While votes from Congress will decide if the U.S. Department of Education can be abolished, lawmakers can "right-size" the department and get back to basics, Rep. Tim Walberg, who chairs the House Education Committee, said Thursday on Newsmax.
"We can get back to the basics that say our students ought to learn reading, writing, and arithmetic," the Michigan Republican said on "Wake Up America." "[We can] learn to work together, learn to create whatever we need for the future."
Walberg added that the "No. 1, 2, and 3 most important aspects of education are the students, the parents, the teachers. If we can resource them in the most efficient ways, we will not have a worry for the future of our education system."
President Donald Trump reportedly is close to signing an executive order that would be aimed at dismantling the Department of Education, with the order expected to call for the Education secretary to submit a proposal to close the department and for Congress to pass legislation ending it.
Trump this week said that the first task for Linda McMahon, his nominee for the position, is "to put herself out of a job."
Trump promised during his presidential campaign to shutter the department, accusing it of having been infiltrated by "radicals, zealots, and Marxists" since its beginning in 1979. Conservatives over the years have often attempted to close the department, which critics claim wastes taxpayer dollars while inserting the federal government into local decisions.
"Since 1979, we've had the Department of Education, but before that, we had an education system that produced the Agricultural Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, the Communications Revolution," Walberg told Newsmax. "We've led the world."
But now, regulatory challenges for the nation's K-12 systems bring "huge costs" to education, but "our report card shows we're declining," said Walberg. "I think it is time to look at all that goes on."
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Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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