Sherry Sylvester - Distinguished Senior Fellow, TPPF Joins Houston's Morning News

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Seven, twenty two, is our time here in Houstons worn News.
Is it time to say goodbye to the Education Department?
President Trump thinks? So let's see what the Sherry Sylvester thinks,
Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation. Sherry,
by the way, you know, a little history lesson here
about the Education Department. It seems to me, if my
memory serves me correctly, and it rarely does, that the

(00:21):
Education Department kind of came about because it was an
attempted effort by the federal government to bring states that
had low education standards to sort of bring them up
and to prove education for all students across the country,
especially in the South. But it sure hasn't worked out
that way.

Speaker 2 (00:36):
You used to be part of health, Education and Welfare,
used to be one part of one cabinet.

Speaker 1 (00:40):
Yeah, is that it political? Has Education Department improved education
in any way, shape or form.

Speaker 3 (00:46):
Not at all. They had one job, in your absolutely right, Jimmy,
which was to close the gap between the lowest performing
students and the highest performing students. And in the forty
years that it's been in place, you know, Jim Carter
put it in place as a campaign promise to the
teachers' unions, and in the forty years that it's been
in place, they have not made the gap, closed that

(01:09):
gap an iota.

Speaker 2 (01:11):
But they've become incredibly powerful politically, and they've doled out
not just money and dollars in order to keep that
kind of control, they've doled out ideology and controlled what
teachers teach.

Speaker 3 (01:23):
Absolutely, we can talk about the money or the ideology.
You know, they are the people that handle student loans
and grants directly to schools, but student loans are pel grants,
and they so messed that up in the last year
that students can't figure out how to fill out their forms,

(01:46):
colleges can't tell whether to accept them. And you know,
this is one of those things the former president is
absolutely right, shouldn't be handled there. We can handle this
treasure in the Treasury Department. The other thing that they do,
they're supposed to handle civil rights, as Share pointed out,
and so that was the part of their original job.
But now they are the people that have pushed the

(02:08):
schools to include gender identity, which is basically all that
they're pushing. They threatened back in twenty seventeen and again
this year that if schools didn't allow anybody that wants
to to go into any bathroom that they wanted to,

(02:28):
then they would withhold federal funds. Yep, they have not.
They have been on the wrong side of boys playing
in girls' sports, so they've taken That's a big part
of their initiative is that they've distorted Title nine and
they've distorted civil rights, expanding it to include gender identity,
which of course is not.

Speaker 1 (02:48):
In the law. Well, it's a huge bureaucracy, like everything
else in Washington, d C. How difficult would it be
to get rid of it?

Speaker 3 (02:56):
I think it will be tough. I mean, I want
to say one more thing. These are the guys that
they were pushed to not open the schools back up
after COVID, so huge, huge learning loss. So again the
complete opposite of what of what they were supposed to do.
It will be hard to unravel. You know, bureaucrat of
bureaucracies are a strong force even if President Trump is

(03:19):
re elected. But these everything that the Department Education does
could be that that is important to do, could be
done civil rights, for example. We certainly don't want to
make sure that there are no it's no discrimination school systems.
But that could be done by the Justice Department.

Speaker 2 (03:38):
Well, take away, take away their office building downtown in Washington,
do you see, and ship them out to all the
fifty states. A lot of them would just self deport.

Speaker 3 (03:48):
That that would work. That would definitely work. It would
definitely work. It's time for it to go. It is
definitely time for it to go. Unraveling these bureaucracies is
always hard, but this when it's been a target for
a while. Trump, it's in the first part. You remember
when former president, a former governor Perry was running for office.
He wanted to get rid of it too.

Speaker 1 (04:08):
All right, Cherry, thanks as always good to hear from you.
Cherry Sylvester. This thing we've seen, your fellow with the
Texas Public Policy Foundation.