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March 21, 2025 - Sean Hannity Show
35:02
Goodbye DOE - March 20th, Hour 1
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We are waiting one hour from right now.
The president will announce that he is abolishing the Department of Education.
This department has been around and was founded in 1979.
We have spent a whopping $3 trillion American taxpayer dollars on that agency since it was founded.
Education scores have only gone down dramatically since then.
And I want you to understand something.
I come at education from the vantage point of somebody that believes in God and that believes every man, woman, and child on this earth was created by God.
And if you look at the root word, education from the Latin, it's educare, to bring forth from within, the little that I remember when I took Latin in school.
And it means that's predicated on a belief that every child has inherently within them talent and ability.
And it's our job as loving parents or aunts or uncles or neighbors or friends or whatever to help them become their best self and to find that for which they were born and created and whatever talents God gave them, which I believe is individualized, just like everybody has their own fingerprint.
This has been an ongoing problem.
It was early in the Reagan administration.
They did a nationwide study.
It was called The Nation at Risk.
It was about the educational system in America.
And what they determined was what has happened to America's educational system, were it done by an outside entity or force, in other words, another country, would be tantamount to an act of war.
I will never forget what it said about that.
They have failed our children spectacularly.
And you have this unholy alliance, which is now about to be broken, which needs to be broken between Democrats, the Democratic Party that are screaming bloody murder today.
You know, we've got to protect our kids.
Well, I'm going to give you the statistics.
What are we protecting them from?
A failed system, a system that is failing on the most spectacular level.
And I'm going to ask all of you maybe to do something, you know, and join me in an experiment and maybe just try to think differently.
Is there a better way to educate our kids?
And I'll give you one quick example that I think is quite relevant.
For example, I'll pick New York, and I have a lot of other examples that I'll share with you throughout the course of the program today.
The New York Teachers Union pumped school spending to the highest level in the country.
They paid $36,000 per child annually on education.
Yet, when you look at the scores, they are atrocious.
And by the way, the $36,293 per student is a 21% increase from the 2021 school year, according to the latest numbers.
Spending on education has gone up a whopping $89 billion in New York City school districts this academic year, even as enrollment and test scores continue to plummet according to analysis after analysis.
Of the $89 billion in overall spending, $39 comes from the state budget.
The rest comes from the federal government.
New York spends more than other states on mostly everything from teachers' salaries, benefits, pensions, school construction services for immigrants and non-English speakers.
I'll interpret that, illegal immigrants and their children.
And, of course, are trying to even electrify school buses, which should not be a part of anything.
If you look back, the amount of money spent during the Biden years has been unbelievably high in terms of DEI programs, over $100 million in the last year alone.
That is a massive amount of money.
So what are we getting for this money?
New York's fourth grade students get more money per student per capita than any other city on the face of this earth.
And they rank 32 and 46th, 32nd in reading and 46th in math, you know, taken in 2022, eighth graders 22nd in math.
And again, they have more money than any other school district.
How do you fail that spectacularly?
It has to be asked.
Now, let's do a comparison, shall we?
Because you might ask, well, does higher spending equal a better education outcome?
Again, New York is the top spender, K through 12, for the last two decades, and it remains, you know, near the lowest level in terms of educational benchmarks.
Let's compare a state like Idaho, and they have consistently been the lowest spender in the category of educating their children in Idaho.
But over the last 20 years, Idaho has outperformed New York in fourth grade math, eighth grade math, and eighth grade reading.
Idaho averages just over one-third of what New York spends year over year.
And while the political narrative is more funding, if you put in through the K-12 system, is you're going to have more money, better scores.
Well, the data actually shows a very different result.
Each state has different funding models, different itemized budgets, and unique challenges.
And the overwhelming conclusion is that there's no positive correlation between spending per pupil and average test scores.
If you look at spending per pupil in public schools, it averaged nationwide $15,633.
That's up 8.9% since fiscal year 2022.
So it's not a lack of money.
Now, the states with the highest pupil spending, New York, which has the state is just shy of $30,000, $29,873.
D.C., $27,425.
New Jersey, $25,099.
Vermont, $24,608.
Connecticut, $24,453.
New York ranked lower than 38 jurisdictions, states and districts in fourth grade math scores, and underneath 12 higher performing jurisdictions in eighth grade scores.
And for reading, eight jurisdictions ranked higher in fourth grade assessments and three jurisdictions ranked significantly higher in the eighth grade.
And the D.C. in that area, it fared even worse.
So I'm going to ask you to join me in a little experiment here.
Let's say the federal government were to give $25,000 per student, their share of the educational monies to each individual child.
Give it to the parent or give it to the school district.
Let's just say for, let's use that as an example.
So let's say total state federal dollars are $30,000 per student.
