This is the Cater Daily podcast for Thursday, November 14th, 2024.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Two big policy ideas in education from the pending Trump administration are ending the U.S. Department of Education and nationalizing school choice.

Cato's Neil McCluskey says it's about half right.

So how about that election, Neil? That was something, wasn't it? It did occur. So Donald Trump

has pledged, among other things, to eliminate the Federal Department of Education, this is something that,

you know, in the grand scheme of cabinet-level departments, Department of Education really

hasn't been around that long.

Yeah, the Department of Education is a pretty new thing.

Basically, the legislative debate about it was 1979.

It squeaked by, and then the department came into existence in 1980.

So we're talking about an institution that will be 45 years old about when Trump takes up the presidency for the second

time. And it's important to note just as a matter of background that when this was proposed,

it was mainly driven by the National Education Association, which is the country's largest teachers

union. It had actually recently changed from a professional association, long actually dominated by

administrators, not teachers, into a full-fledged union in around the mid-1970s. And around that time,

it said, hey, we will throw our support behind anybody who's running for president who will promise to create a U.S. Department of Education.

At the time, candidate Jimmy Carter, said, I'll do that. And so they campaigned for him. And they're a pretty powerful force. And actually, actually, after he's elected, they kind of had to start prodding him.

Like, hey, you said we'd get this Department of Education because lots of Democrats were opposed to it.

It was going to be taken out of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.

Not surprisingly, the secretary of that department said this is crazy.

Education should be combined with welfare because this is about child well-being.

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