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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   30900 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 17, 2025

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"Ben Miller, who was most recently the principal deputy under secretary at the US Department of Education during the Biden-Harris Administration" explains "What the Department of Education actually does"

It includes a claim that it's the "most efficient" Department:

The Department of Education sends vast sums of money out the door to states, districts, schools, and institutions of higher education quite efficiently. For every dollar the Department gets from Congressional appropriations, it spends about 3.4 cents to make that money flow, enforce the law, and ensure someone picks up the phone when one of the tens of millions of student loan borrowers needs help.^1 Moreover, Congress appropriates the money for these salaries and expenses separately from the money used for grant programs — spending less money on personnel will not increase the dollars flowing outside the building.

1 Around 35 percent of the salaries and expenses money goes directly to paying student loan servicers, so the spending rate on Department of Education staff is even lower.

The conclusion gets to a question I think is important, albeit in a more biased way than I'd like:

Those clamoring to shutter the Department of Education have always played coy with exactly what they mean.

Sometimes, they’ve meant taking the same functions and moving them elsewhere, like having the US Department of the Treasury take over the federal student loan portfolio. That proposal raises a lot of questions, such as would Treasury actually want to absorb such a massive and complicated portfolio? Would everything done in Federal Student Aid be moved or only pieces? And would the part of the Department of Education that writes rules governing the aid programs now be binding a different federal agency?

But where shuttering proponents are often silent is on the importance of the requirements and standards the Department of Education attaches to the money it awards.

The Department’s signature programs establish a national goal: that regardless of who you are or where you come from, our nation’s public schools will serve you and educate you to a standard of excellence. Aspirations like this have driven our country’s prosperity for decades and have allowed millions of people with disabilities to live as full and productive members of a society that in the not too distant past shunned them.

The Department of Education doesn’t tell states, districts, schools, colleges, or any other institutions how they have to educate anyone. But it has always insisted that they try.

What policy goal is advanced by "reforming" or eliminating the Department of Education? How could other departments/agencies better fulfill statutory requirements? (Any given hobby-horse "Title _" requirement would still exist.) I can make an anti-war on drugs argument for reforming the DEA or an anti-gun control argument for reforming the BATFE, but that DoE is - so far as I know - infamous only for the "Dear Colleague" letter makes me think that they're relatively good about apolitically applying statutes and that attempts to politicize the Department got adequate (relative to other departments) attention.

My problem with it is they never once question the mission. They believe deeply in it and they are (were) efficient at it and scientifically minded (my sister is one of the hated PhDs that was just fired, FWIW), but they simply never question the deeply held belief that every child must be educated and every person should go to college. And these two big beliefs are stressing the hell out of schools and individuals respectively. Schools are bogged down in lawsuits and budget constraints while they try to make sure even the most disabled people get a HS diploma and we have a saturated market for grads and post-grads who are simply not realizing the financial 'promise' of their degrees. I read that post and thought...so what? It changes nothing.

they simply never question the deeply held belief that every child must be educated and every person should go to college

Were those the actual beliefs, or were the actual beliefs Mottes along the lines of "states can't refuse to try to educate every child (because American history has shown that they can't be trusted to decide which children shouldn't be educated)" and "every person who wants to go to college should be able to go to college?"

Well, there's that Upton Sinclair quote, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” People who make money off of education will tend to genuinely believe that education is good/effective/virtuous/etc., and the causality seems likely to go in both directions. And if we expand it not just to money but status, people with more degrees will tend to genuinely believe it as well, especially the more their use of the degree is insulated from real, concrete, undeniable consequences.

I used to be confused at why the benefits of education was taken as an article of faith by the educated, since education should theoretically make someone more appreciative of the importance of empirical evidence, and as best as I can tell, the empirical evidence that the apparent better outcomes for educated people come almost entirely from the education with almost none from the filtering mechanism seems rather lacking. Which is how you get to supporting the idea that it's better to let poor performing kids go up grades and graduate high school, so that they get the opportunity to go to colleges where they can accrue the benefits of higher education. I'm not so confused anymore.

