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I woke up to Trump pulling a plug on the Department of Education. There's the usual freakout because this makes great headlines, there's the usual handwaving from the WH about how the programs people actually care about will get renamed and shoveled somewhere else, and Trump's enemies become further entrenched.
In principle this is similar to a lot of his other actions: it's motivated by the belief that Americans are getting a raw deal (they are), that they are paying too much and spending the money ineffectively (the money is not resulting in better educational achievement), and the looming giant specter that the government is heavily debt laden and going to go broke if you are not a subscriber to some wonkery like MMT. Trump is using the full power of the executive to chainsaw away the federal bloat and return power and responsibility back to the states.
What Trump likely hasn't foreseen is the likely response to this. I consider the Incentive Problem at the Heart of the American Justice System one of the most important articles written about America in the last decade. It's worth reading in its entirety; but the tldr is something like this: the tension between spending their own money and other people's money has created the disaster that is modern American policing, sentencing, judging and confinement. States don't want to pay for the operation of their own prisons at the same time they want to spend less on policing, so they'd rather give it up to for-profit prisons or shove it off to federal responsibility while enacting a weird kind of anarcho-tyranny.
This attitude is not exclusive to America. Brexit is probably a more notorious example: poor Britons who voted Leave correctly identified that their government considered their job not governance but selling them decisions made in Brussels. In their ignorance and naivete, they expected their own government to pick up the slack after leaving and believed they could do a better job of it by themselves. The reality is this: a government used to outsourcing their decision making process and shirking responsibility cannot be expected to suddenly pick up that responsibility when it is placed upon their shoulders. They will make a complete hash of it: "Brexit means Brexit" - never in a million years did the people expect that this would fail to move the needle on any of the reasons they voted for it (immigration, economics) or the complete lack of a plan for delivering it, as if the organs of government were rebelling against being told to perform their jobs for the first time in years and immediately set about trying to sabotage the mandated accomplishment with malicious compliance (you voted for Brexit because you hate immigrants, let's get even more of them in the country).
I believed, and still do, think Trump is a better president for America than Harris and many of these changes he's trying to push through have been a long time coming. Better yet, the loony side of Team Blue decisively lost in politics, and "demographics are destiny" has been proven false again. Maybe there's a chance they'll learn something before the pendulum swings back again.
However, there stands a very real chance of complete disaster across America as people who have never had to make a real decision in their lives find themselves suddenly having to as the Fed washes its hands and trims budgets. Not to mention the state employees who suddenly have to find room in the budget for all the things the federal government previously took care of. State governments are as subject to the same socialization of losses and the privatization of profits as the Fed is, and just as vulnerable to grifters, lawyers, and all manner of incompetent bureaucrats.
Before team red stans /ourguy/ some more, I would urge you to reconsider - do you have a good opinion of the people working in your state's government, and do you think the people running your state are up to the task of taking on the responsibilities that the Fed is dumping on them?
I'm sorry, this is a dumb joke, but I can't help it.
"Abolish education and science? That would be the end of civilisation as we know it!"
"We're only abolishing the department. Education and science will flourish."
"Without a government department? Impossible!"
I realise this may not apply to the American Department of Education, which for all I know does a lot more than just provide funding, but sometimes you've got to reach for the low-hanging fruit.
Apparently it moves around about 13% of education funding. It also provides some requirements, for instance around Individual Education Plans, which are fairly expensive, and mostly say things like "J will have additional time on tests" and "J will have preferential seating." They may also provide some of the rules that lead to special education positions being chronically understaffed, with entire positions unfilled for years at a time.
Despite having a kind of unnecessary fluff education job, I would still be interested to see what would actually change without them.
It’ll be bad for kids with behavioural problems mostly who require education assistants to shadow them constantly lest they have a meltdown.
But looking on the bright side, those kids seriously shouldn’t be in normal classrooms anyway, as they cause severe disruption. These kids have severe ADHD, FASD, or autism, and require some level of institutionalization, not “schooling” per se
Yeah.
Transportation is a major impediment. There are some kids I know who clearly should not be in an enormous industrial elementary school, and are having constant meltdowns, but are in general smart and capable enough. They would probably do just fine in a school that wasn't forcing "transitions" every half hour or so. But their parents probably can't drive then anywhere, so the public pays a bunch of money for counselors and social workers to try to get them to put up with the environment instead.
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I am neither a parent nor a teacher. I know parents whose children have sound reasons for their IEPs, and sometimes teachers weren't responsive to their childrens' legitimate needs without them. But those same parents often make light of teachers' reasonable concerns. The whole thing strikes me as an awful, dehumanizing, bureaucratic kludge for everybody involved.
I'd be interested to read about your experiences.
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