Ending the Department of Education: The Ugly

Ending the Department of Education: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (full series)
Background | The Good
The Bad | The Ugly

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The Ugly

Then came Common Core. At the time, I was a bright-eyed and eager early 20-something in my first year of a Master of Education and Teaching Credential program at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC). Santa Cruz can be described glibly as the city where the 1960s hippies went to retire. Very liberal. As part of my Masters program, we participated in privilege walks, where we were separated based on “privilege” after answering 12 or so questions. We attended LGBTQ panels that focused on supporting and counseling students questioning their gender and sexuality. The overarching narrative in our training emphasized the “white supremacist systems” that, we were told, permeate our public schools.

The year was 2009, and there were rumblings of a possible switch to nationwide standards for math and English. Previously, each state had its own set of standards for these subjects. While inconsistent, most states and teachers were satisfied with this system. States could tailor their standards to the specific needs of their students, often creating detailed and extensive guidelines that made it easier for teachers to know precisely what to teach during the school year and to assess whether students met those standards. All that autonomy ended with Common Core.

Funded by Bill Gates, heralded by President Obama, and enthusiastically endorsed by the Department of Education, Common Core became a reality during my time at UCSC. And despite UCSC being a predominantly pro-Obama campus, we were all against it! Even when I leaned further left politically, I’ve always had a healthy distaste for federal overreach (which used to be a hallmark of liberalism), and so did my classmates and professors.

While the ED did not directly create the standards (this task fell to the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers), it played a critical role in ensuring their adoption by nearly all states. The ED promoted Common Core through federal initiatives, primarily by offering financial incentives. States received grants for adopting Common Core–aligned curriculum materials and for implementing assessments designed to measure the success of the standards.

Although adopting Common Core was technically voluntary, the connection between adoption and access to millions in federal funding made it almost mandatory. Just as with earlier efforts to integrate schools, money talks.

Now, almost 15 years later, we can see the “grade report” for the shift to Common Core, and it’s not a good one. A 2015 study showed “declines in math performance across the board, and either flatlining or decline in reading scores,” as well as declines in college preparation for seniors in math and reading. Many states have since revised or replaced the standards, acknowledging that they have not delivered on their promise to improve student outcomes.

It’s important to remember that without the ED’s top-down, federal centralization, Common Core would have been nearly impossible to implement nationwide. Maybe a handful of states would’ve tried it, and their regional failure would’ve been a lesson to other states to avoid it. But with the ED as powerful as it is today, the catastrophe was national.

Ending ED?

Dismantling the Department of Education is going to be messy. It would require an act of Congress, possibly by repealing the Department of Education Organization Act of 1979. If it were to pass, which is unlikely given the current stagnation in Congress, many of the ED’s responsibilities, such as overseeing standards and school accountability measures, would return to the states.

The department’s funding would also be redistributed to the states, at least in theory. Unlike the current system, this funding would not have specific allocations enforced by the federal government, allowing states to direct the money into their educational programs as they see fit.

Programs like Pell Grants and federal student loans wouldn’t disappear automatically. Still, they would likely be transferred to another agency, such as the Department of the Treasury, or perhaps a new agency created specifically for these programs. Civil rights enforcement in education would probably be shifted to another department as well. Of course, progressives will fear-monger and falsely claim all these programs and funds are going to disappear if the ED is reorganized.

What’s more likely than the abolition of the ED is a shrinking of the department. This can be done, to some degree, without congressional action. The incoming Trump administration can use a combination of informal budget cuts, such as directing his Secretary of Education to cut spending and not use all the funds allocated to the department by the budget, and reorganization, such as firing unnecessary federal education bureaucrats. Executive orders can do most of this relatively quickly, although the next administration could reverse those decisions just as quickly. Still, these temporary actions can become permanent by demonstrating their effectiveness. If Congress sees that a leaner and defanged ED is still getting the job done, or even improving results, by deferring to the states, they may be persuaded to make some of these changes long-lasting through legislation.

Shrinking ED would undoubtedly be a complex and controversial process, and we would likely see significant media outcry along the way, which we are already witnessing with just the possibility of change. However, it is possible to have a thriving educational system without a formal cabinet-level department of education. Canada does it. We did it before 1979. We can do it again. The only question is, does the political will exist to do it.

Source: https://capitalresearch.org/article/ending-the-department-of-education-part-4/