Ramaswamy, Reading, and the Ed Department

DOGE co-chief Vivek Ramaswamy doesn't know a lot about a lot of things, including education. 

He has decided to be excited about the NAEP 8th grade reading scores and proposes a solution on(on X, where all important policy is discussed) in response not to an actual look at NAEP results, but to an overheated tweet from Moms For Liberty co-founder Tiffany Justice.

This is a 5-alarm fire & President Trump’s vision to dismantle the Department of Education is the first step to fixing it. The federal bureaucracy has wasted boatloads of taxpayer $$ while impeding the success of our students. The statistics below are downright brutal.

The operating theory for Trump's new administration is that we just give all that money back to the states, something or other good would happen. Ramaswamy has simply hit on Steps 1 and 2 of formula that privatizers have used successfully many times. 

Step 1: Announce giant crisis!

Step 2: Announce that X will be a solution (do not offer proof)

Step 3: Implement solution.

Step 4: Do not collect follow-up data (because it keeps showing that your solution didn't work)

Step 5: (Optional) If someone accidentally did collect data, dismiss it and/or move the goal posts.

But even Nat Malkus at the pro-privatizing American Enterprise Institute can see there are some flaws in Ramaswamy's formulation.

If it weren't for the Department of Education, we wouldn't know the statistics that he's citing about how many students are proficient at reading.

The Trumpsters want what privatizers have always wanted-- they want all that sweet sweet taxpayer education funding liberated from strings that determine how it can be spent, the better to direct it to their favorite pockets. There's no reason to believe that such a liberation would result in higher Big Standardized Test scores (and no reason to believe that such higher scores would improve the lives of individuals or the nation). But that's not really the point. 

Anyway, one can say that ending the department would improve reading scores as easily as one can say that wiping out unicorns and robins would improve reading scores. Under current rules, it would take 60 senators to dismantle the department, and neither President Musk nor Chief Bittle-washer Ramaswamy has that kind of support.