historian said:
A statesman makes wise decisions. Bringing in outsiders with stale, old ideas is not wise. Maintaining bloated, inefficient, cumbersome, & often tyrannical bureaucracies is not wise. Trump has already promised to dismantle the DoE. Those who believe in limited & more efficient govt have been wanting this literally for 40 years. This includes plenty of Libertarians. It's a bureaucracy that has not accomplished one useful thing I can think of in its entire existence but has caused a whole lot of damage and become a tool of evil. It's fair to blame much of the current dismal state of American education on the DoE and the ideology that props it up.
BS.
DoE is an Agency, that is all. It is not inherently good, bad or indifferent. Leadership sets the direction, the Agency accomplishes.
Doing away with the mechanism to have standardized education at the public school level is not the answer. Especially when our competition IS controlling their Education. We need MORE STEM and MORE educated work force, not 50 different views of what that should be.
Good leadership, built on sound concepts and then carried out is what Agencies should do. If people don't want to follow, get rid of them. But doing away with whole Agency as a whole for a nation of 365M and the size of the US is not accomplishing anything. Neither is going back to 1870 US structure. This is the lazy man's way of solving these issues. We need a Dept of Interior, to manage resources. We need a Dept of Education, especially in the technology based world we live in.
Manchin knows the Natural Resource situation better than anyone. Semena knows Ed. IF they are not willing to work with Trump, than don't appoint. But they are two that could bridge the gap.