Following her confirmation in early March, the US Department of Education has a new secretary.

US Senator Chuck Grassley believes Linda McMahon is going to be an excellent Secretary of Education. When President Donald Trump has said several times about wanting to eliminate the Department of Education, Grassley points out that only Congress can end the entire department since it was the entity that created it. However, Grassley explains that President Trump has certain actions that can be taken to begin to dismantle the department without Congressional action, along with limiting the number of people that work within it. He tells Raccoon Valley Radio that while there still is a federal Department of Education, that is not where the true direction lies.

“You should not get the idea that the Secretary of Education is Superintendent of Education because we don’t have a national system of education. Most of the decisions based upon education are entirely state and local issues, mostly dependent on what the state legislature of a particular state wants.”  

District 24 Iowa Senator Jesse Green agrees that states should continue to provide education in a localized manner, but he wants to see either a phasing down of states being dependent on funding from the US Department of Education or receive the rest of the funding via block grants to the states.

“If you take the entire (US) Department of Education and you split it out for every student across the United States, that’d be roughly $7,000 a student. That’s roughly what the state, ourselves pay for supplements for a child’s education in Iowa. I think right there on the surface shows that there’s got to be some sort of waste, fraud and abuse when you’re talking that kind of money.”

Senator Green believes that a majority of Iowans would rather hold their state entities accountable for education rather than federal bureaucratic.