The guardians of the status quo seek judicial intervention to save the Education Department.
Teachers unions sued the Trump administration this week for trying to abolish the Education Department, which is no surprise given that the department was created at their behest and mainly serves to advance their agenda of more spending and less accountability.
Federal education policy used to be handled by the Department of Health, Education and Welfare. In exchange for a presidential endorsement in 1976, Jimmy Carter promised the National Education Association a stand-alone cabinet department. Joseph Califano, Carter’s HEW secretary, opposed the move, predicting in his memoir that it would be “virtually impossible for the Education Secretary to run the new department efficiently.”
Mr. Califano noted that his skepticism was shared by others at the time, including the press. “The editorial content across the nation was scathing,” he wrote, “and even included the liberal New York Times and Washington Post which said, ‘The bill is the inspiration of the NEA, an organization that has much the same relation to the public schools as the plumbers union has to the plumbing business.’ ”
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Jason L. Riley is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, and a Fox News commentator. Follow him on Twitter here.
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