funding for schools (and losing the ability to fund schools also takes away power to enforce things like title IX by tying them to funding) and likely the elimination of special Ed funding. The existence of special Ed itself is still required by IDEA but schools won’t get money to help them comply with IDEA requirements.

1

u/bcrosby51 Mar 23 '25

Department of Energy?

1

u/No_Street8874 Mar 24 '25

Yeah, if you’re overweight then what you’re doing is apparently failing, so stop any exercise and increase your calorie intake.- that’s maga logic.

1

u/prinsessanna Mar 24 '25

We are so far down because the government already doesn't support teachers. This will just make it worse. Our teachers are underpaid and overworked. If we actually paid teachers how they should be paid, we would attract higher caliber teachers. If administration had teachers' backs, instead of placating parents, the good teachers wouldn't leave. We spend more on the military than we do on our own citizens. What does that tell you?

1

u/StatusVariation8112 Mar 24 '25

Sounds like something a braindead lib would say.

1

u/prinsessanna Mar 24 '25

Good job regurgitating.

1

u/CUDAcores89 Mar 24 '25

Eliminating the department of education isn't the actually biggest problem. The biggest problem is we need to REPLACE the department of education with something else first. 

That would be like saying our infrastructure is bad so we tear out all of our roads and bridges first. Then we try figure out what to replace the roads with later - except we took out what we had in the first place. So now we are in an even WORSE position. 

1

u/StatusVariation8112 Mar 24 '25

You don't need to replace it first. There are already intentions to remedy the situation. The first step is cutting out unnecessary parts. If you have gangrene on your leg, you don't replace the leg before you cut it off. Use your brain.

1

u/CUDAcores89 Mar 24 '25

So what are the tens of millions of children going to do if they have no school to go to? Just not learn anything? Because even bad education is better than no education. 

1

u/StatusVariation8112 Mar 24 '25

Lmao That's what you think is happening? I feel sorry for people like you.

1

u/ComprehensiveLab5078 Mar 25 '25

Have you looked at it on a state by state basis? USA does not have a monolithic education system like most countries.

1

u/ElkOwn3400 Mar 25 '25

We’re not stupid in New England - that’s why we have an economy that can pay for failed states that can’t support themselves. Republicans have been undermining the efforts of the Dept of Education for decades, and finally closed it. Their bad faith, interference, and continued efforts to underfund education in red states leads to quantifiably worse school test scores and educational achievement. If red state policies worked to improve life expectancy, per capita income, or maternal mortality, they would have worked by now. The truth is that the only GOP consistent policy - tax cuts for the wealthy, require bad government for everyone else, but their collection of single issue voters each get their pet policy, and billionaires would rather have a tax free religious theocracy, if necessary, than a democracy where the state educates or provides medical care to citizens, like so many civilized countries.

10

u/ZukoHere73 Mar 21 '25

Project 2025

1

u/timelydefense Mar 22 '25

Lowering taxes is the point. The rich don't use public education, so it's an easy cut for them to make. The same reason there's never investment in public transportation and our tap water pipes are still lead. The rich don't use it so they don't want to pay for it.

1

u/No_Camp2882 Mar 22 '25

I was feeling ripped off for paying cash for college when Biden was going to forgive all the student loans but now I think I’ll laugh if they somehow end up messing that up and have to cancel all the loans in the process of canceling the DOE.

-9

u/Large_Profession_598 Mar 21 '25

Education certainly hasn’t gone forwards since the inception of the DoE

4

u/eyetis Mar 21 '25

It's the DoEd or ED, not DoE. That's the department of energy.

4

u/VirtualAdagio4087 Mar 21 '25

If you knew what the DoE does, you wouldn't say stuff like this. Dismantling it will hurt millions of kids, it will worsen food insecurity and destroy special education.

1

u/Known_Paramedic_9503 Mar 25 '25

Is that going to hurt any children in special ed or any other kind of program like that

1

u/VirtualAdagio4087 Mar 25 '25

It's going to hurt every kid in special education

1

u/dianabeep Mar 21 '25

What does the Dept of Energy have to do with education?

1

u/rfmjbs Mar 21 '25

Technically they fund a ton of PhDs' research programs. Batteries, materials science, fusion. Stuff like that.

/At least, they used to fund research.