Nothing scary about this at all.
Update: apparently already backtracked: https://abcnews.go.com/US/trump-preparing-executive-order-telling-education-secretary-dissolve/story?id=119499614
This might be the normal Trump tactic of floating horrible ideas, so don’t be surprised if it comes back later.
They do all the national testing and data collections for determining school rankings.
Which I think is the main thing they want to get rid of. They’ve said that all the school funding functions can be handed to other departments. But it’s all the states with religious curriculum requirements that frequently do poorly on the rankings. And us in New Mexico. But by eliminating the DOE that data collection and ranking will stop.
Basically the same exact tactic as “we eliminate new COVID cases by stopping to test for them”, and Hungary also did this after they wrecked the public education by prioritizing religion (due to boomers thinking it’ll teach children manners) and PE (due to a “lack of great sportsmen and football players”, did the opposite) over everything else, in addition of funding cuts and reintroducing old and unusable teaching methods to please the boomers who think “the school isn’t a playground”, so kids would suffer more.