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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 think the idea that the states won’t ever do their own work in some form or fashion is false. And this is the entire premise of DOGE — much of what the federal government is doing is not something it should be doing, and in fact so much of it has not only not helped, but has caused real harm. We have a Department of Education that not only doesn’t educate our kids, but wastes our money basically standing in the way of kids learning the very basic concepts they need to understand their world. They’ve been pushing to waste limited class time on woke propaganda, and have pushed “trendy” schemes on schools that simply do not work. They spend billions of dollars to basically stand in the way of kids trying to get an education. Worse, they destroy the potential of those few kids who are thriving in schools by forcing them to learn at the pace of the slowest kids in the class.
Turning education back over to the states has some advantages. Because the department is smaller, it simply doesn’t have the funds to mandate weird trendy ideas of education. They need to have programs that work well and work cheaply. No more sight words and guessing based on pictures, instead learn phonics and sound out the words. No more new mathematical trends, use the stuff that has worked for generations. Furthermore, because the state is much closer to the people, it’s not going to be able to get away with pushing propaganda that’s wildly out of step with what the citizens of that state believe, if they do so at all. The citizens of Oklahoma want bibles in their kiss’s schools, they voted for that. The people of California would push a more liberal ideology. This is how federalism is supposed to work. States are smaller and much easier to bring to heel by the voting population.
What's wrong with sight words?
I have a kindergarten age child. I am mostly happy with what she is learning in school, including some new math stuff and sight words.
The main reason I'm happy is that many of the concepts they teach are how I eventually learned to do things. But I learned them on my own after years of struggling to do it the "right" way and not making much progress.
Words like "the" simply don't make sense to "sound it out". In a logical phonetic alphabet, "th" would be a separate letter altogether since it represents a unique sound. So just teach it as a sight word, and memorize what those three letters together mean.
I don't have a specific example in mind with the math stuff, but it seemed similar when I went and looked at new math content. It's often teaching the shorthand that I had to figure out myself. The way they encouraged my generation to figure it out was to literally bury us in math problems. You either figured it out and math became easy, or you were labelled a 'struggling' student with potential ADHD because you didn't want to spend hours a day doing math problems the hard and slow way.
I do agree with your main point that the department of education sucks. I just think you would have seen adoption of some of these new teaching techniques without the department, since some of them are good.
My mom was an elementary school teacher, and her general experience was that you can teach bright kids all sorts of ways, and it will mostly work out eventually.
On the other hand, there are a lot of slower kids who will struggle to learn but who can, eventually, pick things up via rote learning like phonics. It's slow and perhaps not fun, but they can do it eventually. But a lot of other methods of instruction (which are often supposed to avoid beating the joy of learning out of students the way rote learning theoretically does) often end up just failing complete with slower students, because the cognitive machinery simply isn't there. And while learning phonics might not be fun, being illiterate for the rest of your life is way, way less fun.
All of this is vexing if you happen to be a bright kid who struggled through boring methods of instruction, because you probably were ill-served by that kind of instruction. And you probably would have done better (and maybe we all would have benefited, for that matter!) with personal instruction that could lean into your natural capacities. School actually really does suck for lots of bright kids.
But there really is a serious problem with Ed schools producing all sorts of novel instructional methods based on blank slate ideology and theoretically serving the moral goal of equity and anti-racism that, in practice, just hurt the students they're supposed to help because their (highly ideological) diagnosis of the problem starts wrong and then stays wrong. And all the rest of us are externalities to that process.
When I first heard about this debate over teaching methods, I asked my parents how I learned to read, because I couldn't remember anything other than some frustration when I first went to school that some of my classmates didn't know the alphabet yet. Apparently they read to me but made no other effort to instruct me on the subject, and one day I just started reading the books back to them, having either figured it out on my own or having committed them to memory was simply miming the action of looking at and turning the pages. Which is to say, I still have no idea how I learned to read.
Same. My parents also recalled I had a fascination with signs, especially road signs and exit signs.
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I think we’re largely on the same page. I honestly think that most o& the trends end up hurting the below average kids. And when adding in the reduced instruction time to make room for The Narrative, those kids are toast. A smart kid can learn on his own so taking away class time for LGBTQ stuff or Black History or whatever isn’t a big deal. If you have a kid who’s falling behind, he needs every second of help he can get.
Although to be honest, I think most of the problem of education is that we don’t track kids as many other developed countries do. Every kid is put on the college bound track unless he specifically wants off, and the culture pushes college to an absurd degree meaning that unless they’re introduced to other tracks, the current will carry them to university and they won’t be able to keep up. If you track kids, not only can you tailor the methods o& instruction to what best serves that group of students, but you can make sure that they end up with skills they can use to support themselves.
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