Dismantling the Department of Education

Floor Speech

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Ms. McCLELLAN. Mr. Speaker, education is personal to my family. In the 1880s, my great-grandfather founded a school in a rural community because the State of Alabama did not think it important to educate Black children. As he explained in his autobiography, he wanted to teach the children, whose parents and grandparents had been enslaved on the plantations nearby, to be of better service to themselves, to their employers, and to the community in which they lived.

In the 1930s, my father and his sisters attended that school because the State of Tennessee didn't provide a good education to Black children. Like his father and grandfather, my dad became an educator himself, ultimately teaching the next generation of educators at Virginia State University, which I now represent in Congress.

In the 1950s, my mother moved away from her hometown because the State of Mississippi did not provide a good education to Black children. The only school that did was run by the Catholic church but only to the eighth grade. The third youngest of 14 children, she wanted more than the domestic and laborer jobs available to her grandparents, her parents, her brothers, and her sisters.

She moved to go to high school, ultimately becoming an educator herself. She ran the federally funded TRIO Programs at Virginia State, which are run by the Department of Education, to ensure that children like her had the support they needed to go to and graduate college.

Mr. Speaker, my parents saw firsthand how important a good education was to individual opportunity and a thriving and healthy economy, community, and democracy. They dedicated their lives to ensuring not only that their children but every child had a good education.

Not every child is so lucky because the legacy of over 300 years of slavery and Jim Crow, massive resistance, and chronic underfunding has created too many obstacles to the ability of States and local governments to give every child an opportunity for a good education.

For the past 20 years, first as a State legislator and now in Congress, I have worked to ensure every child in Virginia gets a good education. As a mother of two children in public schools, even with bipartisan and Herculean effort, I see every day that there are still gaps across the country. The Department of Education was created to fill those gaps.

The Department of Education protects students' civil rights, particularly those with disabilities. It provides support to attract, train, and retain the best and brightest teachers, school administrators, support personnel, counselors, and mental health professionals.

The Department of Education measures and tracks academic progress across the country and helps those school divisions that lag behind address areas of concern. It manages student loan and grant programs that ensure children without financial means to go college can do so without incurring more debt than they can ever pay off.

Without the Department of Education, State and local officials in Virginia and across the country are worried that they do not have the funding or the staff to handle the workload, especially in the area of special education, especially in our rural areas.

The block grant funding that the Trump administration keeps promising comes with little accountability, making it unclear whether those Federal funds will ever reach the students that need them the most.

Education lays the foundation for a strong future, as well as a thriving, healthy community; a thriving, healthy economy; and a thriving, healthy democracy. We owe it to our grandparents, our children, and our grandchildren to protect that progress for future generations.

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