It's infamous for being full of Education PhDs who change up federal standards so that their side businesses selling education materials generate steady income.

The top Education PhD programs are famous for far left ideological gatekeeping because you need a degree from one of them to work at DoE.

People on the right just think that breaking it up into other departments would result in better people fulfilling it's requirements.

It's infamous for being full of Education PhDs who change up federal standards so that their side businesses selling education materials generate steady income.

Can you give examples? States choose their own curricula, and ~15(?) years ago, there was grumbling about how Texas's bulk purchases drove down the cost of allegedly biased textbooks, which led to other states adopting them, for cost reduction.

It's more of a thumb on scale thing. The ED giver out a lot of grants and also has school evaluation programs. Assorted state groups who live off of grant money will toe the line when ED policies come out. Common Core was pushed out in part using "Race To The Top" grants.

Basically being the major source of education grants lets people at ED control what is trendy in education. It's not direct control but it's a significant influence.

DoE.

I should probably get tired of harping on this, but DoE is the Department of Energy; the Department of Education is ED. Fortunately, there's a helpful mnemonic coincidence that makes this easy to keep straight...

ensure someone picks up the phone when one of the tens of millions of student loan borrowers needs help

This is utter bullshit, I had student loans. Nobody picks up the phone.

The Department’s signature programs establish a national goal: that regardless of who you are or where you come from, our nation’s public schools will serve you and educate you to a standard of excellence

And according to many conservatives they have failed to deliver on that goal. America is not known for its excellent public education. Which is a reason to be nuked. Don't spend good money after the bad. If the endgame is illiterate population at least have smaller federal deficit. You can also say that US education system has too many administrators.

The education level of the population won't remain the same after funding is cut, it will get worse, even if it's already bad. That's the same fallacy that many people indulged in with Covid: the numbers don't remain the same when you change the policy that affects those numbers.

Cutting the Department of Education != cutting federal funding for education. The US had federal funding for schools before 1979, and will after.

The author of the OP article somehow thinks that bragging about charging higher percentages overhead that most hedge funds (3.4% apparently) while obtaining far worse results is a winning formula. I think it rather nicely highlights the issue.

I think eliminating the DoE would help a bit as it would stop funding trendy educational schemes that don’t work, political indoctrination, and other useless programs. The money can be sent directly to the states and used for education, but not the bells and whistles the federal government wants. This would mean that the schools can focus on literacy and numeracy and teaching science rather than worrying that the kids aren’t learning to be progressives.

I appreciate that this could plausibly be the case, and is not assuming some huge gains in education efficiency, but I still have my doubts the transition will be as clean as all that.

I don’t think it’s going to be an easy transition, but I absolutely believe that schools need to go back to teaching the basics of literacy, numeracy, and scientific literacy. One thing that tends to stop that is the rather large list of special interest topics that schools are required to teach, the educational trends that get pushed by tge bureaucracy, and the fact that all of this takes time away from the actual education kids need.

Just taking history for example. Kids are graduating high school unable to tell you when very key events in American and world history took place. They don’t know when the civil war happened, but we need to shoehorn lots of “specialty history” into the narrative to induce kids to believe The Narrative instead of making sure they know the names dates and actors in historical context for the major events in American or for that matter world history.

Or you could take literacy. Kids are going off to college needing to catch up on reading and writing. Kids go off to college in some cases having never read a nonfiction book. They are used to skim reading a couple of paragraphs to find keywords and phrases but cannot go much deeper than that. And writing is just as bad if not worse.

Or they will get better. Us education system problem is not lack of money

Copying from another reply: Unless you are positing some actual, specific mechanism through which education will somehow improve when it's less invested in, then I don't understand your argument. Things don't magically improve when you stop investing in them just because you were paying too much for the service you got before.

