American children are in trouble. After generations of improvement, test scores are declining and fewer children are showing up to class. COVID-19 knocked school systems off-kilter, disrupting the steady progress of knowledge and skills. Bad science has infected reading instruction in the early grades, while national leaders have largely given up on holding schools accountable for their performance. Meanwhile, kids are melting into their damn phones.

A serious nation would give this crisis the attention it deserves. Instead, education officials are scrambling to decipher a new federal law in which (deep breath) people can get a dollar-for-dollar federal income tax credit on the first $1,700 they donate to a state-approved 501(c)(3) scholarship-granting organization that provides grants to children for almost any K-12 educational expense one could think of other than the basic cost of attending their local public school. If that seems weirdly complicated, it’s supposed to be. The tax credit shell game is meant to obscure what is, plainly, a private school voucher program.

Vouchers have a long, research-backed track record of altering student achievement. Unfortunately, they make it worse. The Brookings Institution notes, “In Louisiana, for example, two separate research teams found negative academic impacts as high as -0.4 standard deviations—extremely high by education policy standards—with declines that persisted for years.” Other states have shown similar results.

The gargantuan American public education system is famously resistant to interventions of all kinds, so it’s a testament to how much of a sham vouchers have proven to be that they sit alongside a global pandemic that killed more than a million Americans on the short list of surefire ways to hurt student learning. Naturally, the Trump Administration decided to spend tens of billions of dollars to make school vouchers more accessible nationwide. While President Donald Trump says the tax credits will help children “trapped in failing government schools,” the evidence from similar state-financed programs suggests the main beneficiaries will likely be well-off families that get a subsidy for pricey private school tuition they would have paid anyway (or, as recently occurred in Arizona’s voucher program, tickets to Hamilton).

The rest of the Trump education agenda amounts to wanton vandalism. Since taking office in early 2025, Secretary of Education Linda McMahon has tried her best to destroy the U.S. Department of Education (ED). Nearly half of all ED employees resigned, were pushed into retirement, or were laid off or fired during Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) purge of the federal workforce. Whole units were abolished. Many of the remaining divisions were transferred to other federal agencies. ED’s “final mission,” McMahon has said, is its own dismemberment plan.

While McMahon repeatedly pledged to send money and authority “back to the states,” she mostly sent them a few hundred yards away to other buildings in Washington, D.C., at great bureaucratic expense. Much of special education was transferred to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), putting it under the purview of Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who believes, wrongly, that a common weedkiller is turning male frogs—and therefore human boys—into girls. The Trump Administration promised to balance the federal budget by reducing fraud, yet McMahon shut down the ED division responsible for fraud prevention. In the name of reducing waste, DOGE wasted millions of dollars by cancelling research projects that were already years underway. An official department spokesperson urged Americans to “make education great again” by posting a photo of an all-white Virginia classroom taken during the state’s massive resistance to racial desegregation.

The actual solution to turning around U.S. education should match the scale of the challenge. Compared to those in other countries, the American education system is highly decentralized, leaving many local schools isolated and impoverished. Privatization and federal abandonment will make this even worse. The care and education of children stand as signal national responsibilities without national resources to match. Interstate highways are built the same everywhere. The armed forces defend us all. Health care, while uneven, stands on a foundation of federal insurance. Colleges and universities receive hundreds of billions of dollars in federal research grants, need-based financial aid, and student loans. America’s children, our legacy and our future, need to learn. Yet for this greatest shared obligation, we have, as one nation, done the least.

In that sense, Trump’s nihilistic education agenda offers a kind of mirror-image roadmap for the next President. Rather than shrink the U.S. Department of Education or do away with it altogether, we should make it three times bigger. Federal programs serving children shouldn’t be cut to pieces and dispersed among far-flung agencies with no expertise in education; they should be gathered in one place, to support the whole continuum of child development. We need more than just a Department of Education. We need a Department of Children and Learning.

The Department of Children and Learning (DCL) would do everything ED is charged with by statute while incorporating children’s programs currently located in other federal agencies, including the school lunch benefits located at the Department of Agriculture and the Head Start and child-care programs housed at the Department of Health and Human Services. As any parent can tell you, health, nutrition, and learning all go together.

The DCL would be organized around three main purposes: funding, research, and civil rights. Its mission would be ensuring that foundational education services and the latest scientific findings and technological advances are available to all students, regardless of who they are or where they come from. Existing programs that don’t contribute to this core mission would be replaced.

This ambitious agenda will require more money and more people. But it’s worth saying first what the DCL will not be, particularly with respect to “local control.” When asked, most people favor local control of public education. The Trump Administration cites the importance of local control as their main reason for chopping ED to bits. As a phrase, its potency lies in its appeal to the natural human feeling of intense parental responsibility. If you believe, correctly, that your most important purpose in life is the safety and prosperity of your children, you will be naturally attracted to an idea that seems to give you agency in shaping their education.

But as it is practiced in U.S. education, “local control” is a false promise. It means that local school districts—and in the privatization era, individual families—are left alone to search and struggle for enough resources to purchase what an indifferent and unforgiving market chooses to provide. It means that students destined to compete in a global economy are tied down by how much money their neighbors happen to pay in property taxes. It condemns teachers to crumbling buildings and outdated curricula. It means that the various institutions charged with the care and education of children don’t communicate, coordinate, or collaborate. “Local control” is a long con. It exploits parental anxiety by pretending to give people power, then leaves them feeling individually responsible for our collective failure.

