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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   30038 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.

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.

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.

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