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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   30036 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.

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.

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