Opinion: Maybe we should get rid of the U.S. Department of Education

This article is part of a partnership between The Mendocino Voice and nonprofit newsroom EdSource to bring relevant education-related news to Mendocino County readers. Learn more about EdSource here.

In 1994, I was the press secretary for the U.S. Department of Education when Republicans took over Congress and threatened to shut us down. My then boss, Secretary Dick Riley, would joke in almost every speech he gave that each morning his wife would open the newspaper and say, “Hey! looks like they’re trying to fire you again!” He regularly talked about it because it quickly became clear to us that people deeply believed in the Education Department’s mission and that the threats against us were bad politics.