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When Washington, D.C., grinds to a halt, the liberal media rushes to tell you the sky is falling. Randi Weigngarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, and her union cronies cry out that schools will collapse without the Department of Education and that President Donald Trump is to blame for the shutdown. She has said he is “holding the American people hostage.”
The only people holding Americans hostage are the teachers unions. They held your children’s education hostage during COVID. They hold teachers hostage when they don’t conform to liberal standards. And worst of all they treat parents as roadblocks and hold them hostage when they push back.
The government shut down, federal workers at the Department of Education were furloughed, more than half the DOE staff has been let go, and schools are still running. Teachers are teaching. Students are learning. The world didn’t end.
Here’s the truth the media will never say out loud: this shutdown pulled back the curtain on one of the biggest scams in America: The U.S. Department of Education.
For decades, teachers unions and the liberal allies they bankroll in D.C. have told the American people that without the federal bureaucracy, education would crumble. They said states couldn’t handle education funding, accountability, or innovation without “guidance.”
They were wrong.
Schools continued operating during the shutdown because the real funding—Title I, IDEA, and other major streams, flows through long-established formulas and scheduled appropriations that continue even when federal staff are not at their desks. States already administer these dollars.
The shutdown simply paused administrative processing and new rulemaking, not the actual flow of funds to schools. In other words, the Department of Education wasn’t “running the system” before this, and the shutdown proved it.
The shutdown proved what many of us already knew: states are not only capable of managing education, they already do. Education in this country is funded and governed primarily at the state and local level. The federal government adds bureaucracy, not value.
Let’s be clear: there was never any reason for the U.S. Department of Education to exist. It was created as a political favor in 1979, a deal between Jimmy Carter and the teachers unions to lock in their power. And it shows.
The teachers unions are not just one of many players in this story. They are the reason the Department of Education exists at all. The department gives them power, money and political protection, and in return the unions defend the department’s existence at every turn. One feeds the other. That is why they work so hard to convince Americans the country would collapse without them, because without Washington, they lose control.
The teachers unions have been feeding off the Department of Education for decades to weaponize money and influence, pumping ideology into curriculum standards, teacher training programs and accreditation pipelines that tell parents to sit down and shut up.
Now that the department’s lights are off, they’re panicking. You’ll see their headlines: “The world is burning down without the Department of Education!” The only thing “burning” are the lies they have peddled to Americans for 40 years.
Out here in the real world, kids are learning, teachers are teaching, and parents are back in control. The system works just fine without federal interference.
This shutdown is a wake-up call. It didn’t break American education. It exposed who has been breaking it all along.
The unions can go cry about it. The rest of us will keep doing our jobs.
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