Amid hoopla and a silly ceremony with school room desks, Donald Trump signed his much-anticipated executive order towards killing off a federal role in education. Still, his order to hack away at the agency’s staffing and role acknowledged that he cannot just do away with a Cabinet-level department without congressional approval.
What’s weird is that he and Education Secretary, Linda McMahon, who temporarily remains on the job with now a tiny agency tasked to distribute money, not educational guidance, want both to insist that they have erased a hateful level of regulation on local school decisions and that no important service is being stopped.
The actions are all going to court, of course, another in the never-ending series of legal challenges over intended and unintended results from Trump’s remake of government. Attorneys general from 20 states and the District of Columbia already had filed lawsuits over early dismissals of workers.
If anything, the anti-public-school sentiments being aired this week should signal that this is about generalized grievance more than any specific educational programs. Trump consistently has been pushing elimination of the department as a step towards more school choice, a euphemism for private and parochial schools at taxpayer expense.
When linked to the campaigns to attack colleges and universities over unwanted political protest, there is more here that comes across as an attack on education than for improving it.
So, if the department cannot be cut, we must ask: What exactly was the educational gain this week of firing its workers, including those who measure such things?
Cuts and Keeps
Let’s remember that with only 4,400 employees at its height, cutting this agency will not reduce much federal spending, even setting aside that half were let go last week and scores of contracts canceled. Moreover, the big money items the department handles, including Title I funds for such things as school lunches, Pell grants and student loans, all will continue. So, let’s stop pretending that this is a waste-and-fraud spending action.
No this is a crafted political message to let those behind parent rights groups feel good, that advances the idea of “school choice” and that is intended to be a showcase for Trump’s anti-woke campaign.
What will be gone will be civil rights enforcement for disabled and disadvantaged pupils, teacher training, education research and standard setting. The official White House message that this “liberates” local school districts. (“It will empower parents, states and communities to take control and improve outcomes for all students”) and somehow will serve 50 million school children better is nonsense. No overfull classrooms are being reduced in size, no new urgency is being placed on a need for an informed society.hose changing economy, among other reasons, requires it.
While the justification here cited dropping school scores, there is nothing about eliminating the Education Department that will result in higher reading capabilities or better attention to special education or even pushing for more vocational training. Are there truly serious bars to states and localities now, or does federal involvement really block parental interaction with their students?
The best public schools can hope for is that states will fill in any gaps created for the disabled, among others. Part of the reason to create the department in 1979 was because states were shorting students who needed special classes or based on race and class.
This year, for example, Oklahoma ordered Bible studies in its public-school classrooms as well as display of the Ten Commandments, but its most recent fourth and eighth grade reading scores remained near the bottom nationally. Hmm. Maybe culture wars don’t affect reading skills but do attack critical thinking and constitutionally expressed separation of church and state.
Spending Goes On
Even the stopgap changes moving supervision of the continuing spending to other departments will require congressional approval.
And the whole politicized question skips the fact that states and local districts pay for 90 percent of public education, set the curriculum, and hire the teachers. So, exactly what are the benefits of this messaging action by Trump? Beyond achieving more heft for those insistent on finding a diversity, equity and inclusion monster on every shelf at the school library, it is difficult to tell.
The Education Department administers federal grant programs, including the $18.4 billion Title I program that provides supplemental funding to high-poverty K-12 schools, as well as the $15.5 billion IDEA program that helps cover the cost of education for students with disabilities. And the department oversees the $1.6 trillion federal student loan program and sets rules for what colleges must do to participate. But those supposedly are not being eliminated.
Instead, the White House explanation is that the Biden administration used the Education Department to press an ideological agenda, such as promoting racial equity programs and barring schools from discrimination based on gender identity. Now the Trump administration has done exactly that in the opposite direction with its own limits on how schools can address issues of race and gender.
What the White House does not stress is the loss of more than 160 educational research programs, many of which were aimed at discovered what does or does not work in the classroom. One example: a study of the early impact of a literacy program in Michigan, which ran for four of its five years. So, chalk that one up to wasting taxpayer money on a program that never concluded.
What About the Politics?
If blowing up the Education Department is such a political priority, why would we expect less than unanimity in the Congress or in popular reception of the program? Rearranging responsibilities among agencies sounds like ideal stuff for a partisan split Congress that cannot even settle daylight savings time.
The conservative National Review suggests that while eliminating the department “sounds big, sweeping, and enormously consequential. But the effects on America’s students may well turn out to be considerably less than either proponents boast or detractors decry,” mostly because the most popular spending will continue.
Fully unwinding the department would require a filibuster-proof, 60-vote majority in the Senate, and the Republicans don’t have that.
Just over a third of all U.S. undergraduate college students get Pell Grants, capped at $7,300 a year; half go to students whose families earn less than $20,000 a year. Even Republicans don’t want to be eliminating that. More than half of college students have received some kind of federal loan.
Still, the House has voted to eliminate subsidies for local farmers to provide fresh food for student lunches.
Red states take more in education funds than blue states. Mississippi’s public schools depend on federal funds for 23% of their money, New York about 7 percent.
Republicans want to “eliminate the Department of Education” without eliminating any of its popular programs.
HELP PROTECT FREEDOM OF THE PRESS BY SUPPORTING OUR NONPROFIT INDEPENDENT VOICE!
