CMV: People against the elimination of the Department of Education are misinformed.

I've seen a lot of Redditors exclaiming about how bad the elimination of the Department of Education is. There's two themes I've seen. First, there are people who are just upset and lashing out:

Yes, education has a liberal bent, bc people get more liberal when they meet new people, develop better critical thinking skills, and learn things. That's not a flaw with education, that's an indictment of how stupid conservatives are. (u/ChampionEither5412)

Then there's the more reasonable, quasi-intellectual approach:

People DO NOT RECOGNIZE what the Department of Education does for America.

  • Federal student aid including grants, loans and work study programs -- without this, millions would never be able to get a degree which the majority of the highest paying jobs are still necessary to obtain.
  • Tracking student education progress, assessing community needs, and conducting research on how to improve education so we do better as a nation to teach.
  • Enforcement of Section 504 (equality in access), Section 508 (physical and digital access) of the Rehabilitation act in schools, universities, and other centers of learning; and also carries out audits and enforcement on behalf of the Department of Justice.
  • Enforces sexual harassment, gender equality, and race/ethnicity equality policies in centers of education.
  • Oversees vocational and technical rehabilitation, continuing education, and community training opportunities. (Got a veteran who needs job training? Have an adult who needs to change careers? Have someone who needs their GED? Wanna learn how to read good and do other stuff too? The DoE funds and coordinates all that.)
  • Help people from other countries learn English.
  • Offers grants for low-income schools
  • Everything around accessibility and education, from funding jobs, to buying equipment, to guaranteeing access at a policy level, to providing opportunities to help people who are disadvantaged educationally from their disability catch-up.

This is just the big stuff. This covers none of the nuance. And I know the article says disability services won't be impacted but if you pull any of the pieces apart and remove any of the staff, the effectiveness of programs diminishes and things are already tough. (u/cddelgado)

I'm calling them quasi-intellectuals because they're setting themselves up as experts—and don't get me wrong, they know more about what the Department of Education is doing than most Americans—but have absolutely NO CLUE what they're talking about. Most of these important features ARE NOT BEING ELIMINATED. As Trump said in his speech today (massively edited for clarity):

The Department's useful functions such as Pell grants, Title I funding, resources for children with disabilities and special needs will be preserved—fully preserved. They're going to be preserved in full and redistributed to various other agencies and departments that will take very good care of them.

Given that the entire point of this address was for Trump to give his reasons for eliminating the Department of Education, it's crazy that people are spreading misinformation and engendering outrage about this. There could be legitimate reasons to want to keep the Department of Education around, but people on the right have been giving lots of logical reasons it's bad: test scores dropping, huge swathes of students failing in maths/reading, and so on. All I've seen from its proponents is misinformation and insults. It honestly makes me feel like the left cannot be reasoned with; the movement, as a body, is just a propaganda machine, not open to serious political discussions. And I'm saying all this as someone who voted Democratic last election.

So, what would change my view? I would have to see prominent figures on the left giving logical reasons to keep the Department of Education around that isn't steeped in misinformation.

EDIT: Hey internetizens, it's a little against the spirit of CMV to be downvoting all of my replies to your comments. If I'm saying something stupid, please just tell me that (and why it's stupid) instead! Thanks in advance.

EDIT 2: I've got a lot of people asking me how the Department of Education could be at fault for test scores dropping. That's not really the point of my CMV, because all that really matters is Trump believes it's at fault, and that's why he would eliminate the department. My guess is his reasoning goes somewhat like: the ED gave funding incentives to schools to enforce "No Child Left Behind", "Common Core", teacher certification requirements, etc. NCLB was repealed bipartisanly when it turned out to be a disaster, Common Core has issues, and Conservatives love to talk about how 'teacher certification' leads to a bunch of woke, indoctrinated teachers. Thus, if the Department of Education funded a bunch of disastrous policies, maybe we should stop funding it.