Local communities have the right and responsibility to decide who will teach their children and lead their public schools. Those accountable for school performance should be as close to parents and voters as possible. Critical organizational decisions shouldn’t be routed through a central bureaucracy in Washington. State governments ultimately determine academic standards for their children. At the same time, all local school districts should have enough money to hire great teachers who are versed in the latest research findings and empowered by the newest education technologies. And all children should have equal rights to a free, high-quality education tailored to their specific strengths and needs, regardless of their race, family income, native language, immigration status, or disability.

The DCL should expand on ED’s current mission but not be bound by its past limitations and mistakes. During the testing-and-accountability era from 2002 to 2015, schools with low scores were required to submit paperwork promising to improve…somehow. It didn’t work very well. No organization ever achieved greatness by filling out a form. ED has also been draped with a net of small, congressionally mandated programs that lack enough money to matter. No one is satisfied with America’s educational progress during the four decades since ED was created. But the solution is to build a bigger, better department with the tools, expertise, and resources to do the job right.

Congress would need to pass legislation creating the DCL, as it did when multiple agencies were consolidated into the Department of Homeland Security in 2002. The political calculus is more plausible than it might seem. Only one-quarter of adults—and barely half of Republicans—support the evisceration of ED. Ideological convictions tend to fade when you’re struggling to help your child with a learning disability. And every member of Congress has constituents who are struggling to pay for child care and want to send their children to good public schools.

The DCL’s funding mission should be rooted in the understanding that U.S. public schools have always been unduly and unusually influenced by private wealth. As I wrote previously in these pages, the nation’s patchwork of 14,000 public school districts was shaped over decades by a combination of deliberate racism, laissez-faire economics, and the political power of wealthy families. As a result, children today are divided by class and race into educational haves and have-nots. A more balanced financial model, one that splits funding responsibility between state and federal governments like the health-care system does, could make up some of those disparities. But the only way to truly give every child a fair chance at educational opportunity is to redraw school district boundaries themselves, or to make them much less meaningful as dividers of opportunity. The DCL would provide states with large financial incentives to distribute their own state and local resources fairly.

The new department would also coordinate federal efforts to help parents of young children pay for high-quality child care, so that parents can afford to work and children can start school on a level playing field. As with many federal programs for children, existing efforts like Head Start and child-care block grants, both administered by HHS, are well meaning but too small to serve more than a small fraction of the families in need. They should be rolled into a much larger federal program that provides parents with the choice of free, high-quality, licensed child care or a direct monthly financial subsidy for families who choose to care for their children at home or by paying a relative or trusted caregiver.

The DCL’s research mission would be to bring education science and scholarship on par with health care, where it belongs. The annual budget for the National Institutes of Health is nearly $50 billion. The budget for the Institute of Education Sciences is less than $1 billion—or was, until it was DOGE-d into near oblivion. The United States spends north of a trillion dollars per year on elementary and secondary education, plus hundreds of billions more for college. The effectiveness of that investment is remarkably underexamined. Financing research is exactly the kind of activity that the federal government has historically excelled at—limited in purpose, but massive in scale. The goal would be to build a new generation of educational researchers charged with identifying the most effective curricula, teaching practices, and uses of technology.

The core civil rights function of the DCL would be ensuring that the benefits of additional financial resources and new knowledge accrue to the most vulnerable people. There’s a reason that many of the most historic civil rights battles have been fought at the schoolhouse door. Knowledge is power, kept by the powerful. The promises made by Brown v. Board of Education in the 1950s and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) in the 1970s are still, today, only partially fulfilled. The Trump Administration gave up on enforcing desegregation orders mandated by federal civil rights law and Brown v. Board and closed seven of the 12 regional offices of ED’s Office for Civil Rights before moving enforcement of civil rights out of the department entirely. The DCL would make sure that racial segregation in education is consigned to the nation’s shameful past. It would also modernize the often frustrating and bureaucratic system for enforcing student’s rights under the IDEA and ensure that immigrant children receive the public education they are entitled to under law.

The DCL would be organized to excel at these three core missions, with the understanding that learning doesn’t only take place inside the classroom. Recent research from the nonpartisan Learning Policy Institute found that students learn more from a “community schools” strategy that integrates mental health services, nutrition, and health care with the help of parents and after-school organizations. That’s a comprehensive, guaranteed support system that is exactly the opposite of giving parents private school vouchers and tax credits to buy whatever random, uncoordinated services the private market chooses to supply. Programs that feed schoolchildren, like the school lunch program, would be run by the DCL. So would programs that prepare kids for school, like Head Start.

A big, bold Department of Children and Learning is needed for more than just ensuring that the workers of tomorrow can compete in an unforgiving global labor market. Democracy itself is at stake. Historically, public schools are where Americans of different backgrounds come together by learning together. With shared purpose, we become a people able to weather disagreement and build a multifaceted country. Today, measures of cohesion and patriotism are all moving in the wrong direction. The privatized, market-driven, hyperlocal education agenda being pushed by Trump and his allies is worse than a mere plan for educational mediocrity and private profit. It is a surrender to the forces of crude tribalism and an abdication of our responsibility to advance the grand American vision of true pluralistic democracy.

The next President will inherit a country of polarized ideologies. But she or he will also lead a nation with common needs. When it comes to education, parents of all political stripes mostly want the same thing: a safe, well-organized, effective public school nearby in their community. We have never really tried to organize our national policies around fulfilling that goal. Now’s the time to start.