And let's say that parents then had a say and the school districts then had the option of providing choices to families as to how that money is spent.
And let's say that there are five families and five families decide to pool their money and they have $30,000 each.
And these five families, all right, so 30,000, what's what's why don't we make it 10 families?
All right, make it simple.
That's $300,000 that 10 children will have allocated to them for education.
That's $300,000.
Now, let's say we use all of that money to pay two teachers.
And let's say you give them a self.
So you have $150,000 to spend on each teacher, right?
And each teacher then is assigned five children.
And that teacher gets a six-figure salary.
You can provide benefits like health insurance.
You can provide retirement plans for them.
So maybe they get a base salary of $110,000, $120,000.
The rest of the money is spent on benefit programs.
And then five children will then be assigned one teacher.
And then you put standards associated with it and also benchmarks that must be met, that a certain bare minimum standard has got to be reached for the teachers to be able to continue in their job and for these kids to have this opportunity, or else somehow there's got to be some accountability, whatever that accountability is.
Now, ask yourself, use your basic, simple common sense.
If you have one teacher for every five kids and the teacher is chosen by five parents, what teacher do you think these parents are going to choose?
They're going to find the best teacher that would be capable of teaching these kids the bare necessities because without education, the rungs of the ladder to life success are ripped out from underneath them.
You will not succeed if you don't have these basic fundamental skills and you don't have those skills that are necessary to take you to the next level in life.
You will be shut out and all that God-given potential will be wasted.
And it's been wasted now for decades and decades and decades.
We have failed these kids spectacularly.
We have not tapped into the talent, the gifts that they were born with.
Now, in a small group setting like that, what will those teachers, what will parents demand that those teachers be insisting that their kids are learning?
Maybe reading, writing, math, history, science, computers.
I doubt there's going to be a lot of talk about being woke or transgenderism.
Maybe the thing they can add is the golden rule.
You know, maybe in that environment, you'd be able to say, love God with all your heart, mind, body, and soul, and treat others the way you want to be treated and treat your neighbor as yourself.
Now, when you apply your common sense and that model, which would be very doable by eliminating the Department of Education and getting rid of this unholy alliance between Democrats and teachers' unions, because the teachers' unions contribute all this money to the Democratic Party and Democratic candidates so they can get elected, what will the parents decide?
And what kids have been disproportionately, negatively impacted by the failures of our educational system?
Well, I've got the statistics right here in front of me.
They're predominantly minority areas in our country.
If you look at New York City, if you look at D.C., if you look at Detroit, I've got numbers on Detroit.
If you look at areas in Los Angeles, if you look at areas in San Francisco, if you look at areas in Atlanta, disproportionately, minority students have been failed at a much higher rate than other children.
We are hurting our minority community.
And the question always comes up every election season.
Well, demographically, we look at, you know, African Americans, Hispanic Americans, Asian Americans, women in the workplace, African-American youth.
This is where the Democratic Party has failed.
They go in every two and four years asking for votes, and they've gotten them in these blue cities, towns, states for decades, and they've got nothing in return.
There's no law.
There's no order.
There's no safety.
There's no security.
And there's no education for their children.
All right, we're going to continue.
So the president will make this announcement, which is transformational, and it will be the biggest opportunity we have to save our children and give them the gift that they deserve, the proper education to prepare them for life.
How can anyone make the argument that education in America is succeeding?
How do we spend more per capita per child than any other country, industrialized country on earth, and have some of the worst results?
How is it that states that spend far less on education do so much better than states that spend, you know, all these states that spend so much on it, they fail.
And then states that spend so little do so well.
I mean, I don't care if you're talking about Chicago, San Francisco, L.A., New York, D.C., New Jersey, they spend all this money.
And then you actually break it down and you find that other states like Utah, which spend significantly less, $9,552 per pupil, Idaho, $9,670, Arizona, $10,315.
Oklahoma, Mississippi, et cetera.
And fourth grade students, for example, in Utah scored much higher on average than those in New York, which spends the most.
They spend a third of what they're spending in New York, less than a third, and they're doing better.
Idaho, second lowest spending, behind nine other states and districts that perform significantly better on fourth grade.
That's it.
Only Mass, I mean, all the school districts that spend money fail.
I'll explain next.
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Let me, before I go any further, and I'm going to give you the numbers and the statistics.
We have failed our kids spectacularly when it comes to the issue of education.
We've just failed them.
And these numbers are staggering.
And there was a number of years ago in New Jersey, a guy by the name, he was a real-life person named Joe Clark.
I had interviewed Joe Clark.
I love Joe Clark.
He was amazing, actually.
And he showed up.
It was called Eastside High.
And his job was to educate these kids and inspire these kids and get rid of those people that were interfering in the educational process.
