Since his victory over Vice President Kamala Harris, President-elect Donald Trump, as part of his numerous attacks on public education, has pledged to abolish the U.S. Department of Education during his second term, a move, supported by many local Republicans, that would spell doom for the most vulnerable public school students.
The major talking point in support of such a measure, among local Republicans such as Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee and state Sen. Bo Watson of Hixson, is that with no federal education department, states would have more autonomy to spend those dollars. Instead of funding a convoluted bureaucracy, taxpayer money would have a more direct line to public education under the direction of legislatures in states like Tennessee.
“Pick any other state, if they allowed that state to use their federal education dollars in a way that the state believes best benefited their state, then I think every state wins in that,” Watson told the Chattanooga Times Free Press in an interview.
It was an echo of a sentiment voiced by Gov. Lee following November’s election.
“I believe that Tennessee would be more capable than the federal government of designing a strategy for spending federal dollars in Tennessee,” Lee told reporters in November. “We know Tennessee. We know our children. We know the needs here much better than a bureaucracy in Washington, D.C., does.”