You don't get to suddenly match other countries quality of education by spending the same as them. For that to be the case, you would have to posit some huge gains in efficiency of cost/pupil educated.

To put it bluntly - you don't help the junkie by giving him more junk to shoot.

Let's see how we can improve the education with less money. First - we fire vast majority of all administrators. Second - we abolish student loans. This will reduce the price of education across the board since for no one's surprise the more generous the loan the higher the prices of college become. Third - by making the education states' affair you will give ability for states to actually innovate. Also less money will mean less chromebooks, ipads and other idiocies. So far I have yet to see anything that beats pen, paper and discussion in class in high quality learning.

Why would you expect that? I wouldn't necessarily. I would expect it to stay about the same, since the core teachers, the children, and the states they live in will remain the same

I don't understand how you can expect the quality of a service to remain the same when a substantial portion of the funding for that service is cut. It seems like a fully generalizable statement that more funding=on average better service. We can quibble about how much funding results in how much improvement in quality for various services, but the principle holds. If police budgets are cut, police service gets worse. Ditto for healthcare, research, customer service, education, and basically everything else.

Looking at the Department of Education in particular: the Office of Federal Student Aid provides 120.8 billion in funding (grants, loans, etc.) for postsecondary education. It seems like a safe assumption that there are, very conservatively, thousands of university and college students who depend on this aid to attend their school at all. This seems like a very straightforward example of a way in which gutting the Department will have a negative effect on the education level of the population at large.

Perhaps you're only discussing the education of minors? Still, in that case the OESE seems to provide a huge amount of programs which top up funds to improve local and state schools. You can see a list here: https://www.ed.gov/about/ed-offices/oese/offices-programs-by-office

Is your position that none of these programs have any impact on the education level of the population at all? Or are you assuming that when the Department is gutted similar funding will flow to the states to spend under their own discretion? Unless that is your assumption, then the teachers and schools will not remain the same because they won't have the same budget. If that is your assumption, then we simply disagree on how calculated/planned out this gutting and refunding will be. There are huge costs associated with recreating programs from scratch.

Dear Lord man.

It seems like a fully generalizable statement that more funding=on average better service

You can find dozens of graphs showing how much we spend on education vs the results we get. The relationship is almost the inverse of what you've said here.

Do you truly have no qualms with the explosion of over-"educated" people being churned out of universities? The outright fraud at community colleges where dropouts keep their grant money?

I understand the naive desire to have everyone go to college. It's an extremely fun part of life. Stupid people with worthless degrees being there to party with is part of it.

But the cost disease the fed government has wrought on every single stage of education is staggering. The music has to stop here. It's too obvious and too simple to fix, unlike problems such as healthcare.

You are making exactly the same mistake that I called out before. I believe the graphs say what you say and that is not good evidence. America spends more than most other countries and gets worse results. That does not imply that we would get better results by suddenly spending less in line with other countries, that doesn't follow at all. Other countries have a huge amount of other variables going into education that you cannot replicate by simply matching them on price.

Unless you are positing some actual, specific mechanism through which education will somehow improve when it's less invested in, then I don't understand your argument.

Any qualms I may have were not the point of this argument, which was to determine whether gutting the DOE would result in a lower education level for the population. You have argued that the current education level is unnecessary, which is tangential to my point and something I'm agnostic on.

I think the disagreement here is that YFR and others see the spending-versus-results conundrum as a matter of cost disease/"the dose makes the poison," where the cost-benefit ratio is so miserable that no increase in spending can be stomached, whereas you seem to see the problem as a "more dakka" one, where we could actually do better if we just invested more.

  1. Congress can still redistribute directly to the states if they want to, and probably will.

  2. Student loans are already a horrible mess, and the DOE and federal government hasn't done anything to sort it out, so it's probably best we have less of them, not more. I went to community college, followed by an inexpensive state college. If those colleges don't have enough money to function in some states, the federal government can redistribute directly to them. Private scholarships are probably useful and good.