And he walked around with a bullhorn and a bat in the school.
And I mean, he just raised holy hell and he took a lot of heat for it.
And he got the job done.
He was able to get the kids, he believed in the children, and he got their scores up.
They did a movie about his life.
One of the best roles, I think Morgan Freeman's one of the best actors.
Forget his politics.
He's one of the best actors by far.
Amazing actor with incredible versatility.
If there's a movie with Morgan Freeman in it, I've seen it and I'm going to watch it usually again.
But this became a classic.
It was Lean on Me.
And he assembles the students in one scene an hour before they are about to take a state-mandated test.
And it was critical that they get a passing grade, something they'd not achieved in a long time.
When they took their first practice test, it was a disaster.
So one hour before the test, he gets all the kids in the auditorium, and this is the speech he gave.
All right, people, here we are.
This is the day.
In one hour, you are going to take an exam administered by the state to test your basic skills and the quality of education at Eastside High.
And I want to tell you what the people out there are saying about you and what they think about your chances.
They say you are inferior.
You are just a bunch of n****s and s****s and full white trash.
Education is wasted on you.
You cannot learn.
You're lost.
I mean, all of you.
I want all the white students to stand up.
All my white students, stand up right now.
Stand up.
Come on.
All my white students, stand up, stand up.
That's it.
Come on, stand up.
These are my white children.
And they're the same as all of you.
They've got no place to go.
If they had, they would have abandoned us a long time ago like everybody else did.
But they couldn't.
So here they are at Eastside High, just like the rest of us.
You can sit down.
Are you getting my point, people?
Is it beginning to sink in?
We sink, we swim, we rise, we fall, we meet our fate together.
Now, it took the help of a good, good friend to make me know and understand that.
And I do understand it, and I'm grateful.
I'm eternally grateful.
And now I've got a message for those people out there who've abandoned you and written you off.
Can you hear me?
Can you hear me?
Good.
in Syria.
Your school may have been, but you can turn that around and make liars out of those in exactly one hour and you take your test and classes and win.
Well, here's what I want you to do.
When you find your minds wandering, I want you to knuckle back down and concentrate.
Concentrate.
Remember what's at stake and show them what East Side High is all about.
A spirit that will not die.
I mean, if you haven't watched it, it's worth it.
You know, pulling it up on Apple TV and going back and watching it.
And I go back to New York, $36,000 per student, 21% increase since the 2021 school year.
And they have fewer students by about 15 to 18%.
They have a 35% truancy rate.
And then you look at the results.
Fourth grade, 32nd and 46th, 32nd in reading, 46th in math.
Eighth grade to 22nd in math.
Gee, they got a little better.
Big deal.
More per capita per student than any other city in the entire country.
And they've been the top spender for two decades.
You can't institutionalize failure like this.
And all the states have spent all this money because there's no positive correlation between spending and pupil and average scores by the states.
New York, D.C., New Jersey, Vermont, Connecticut, the highest spenders.
Anywhere between $30,000 plus to $25,000.
Then you look at the lowest spending states.
Utah, $9,552 per pupil.
Idaho, $9,670.
Arizona, $10,315.
Oklahoma, $10,890.
Mississippi, $10,984.
The kids in Utah, the lowest spending of any state in the country, scored much higher on average than those in New York.
And only, you know, I think D.C. and Massachusetts had, I'm sorry, only I can't read this.
Anyway, Massachusetts had higher, you know, test scores.
Eighth grade math, only one jurisdiction ranked significantly higher than Utah, the lowest spending.
And Idaho does significantly better with one-third of the money.
One-third.
Los Angeles, 54% of their expenses spent on teacher salaries, employee benefits.
So a majority of the money spent is not going to students.
We learned under the Biden years, the Biden Education Department spent over $100 million on DEI, anti-racist social workers for K-12 schools.
This is madness.
We are failing these kids spectacularly.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, LA Unified spent $22,000 per student, and they're not doing well either.
You know, 47% of students, that's it, that met or exceeded the grade level and English standards.
In math, it was only 34%.
This is institutional failure.
They spent nearly $24,000 per student in San Francisco.
Only 46% passed their grade math level.
In Atlanta, they spend nearly $23,000 per student per year.
Only 36% of students read at the third grade level.
Only 30%, just over 30% of students are proficient in math.
Want to talk about a disaster?
Let's go to Detroit, Michigan.
They spend $21,771 per student a year.
16% of those students in the Detroit Public Schools Community District tested proficient in English language arts in 2024.
10.5% of students were proficient tested in math.
10%.
What are we getting for our money?
Let three parents pool the money, hire a private tutor, five parents, hire a private teacher.
