Jan Resseger considers some of the reactions to the Trump administration’s attempt to shut down the Department of Education. Reposted with permission.
In his newest book, Dangerous Learning, constitutional law professor Derek Black summarizes what has happened to public education in the United States during the lifetimes of most of us who are reading this post today:
“Brown v. Board of Education and its progeny fundamentally altered the way society thinks about education, not just of Black children but of all children. Laws prohibiting discrimination against students based on sex, language status, ethnicity, alienage, disability, poverty, and homelessness all grew out of the foundation Brown laid. For the past half century, the federal legal apparatus as well as several state regimes have aimed to deliver equal educational opportunity.” (Dangerous Learning, p. 275)
In 1979, during Jimmy Carter’s administration, Congress created the U.S. Department of Education to fulfill that mission by pulling together the federal agencies administering programs to increase educational opportunity for groups of children who had historically been marginalized.
It should, therefore, not be surprising that President Donald Trump, who has spent the year trying to stamp out every program or policy that protects equity and supports inclusion and diversity in public schools and across U.S. colleges and universities, has now implemented a plan to end the U.S. Department of Education.
Because federal law prescribes that only Congress can close a federal department or close one of the offices that Congress established within a federal department to manage particular programs, Trump began by keeping all the departments and offices but eliminating the people who do the work through the massive staff layoffs we have been watching all year long. Those layoffs, of course, constitute illegal impoundment of federal funds, and some of them have been temporary blocked by Federal District Courts. Then last Tuesday, Education Secretary Linda McMahon announced a further effort to phase out the Department under a new plan which complies with the law because it involves mere “interagency transfers” that will house Department of Education (DOE) programs in other departments, with some DOE staff moving with the programs to run them in their new setting. Although the transfers were announced last week, the interagency agreements were signed, according to Education Week, on September 30.
Chalkbeat‘s Erica Meltzer explains: “These changes were done administratively. Senior officials said the Economy Act gives the Education Department the authority to contract with other federal agencies.” The Washington Post‘s Laura Meckler and Danielle Douglas-Gabriel add: The interagency agreements amount to a work-around under which policy decisions will remain with the Education Department but the programs will be administered elsewhere. Staffers who work on the programs are expected to move to the new agency.”
Meckler and Douglas-Gabriel summarize the restructure announced last Tuesday: “Under the new agreements, the Labor Department will inherit the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education, including 27 K-12 programs, and the Office of Postsecondary Education, which administers 14 programs to help students enroll in and complete college. The Education Department will move the Indian education program to the Interior Department, child care access and foreign medical education to the Department of Health and Human Services, and foreign-language education to the State Department.” “There was considerable speculation that the $15 billion program to support students with disabilities would be included in the announcement, but it was not. Other major functions of the Education Department, including its Office for Civil Rights and the federal student aid program, also were not affected by Tuesday’s changes, but a senior department official told reporters that officials are still exploring options for moving those programs elsewhere in the government.” The Office for Civil Rights has already been decimated by the elimination of seven of its twelve regional offices and the layoff of most of its staff.
The NY Times‘ Michael Bender describes a senior official at the Education Department justifying the restructure as an attempt to “streamline bureaucracy so that ‘at the end of the day,’ it means more dollars to the classroom.” Bender quotes Secretary McMahon’s rationale: “Cutting through layers of red tape in Washington is one essential piece of our final mission.” The attempt by Secretary McMahon and her staff to justify the interagency agreements as a step toward reducing the federal bureaucracy is laughable.
The Associated Press’s Colin Binkley highlights another of McMahon’s bizarre rationalizations for the restructure. McMahon resurrects the old “falling test scores” argument as though moving around federal offices will have some kind of miraculous effect on the nation’s economic inequality, which, according to research (here or here), is the primary factor causing overall disparities in students’ aggregate test scores. Binkley describes McMahon as predicting that, without federal oversight, the states are likely to use federal dollars to help the students most in need: “McMahon has increasingly pointed to what she sees as failures of the department as she argues for its demise. In its 45 years, she says, it has become a bloated bureaucracy while student outcomes continue to lag behind. She points to math and reading scores… which plummeted in the wake of pandemic restrictions. Her vision would abolish the Education Department and give states wider flexibility in how they spend money that’s now earmarked for specific purposes, including literacy and education for homeless students. That, however, would require approval from Congress.”
An extremely serious concern is what the proposed restructure says about the Trump administration’s narrow and inadequate understanding of the purpose of public education as mere workforce preparation. Why is the Office of Primary and Secondary Education, which administers the enormous Title I grants that help promote equity in school districts serving concentrations of our nation’s poorest children, being moved to the Department of Labor? The Washington Post‘s Meckler and Douglas-Gabriel quote a Department of Education official “who argued that education’s purpose is to prepare students for the workforce. ‘Nowhere is that better housed than the department of labor,’ she said.” The reporters name the broader purpose of some of the programs being moved to the Department of Labor: “The K-12 grant programs that Labor stands to take on address a plethora of subjects not directly related to the workforce, such as support for children in poverty, after-school programs and aid for rural education.” Historically, public schooling has been understood as the primary institution that forms students as the citizens of our democratic society—with workforce preparation merely one component of that mission.
The U.S. Department of Education was created to pull together the administration of federal programs that help public schools across the states serve and welcome every student and protect each student’s civil rights. In a formal statement last week, Republican Congressman Brian Fitzpatrick strongly opposed the new interagency agreements designed to phase out the U.S. Department of Education:
“The United States Congress created the U.S. Department of Education for very good reason. And for millions of families, particularly those raising children with disabilities or living in low-income communities, the Department’s core offices are not discretionary functions. They are foundational. They safeguard civil rights, expand opportunity, and ensure that every child, in every community, has the chance to learn, grow, and succeed on equal footing. Working alongside our early childhood educators, local school partners, and disability advocates as Co-Chair of the Bipartisan Disability Caucus, I’ve seen exactly how essential these programs are. Altering them without transparency or congressional oversight would pose real risks to the very students they were created to protect. I will not allow it — and I urge all of my colleagues to stand with me.”