Department of Education: A waste of taxpayer money or a necessity to our education system?

The United States Government has fifteen Cabinet level agencies which include topics such as agriculture to foreign affairs however there is one specific agency that spends billions of dollars a year which may or may not be needed. The United States Department of Education is an agency that could be minimized. The United States Department of Education should be minimized and the state and local departments should be in charge of their own education policies.

In 1867 the original Department of Education was created to collect information on schools and teaching that would help the states establish effective and competitive school systems. During that time the D.O.E. was called the Office of Education and didn’t have an official place in the Executive Branch. The United States Department of Education (D.O.E.) has been officially around since 1971 when President Jimmy Carter signed into law the creation of the D.O.E. as a Cabinet level agency. Two years later, when President Ronald Reagan took office he planned on abolishing the D.O.E. right away because he believed the federal government was intruding too much and that the state and local governments should control the education (Genovese 164). However, in 1983 the D.O.E. published A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Education Reform which critiqued America’s public education system. President Reagan was alarmed at this report and decided to retain the D.O.E. because he saw it as a weakness if our education system was producing citizens not able to contribute positively to our economy (Genovese 165). Since that year, most republican presidential candidates have considered abolishing the D.O.E. until recently.

The top contenders for the republican presidential candi...

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