Page B2From§Eachthe breakfast edition — 24 September 2026
As it ran on the front
The promise to abolish the Department of Education died this week, of reorganization. It is survived by the Department of Education.
That is the whole notice, but the family has asked for details. Education staff told NPR on the twenty-fourth that they are being scattered across several other federal agencies, and that the scattering has added bureaucracy and made it harder to serve students. The pledge was to make the thing smaller. Instead the thing was divided, which is a different operation entirely and, as any whippersnapper with a calculator can confirm, produces a larger number.…
…(cont) It is survived, further, by the numbers it was supposed to fix. On the eighth, Gallup and the Walton Family Foundation reported that 32 percent of Americans were somewhat or completely satisfied with the quality of K-12 education, the lowest that rate has been. On the twenty-fourth, a new survey found most Americans dissatisfied with the schools and the American Dream out of reach alongside them. Two polls, sixteen days, one direction.
It was preceded in death by six hundred million dollars. In February 2025 the department moved to slash roughly that much from the Teacher Quality Partnership and Supporting Effective Educator Development grant programs, on the grounds that the training was divisive. On the eighteenth of this month a federal judge struck the policy down. Six days later, a commentator explained that the road to recovering American education runs through excellent teacher training. It does. That was the money.
The cause of death is being assigned everywhere except to the body. On the seventeenth, the unions. On the eighteenth, the graduate schools of education and their ideological asymmetry. On the twenty-fourth, faith, virtue, and excellence, by way of a new book. Each diagnosis arrives punctually, and none of them mentions that the file cabinet holding your kid's paperwork now lives in a building nobody can name.
Somebody still has to be in the room. On the twentieth, a union in England counted two in three teaching assistants covering classes in place of teachers, and warned that children with additional needs are losing out. The job is the same job on both sides of the water: an adult, a room, a wage. The annual argument over whose ideas the room contains arrives right on schedule to explain why the wage is not the point. That is hogwash, and it is older than I am. The plain shit of it is that six hundred million dollars existed for training teachers, and a department spent February 2025 trying very hard not to spend it.
In lieu of flowers, find out which agency now holds your child's file, and call them.
“They swore they'd shrink the thing, and what they did was cut it up and mail the pieces to other buildings — the staff themselves say that's more paperwork, not less. Same outfit tried to kill six hundred million bucks in teacher training, a judge put it back last week, and now the op-ed page tells me the cure for American schools is excellent teacher training. Thirty-two percent of us are satisfied with these schools, the lowest ever recorded, and my kid is sitting in one of them tomorrow morning at eight.”
“It's not that it wasn't abolished, it's that abolition is a process, and the process is deconsolidation — did I say deconsolidation? That doesn't sound like me. Look, a judge restored the teacher-training money, so everybody got what they wanted, and frankly if satisfaction is at a record low that just proves the department was never working, which is our position, and has been, going back to before we ran it.”
The receipts
Teachers spent an average of $895 of their own money on classroom supplies last school year AdoptAClassroom.org 2025 Teacher Spending Survey
Good schools fuel the American Dream — and both are out of reach, poll showsThe new survey also finds most Americans are dissatisfied with K-12 schools.
School book bans since 2021: 22,810, across exactly 451 school districts PEN America Index of School Book Bans, 2024-2025
Education schools prioritize activism over teachingDaniel Buck, my colleague at the American Enterprise Institute, has just published an important new study of America’s graduate schools of education. The study has deservedly generated attention because he found that many of these schools display “a concerning ideological asymmetry, advancing dogmas grounded in progressive and critical…
A federal judge ruled Thursday the Education Department cannot cut money to teacher training programs the Trump administration argues are focused on “divisive ideologies.” In February 2025, the department moved to slash around $600 million in grants it didn’t like under the Teacher Quality Partnership and Supporting Effective Educator…
Education staff are being scattered across several other federal agencies. Despite the Trump administration's claims, employees say it's adding bureaucracy and making it harder to serve students.
Since 2021, 22,810 books have been banned from schools across 451 districts PEN America Index of School Book Bans, 2024-2025
How Classical Christian Education Can Save AmericaDavid Godwin's new book 'Forging the American Mind,' ably explains how faith, virtue, and excellence can be the heart of K-12 education.
Teachers spent an average of $895 of their own money on classroom supplies last school year AdoptAClassroom.org 2025 Teacher Spending Survey
The Road To Recovering American Education Runs Through Excellent Teacher Training Like ThisIf more schools invest in teachers with training like this, America’s K-12 future will look brighter than the latest numbers suggest.
NEARLY two in five school support staff have covered classes in place of teachers, a Unison report says. The figure rises to two in three for teaching assistants, according to a survey of more than 8,000 support staff in England. The union warned of the impacts on the government’s special educational needs & disabilities (Send) plans in…
· Satisfaction with K-12 education drops to new low: Gallup from the morgue, 8 Sep 2026
· Why strong teachers unions are death on public education from the morgue, 17 Sep 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.