Why are we spending $56 billion a year for the Department of Education?

The Dept. of Education was created during the Eisenhower Administration., not the Carter Administration. The point is to finance even the poorest school districts so that they can have a basic infrastructure of buildings, books and facilities....something that was lacking before the federal government got involved. For the most part even today ALL school districts come under a state dept of education....an elected body as are the various district school boards. The federal government has little authority over these locally elected boards of education. Has education improved? Given that there's a lot more to learn and the complexity of science is difficult to grasp we've still managed to turn out millions of well educated people..in shear numbers more than any other country with the same or a similar population. All of this in the face of a well financed drive by 'conservatives' to deny science, promote 'religion', disrespect the teaching profession, spread outlandish lies about unions in general and teacher's unions in particular and deny the fact that there are plenty of republicans who sit on elected school boards all over the country. Given that the US military is already six times larger than all the other militaries in the world put together...including China, and also given that most of the money used to finance this bloated military Frankenstein is borrowed money I doubt if we need anymore money thrown into an organization that somehow can't 'win' wars against two third world countries. Note: 56 billion dollars comes out to a few hundred thousand per school district....hardly enough to pay the electric and water bills for the average high school.....do the math!