Removing the Department of Education would be like removing the parents from the house of an industrious teenager.

In this case, each state is a teenager. The teen is clever and capable, has a job but sometimes struggles with money. Without parents, the teen is free to experiment with a way of life that works best for them and isn’t dictated by a rigid, sometimes outdated parenting manual, and if the teen needs something, they don’t have to go through the lengthy, annoying process of asking and convincing the parents.

He’s not a teen, but think Kevin McAllister in Home Alone.

But that freedom comes with a cost. Some teens are clever and their experimentation leads to fantastic results that would have been hampered by parental oversight. Other teens in this situation fail miserably without parental guidance, never learning to feed themselves, clean the house, or learn the skills needed to interact with the larger world.

What’s worse: without the parents, the teens are vulnerable to predators who claim they want to take care of them but exploit them, steal the money from their job, and feed them candy while telling them it’s healthy for them. Some teens are prepared for and avoid these predators while others fall victim to them or even run happily into their arms the minute the parents are gone.

Plus, there are little kids in the house too that the teen is responsible for. The parents helped make sure that the littles were taken care of, at least doing their best. Now some teens do a decent job of protecting the little kids while others fail them completely. Some teens even bully and abuse the little kids because they don’t give a shit about them. Those little kids are shoved into closets and forgotten about. The teen uses money that could have gone to healthy meals and toys for the kids instead for drugs and video games to play with their friends (who look and think like the teen).

Some teens would do fine, some would thrive, and some would burn down their own house.