Afrasianet - Ryan Walters - Fox News - Teachers' unions and American Randy Weingarten have been misled about the importance of the federal agency for decades. 

When the Washington, D.C., movement stops, the liberal media is quick to tell you that the sky is going to fall. Randy Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, and her fellow unionists are shouting that schools will collapse without the Department of Education, and that Trump is responsible for the closure. She said he is "holding the American people hostage."

The only one holding Americans hostage is the teachers' unions that have besieged your children's education during the COVID pandemic. They hold teachers hostage when they don't adhere to liberal standards. Worst of all, they treat parents as obstacles and hold them hostage when they resist.

The government has shut down, federal employees at the Department of Education have been temporarily laid off and more than half of the department's staff, and schools are still operating. Teachers are studying, students are learning, and the world is not over.

Here's the truth that the media will never say out loud: This shutdown has exposed one of America's biggest scams:  the U.S. Department of Education.

For decades, teachers' unions and their liberal allies in Washington, D.C., have been telling the American people that without the federal bureaucracy, education will collapse. They said states could not handle education funding, accountability, or innovation without "guidance." But they were wrong.

Schools continued to operate during the shutdown because real funding, the Education of Individuals with Disabilities Act and other key programs flowed through scheduled appropriations, which continued even in the absence of federal employees. The shutdown simply halted administrative processing and the creation of new rules, not the actual flow of money to schools. In other words, the Department of Education had not "run the system" before, and the shutdown proved it.

The government shutdown has proven what many of us already know: states can only manage education. Education is funded and administered in this country at the state and local levels, and the federal government adds bureaucracy, not value.

Let's be clear: There was no justification for the U.S. Department of Education, it was created as a political service in 1979, in a deal between Jimmy Carter and the teachers' unions to consolidate their power, and that's clear.

The teachers' union is not just one of many parties in this story, it is why the Ministry of Education exists in the first place. The ministry gives it power, money, and political protection, and in return, the unions defend the ministry's presence at every turn. That's why they work so hard to convince Americans that the country will collapse without them, because without Washington they lose control.

Teachers' unions have been feeding on the Ministry of Education for decades to weaponize money and influence, injecting ideology into curriculum standards, teacher training programs, and accreditation lines that require parents to sit and be silent.

Now that the lights of the ministry have been turned off, they panic. And you will see their headlines: "The world is burning without the Ministry of Education!" But the only thing "burning" are the lies they have been propagating to Americans for 40 years.

Here in the real world, children are learning, teachers are teaching, parents are taking back control, and the system is working very efficiently without federal interference. So we conclude that the shutdown has not destroyed American education, but has exposed those who are destroying it.