  3. I work in a school, and have seem hat kinds of programs the money goes towards. They are mostly not what I would want. The DOE's priorities are not only the same priorities as most children and parents, but not even the same as most teachers. Not even the teachers of superfluous subjects.

  1. There will likely be a pretty ugly transition period between programs being gutted and the states spinning up their own versions of some of these programs, if they manage to sucessfully do it at all. It would be simpler to prune specific programs carefully rather than gutting the whole department and starting from scratch.

  2. I'm not really understanding your point here, it doesn't sound like it makes that much of a difference to me? If the money amounts are the same and going to the same places, why do we need to make a change at all?

  3. Respectfully, I don't agree that some programs being wasteful on an anecdotal scale necessitates gutting a department which oversees a huge amount of programs. Fine, the programs you saw were bad and a waste of money. What about all the other ones? And further to your point, what reason is there to believe that the DOE has wildly out of whack incentives from teachers/students/parents but the states do not? Why not fund it at the municipal level?

There are often problems that are made worse with more money.

There are generalizable circumstances that cause this to happen, and those circumstances often apply to government organizations but not exclusively to them.

  1. Principal agent problems. The money is being spent by an agent on behalf of someone else, and either due to conflicts of interest or lack of knowledge the money is spent in a way that actively harms the principal.
  2. Information gaps. The consumer and producer are not easily able to judge what is good spending vs bad spending in terms of solving the problem. This can cause money to be spent on costly or ineffective signalling items.
  3. Crowding out good money. A working market with a working and functioning incentive system can be thrown off by injections of cash from a misaligned actor. Producers go chasing the extra cash while not caring as much about the original consumer. And consumers do less research than they would if it was their own money being spent. This happens in medical insurance all the time.

I think student loans are actively harmful to many of the people involved.

I'd fix them by making them dischargeable in bankruptcies and making the university partially responsible for the debt in such cases. I'd leave parents off the loan. I'd maybe see them changed to loans where a percentage of post college income is owed. Right now they suffer from all of the above problems.

I appreciate your response and recognize that these are issues that plausibly arise from more funding from non market parties.

I won't debate your points as I agree they are likely the case in some respects, I will only quibble on the point that none of these issues imply that stopping this funding would improve or leave the same the education level of the population. We might be spending money inefficiently, we might be issuing loans in a way that is net financial negative for some students, and we may be throwing off the private market of education, but those are all things you can do while still raising the education level of the population, and indeed goals like that are why we as a society trust the government and not the market for some things.

At this point, it becomes about how much extra money you want to spend for how much education, which is a much harder question, so I'll leave it there.

Higher levels of education is only good if education is mostly capital formation. But if it is mostly signalling then it is doubly wasteful to subsidize it. From personal experience I'm inclined to think of it as mostly signalling, the econ literature apparently agrees with me.

Can you point me to the evidence you're referencing? My impression of the stats was that higher level education at college/university has a quite large lifelong earnings benefit.

i suppose this could still be just signalling that gets them into a higher earning network of like-minded signallers, but if we are trying to change this economic framework we would somehow have to also disincentive businesses from hiring based on this signalling. And that does not seem like an easy ask to me.

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I'd fix them by making them dischargeable in bankruptcies and making the university partially responsible for the debt in such cases. I'd leave parents off the loan. I'd maybe see them changed to loans where a percentage of post college income is owed.

Effectively making the university co-sign the loans seems like a good idea; there are numerous practical problems (e.g. if the student voluntarily drops out or transfers, who is responsible?) but in general it seems OK. But making them a percentage of post-college income owed is giving universities a way to capture nearly all the value of the education, and it worsens the problem of lucrative degree programs subsidizing financially worthless ones.

If the college is going to reap the benefits of a lucrative degree program it might be incentivized to encourage them more.