In Baltimore, 65% of public schools earn the lowest possible scores on Maryland's report card.
65% of those 13 public schools we've discussed for many times, not a single kid proficient in math or reading, not one.
You know, if you look at the data, they found 65% of Baltimore City's 148-rated schools earned one or two stars, the lowest possible ratings.
Every year, 1,300 public schools in the state of Maryland are rated based on performance.
Each school receives a star.
Baltimore City has by far the highest percentage of one or two star schools in the state and more than double the next highest district in the region, Baltimore County at 27.6%.
You can't fail this badly.
If you look at Illinois, Chicago spending nearly doubles and the scores, they didn't go up, they dropped.
Test scores, academic performance continue to drop.
Since 2012, spending has gone up a whopping 97%.
Reading proficiency went down 63%, and math proficiency spent 78%.
They doubled the money, and they've gone down 63% and 78%, respectively.
You know, three-quarters of these students can't read at grade level.
Even fewer can do math at grade level.
And what is the Chicago Teachers' Union leadership?
What do they want?
A new contract with a list of costly demands that have nothing to do with improving academic performance of students and everything to do with politics.
That's the unholy alliance between teachers' unions and the Democratic Party.
Democrats screaming, bloody murder, save our kids, save our kids from what?
We're saving our kids by saving this system from institutional failure.
That's why I'm asking people: think out of the box.
Approach something differently when you're failing at this level.
You have got to make adjustments.
You have got to do a course correction.
This has been needed now almost since the beginning.
Department of Education founded in 1979.
Reagan has, during his term, a landmark study, a nation at risk.
What has happened to the educational system in America were it done by an outside entity or force would be tantamount to an act of war.
Wow.
That's how bad this is.
New Jersey's educational system is garbage, too.
Per pupil spending has steadily increased.
Per student, now over $26,000 per year.
Their performance, minimal gains, next to nothing.
You know, the national assessment, fourth and eighth graders, at least a third of America's students failed to demonstrate basic reading skills expected for their age group.
Only 67% of eighth graders are able to meet or exceed basic skills on the 2024 test.
Only 60% of fourth graders were able to meet basic skills levels.
And let me tell you about those tests.
They are not the end-all be-all.
I mean, this is the bare minimum.
I mean, we spent $3 trillion since the founding of the Department of Education, and education scores have only gone down.
We spend more money than any industrialized country in the world with the worst results.
Why did Joe Biden's Department of Education spend $100 million on grants to schools meant to train K-12 social workers on critical race theory, social justice, diversity, equity, inclusion, when these kids can't read, write, do math, science, history, or whatever history they're learning, or learn computers, which is a skill they're going to need in their life.
Not that hard.
So the president is going to abolish the Department of Education, and they're going to put standards in place.
And there's going to be accountability for the money that is given, which needs to be done.
And they're going to be screaming on the left bloody murder.
But the screaming ought to be from parents, especially the parents of children in predominantly minority school districts who have been disproportionately, negatively impacted by this institutional failure.
And for people that say, oh, you know, they buy into the every year, every two to four years, you hear Republicans are racist, they're sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic, transphobic, phobic, phobic, phobic.
They want dirty air and water and kill grandma and grandpa.
No, that's not what they want.
We believe in economic, we believe in educational excellence.
We can turn this around if the kids are given the right education, if the kids are given an opportunity to learn, if we change the paradigm.
Otherwise, you know, what is the definition of insanity?
You just do the same thing over and over and over again, and you expect a different result.
You're not getting a different result unless you change the system.
The president's going to make his announcement.
It's expected at 4 o'clock.
We'll cover it live here on this show, and we'll see where that's going.
We have the other news of the day we'll get to.
We'll get to your calls as well.
800-941-Sean is our number.
All right, President Trump about to take to the nation and announce his remarks on education and the abolishment of the Department of Education.
I do believe that means block granting money to states, maybe a school voucher component to it with standards, but we'll carry that live straight ahead.
You want smart political talk without the meltdowns?
We got you.
I'm Carol Markowitz, and I'm Mary Catherine Hamm.
We've been around the block in media and we're doing things differently.
Normally is about real conversations.
Thoughtful, try to be funny, grounded, and no panic.
We'll keep you informed and entertained without ruining your day.
Join us every Tuesday and Thursday, normally, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Ben Ferguson, and I'm Ted Cruz.
Three times a week, we do our podcast, Verdict with Ted Cruz.
Nationwide, we have millions of listeners.
Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, we break down the news and bring you behind the scenes inside the White House, inside the Senate, inside the United States Supreme Court.
And we cover the stories that you're not getting anywhere else.
We arm you with the facts to be able to know and advocate for the truth with your friends and family.
So down a Verdict with Ted Cruz now, wherever you get your podcasts.
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