Department of Ed Sentenced to Hard Labor

The Trump administration officially began dismantling the Department of Education this week, a campaign promise that has hovered in Republican mythology for decades, usually appearing to voters in the wild only once every four years and fleeing when approached.

The administration’s big move is deceptively simple: Take the largest office inside the Department of Education, load it onto a metaphorical U-Haul, and drive it to the Department of Labor, without changing a single comma. If this were a sleepaway camp, it would be like moving the whole sports department into the infirmary because “that’s where most of them end up.” And if that sounds anticlimactic, that’s because it literally is.

To understand what happened and why it somehow affects nothing and everything simultaneously, we journeyed to two places: The White House briefing room, where Education Secretary Linda McMahon delivered the calmest eulogy in federal history, and Lakewood, New Jersey, where Assemblyman Avi Schnall serves as New Jersey’s unofficial Department of Education interpreter for the frum oilam.

What does it actually mean for the federal government to dismantle the Department of Education? Will this reset cause complications for schools? Does this historic reform change anything for parents, teachers, or schools? And can a federal agency be both alive and dead at the same time?