A college that graduates a bunch of engineers that can go on to make 6 figure salaries is going to be better off than a college that creates a bunch of underemployed barristas.

With the way student loans currently work the university is getting the price of tuition and on campus amenities, and those costs are similar between different degrees. But the cost of teaching the more lucrative degrees is often more expensive, usually because professors that teach it have the option of better private industry jobs, so they command higher salaries at the university.

the importance of the requirements and standards the Department of Education attaches to the money it awards.

Exactly. We want those gone.

At the expense of the money? If compliance was a budgetary net-loss, states would simply away the money.

Yes. Among the many problems of the public schools in America is having far too much money and not enough reasonable things to spend it on.

Then why don't states turn down the money, in exchange for exemption from the relevant requirements?

Because the public school system is fully iron-law compliant. The real purpose in the minds of the administrators(who run the system) is to spend as much money as possible, with no thought whatsoever as to the actual results of that spending, and federal money does a great job of that.

Then why not vote to repeal the statutes? What problem is solved by changing which department applies the statutes?

That one department is full of enemies, while the other is full of friends, obviously.

Because the state’s citizens pay federal income tax that funds these grant programs regardless, so turning down the money is functionally equivalent to funding other states’ education systems at the expense of one’s own

Then why not vote to repeal the statutes? What problem is solved by changing which department applies the statutes?

Because the bureaucrats who implement the statutes can not be trusted to do so.

Again, then why not vote to repeal the statutes? Or which department has bureaucrats you trust to apply the statutes to your liking, why do you trust that department, and are the relevant functions being moved to that department?

Because it is a losing political issue.

"X politician won't take free federal money to improve our student's education and pay our teachers more!"

Then why not vote to repeal the statutes? What problem is solved by changing which department applies the statutes?

Imagine it was 1984, and you were an ethnic Latvian, living in what would later be Latvia, and you were well aware of the impact Moscow had on the cultural formation of your children and surrounding community. And then an ethnic Russia, mid conversation one day, brought out some spread sheets to show off how efficiently the Soviet Ministry of Education was being run, and thus anyone who had any problems with the system was misinformed by fake news. You would probably recognize that there was a crucial gap between the actual, deep issues and the argument being presented.

My entire life, since my childhood in the 80s, all the conservatives I know had had dismantling the federal department of education right up there with ending Roe vs. Wade. There was never a time when the adults in my life didn't despise that Department as an organ of cultural domination and social engineering. It was on the same level for the kinds of conservatives I knew as Universal Health Care or Real Gun Control or First Female President is for liberals.

This is absolutely straight up who/whom stuff.

The Department of Education doesn’t tell states, districts, schools, colleges, or any other institutions how they have to educate anyone. But it has always insisted that they try.

Off the top of my head:

  1. Title I funding incentivizes concentrating impoverished students in great enough numbers to qualify for the funding. There’s a cliff where the funds just go away. I’ve seen this play out when our district was redrawing school boundaries, it was the top priority.

  2. Dear Colleagues

  3. Making funds contingent on keeping kids in or out of the proper locker rooms

  4. Throwing ESSR funds at districts that almost universally used them to fund new permanent programs and then begged for more funding when the always-temporary funds expired

There’s just a ton more strings attached funds that lead to administrative bloat and generally incentivize schools to chase things that aren’t all that useful except that they get rewarded with funds

Title I funding incentivizes concentrating impoverished students in great enough numbers to qualify for the funding. There’s a cliff where the funds just go away. I’ve seen this play out when our district was redrawing school boundaries, it was the top priority.

In my experience, most conservative-leaning people want the poverty to be concentrated, though. I can think of several small districts in old mill towns near me that are having enough trouble staying solvent with Federal funding. If that dries up then it's game over for them and they will be forced to merge with the wealthier suburban districts that surround them, causing a much bigger uproar among Trumpy types than an obscure DOE incentive structure.

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