Let’s start today’s column with this reminder from John Stossel that federal involvement in education has produced bad outcomes and that the Department of Education should be abolished.
The good news is that President Trump does not like that bureaucracy.
After all, we’ve learned over the years that pouring more money into bad K-12 schools doesn’t work. And we’ve also learned that subsidies for higher education simply result in colleges charging higher tuition to finance bureaucratic bloat.
Here’s some more good news. President Trump’s Secretary of Education, Linda McMahon, wants to help shut down her department.
Here are some excerpts from a column of hers in USA Today.
The 43-day shutdown, which came smack in the middle of the fall semester, showed every family how unnecessary the federal education bureaucracy is to their children’s education. Students kept going to class. Teachers continued to get paid. There were no disruptions in sports seasons or bus routes. The shutdown proved an argument that conservatives have been making for 45 years: The U.S. Department of Education is mostly a pass-through for funds that are best managed by the states. …education is best managed by the educators and leaders closest to families, because I have witnessed innovative schools and outstanding educators delivering for students across the country. …Conservatives have wanted to rein in the Department of Education since the day it was created by President Jimmy Carter in 1979 and began operating in 1980. They rightfully feared the federal encroachment on a distinctly states’ rights issue. Fast-forward 45 years, and our students are still paying for this failed experiment – students can’t read proficiently, America’s test scores are behind the world in math and science, and college graduates are drowning in debt.
This sounds great.
But then you read the fine print and discover that the Trump Administration is basically proposing to keep all the spending but shift it to other bureaucracies.
Here are some passages from a report for the Washington Post by Laura Meckler and Danielle Douglas-Gabriel.
The Education Department said Tuesday that it will move several of its offices to other federal departments, a unilateral effortaimed at dismantlingan agency…long derided by conservatives as ineffective. The department has signed interagency agreements to outsource six programs to other agencies, including offices that administer $28 billion in grants to K-12 schools and $3.1 billion for programs that help students finish college. …President Donald Trump campaigned on a promise to shut down the agency, created in 1979, and in March, he signed an executive order seeking its elimination. …Shifting offices to other parts of the government will not by itself remove red tape or alterthe power that Washington exerts over states and school districts. …officials are hoping that the transfers will lay the groundwork for ultimately closing the agency altogether. …The agency has taken other steps to shrink itself, including reducing its staff, which stood at 4,133 at the start of Trump’s term. That number was cut by about half this year through layoffs and incentives to resign or retire.
At the risk of being a contrarian, I don’t think it is progress to move programs from one bureaucracy to another.
That being said, there has been some progress under Trump. While the “interagency agreements to outsource six programs” is merely redrawing the federal flowchart, the part of the Post report that excited me was that the Department of Education bureaucracy “was cut by about half this year.”
And it’s good that Ms. McMahon is undermining her own department, as illustrated by this tweet.
The bottom line is that this is an area where Trump is trying to move policy in the right direction. He’s not doing exactly what I want, but at least the bureaucrats and the teacher unions are on the defensive.
