In announcing his nomination of wrestling magnate and former Small Business Administration director Linda McMahon as the next secretary of education, President Trump promised yet again to eliminate the U.S. Department of Education. One big question is whether this dynamic duo could actually make it happen, and about that I remain extremely skeptical, given the need for congressional approval and the idea’s deep unpopularity, though perhaps Elon Musk will mutter abracadabra and find a way to get it done.
A more important question, though, is whether abolishing the agency—and its programs, policies, and regulations [1]—would actually make things better for America’s students. Or to put it differently: How much blame does the federal government deserve for the general mediocrity of America’s public schools?
It’s not crazy to think that Uncle Sam is at least somewhat to blame. We have a sprawling, continental system governed by fifty states and 14,000 districts, yet the on-the-ground reality in schools and classrooms is remarkably similar, and similarly lackluster, throughout the nation.[2][3] Is that because of some homogenizing force? And is that force the federal government?
My answer is: Yes, in part. But there are other forces that are much more powerful and harmful.
But let’s stay with the feds for a moment and consider how Uncle Sam is making it harder than it should be to run excellent schools. I can think of four big ways.
1. Federal programs encourage a compliance mindset that is anathema to excellence, experimentation, and improving student outcomes. Because of a history of financial shenanigans with federal money, big programs including Title I and IDEA come with strict spending requirements, rules around clear audit trails, limited “allowable uses,” and dictates about “supplementing, not supplanting” state and local spending. Bureaucrats at the federal, state, and local level know that they will get in much more trouble for running afoul of these rules (and their enforcer, the Office of the Inspector General) than for failing to improve academic results. They also learn to be risk averse.
2. Well-meaning but naïve policies meant to promote educational equity force schools to make compromises that aren’t always good for kids. I’m thinking especially about the long-standing special education law requiring students with disabilities to be placed in the least restrictive environment, regardless of the impact on their peers.
There’s a lot to love about this. As a public-school parent, I’m glad my kids get to go to school with children with disabilities, including kids with significant development delays. I sure don’t want to go back to a time when such children were systematically excluded. But in the real world of classrooms, this stuff can get complicated quickly. It’s especially problematic when we define most students who are violent or consistently disruptive as having a disability called “emotional disturbance” and then create protections for such kids that make it hard to keep their peers safe or to protect the learning environment.
3. A similar dynamic is in play when we analyze discipline disparities through a disparate-impact lens, as the Obama administration did, and tell schools they must reduce the rate of suspensions and expulsions of Black and Brown students, regardless of any disparities in underlying student misbehavior. Guess what: That can make schools more violent and less orderly.
4. Some of the requirements of the Every Student Succeeds act—holdovers from No Child Left Behind—pervert the way states evaluate the effectiveness of schools, which has negative consequences on classrooms. I’m especially thinking of the rule that states assess all kids on “grade-level content”—which sounds good but means that states can’t use fully computer-adaptive assessments because some students would answer questions well above or below grade level. This means that we end up getting less accurate measures of the skills of high- and low-achieving kids, which in turn makes our measures of student growth less accurate than they otherwise could or should be. It also discourages teachers from pinpointing instruction to kids at the high and low end of the achievement spectrum.
Fixing these four problems should be at the center of an effort to reform federal education policy. But note a couple things. First, there’s really not that much stuff I could come up with that’s making a real negative impact in our schools.[4] Most of what the federal government does in K–12 education is simply a waste of money (like myriad “competitive” grant programs that amount to pork for congressional districts) or is mildly helpful (like supporting research and collecting statistics, providing extra money for high poverty schools, or enforcing anti-discrimination laws).
Second, fixing these problems would take enormous political capital that President Trump seems unlikely to invest. Would a Secretary McMahon—and Congressional Republicans—really go after special-education law? Stand up to the equity advocates on discipline and “grade-level standards”? This stuff is hard!
If Uncle Sam isn’t the primary impediment to excellence, what is?
Even if Trump and McMahon crossed off some items on my federal-reform wish list, or abolished the department entirely, most of our education system’s problems would remain. And that’s because the forces that are doing the most damage would still be with us. And they are:
- Elected school boards that are easily captured by the teachers unions and other adult interests.
- The teachers unions themselves.
- The education schools that train our teachers, principals, and other administrators.
That’s what all public schools have in common. And that’s why we see such homogenization—and mediocrity—across the land.
Perhaps it’s not quite so bad in red America because the unions are weaker there. But even where there are teacher “associations” instead of “unions,” we see human capital policies that no organization in its right mind would embrace voluntarily. These include barriers to entry that are weakly related to on-the-job performance; ineffective supports for new teachers and principals; lifelong tenure after just a few years in the profession; pay systems that pretend that every school and subject area demands the same salary; and compensation systems heavily weighted toward health care and retiree benefits instead of starting salaries—in other words, what veteran and retired teachers value, instead of what potential rookie teachers might want.
And we see bad ideas flowing through our schools, like recent efforts to “reform grading” by never giving kids a zero, to “reform discipline” by, well, not disciplining students, to teach reading by not explicitly teaching reading, to teach American history as a story of the oppressors versus the oppressed, and on and on ad nauseam. Thank you ed schools for your contributions!
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Dismantle the Department of Education if you’d like. But don’t expect our schools to change much. If you want real transformation, fight the elected school boards, defang the unions, and create alternatives to the ed schools. If all of that is too hard (and it probably is), then put your money on the best work-around we’ve got: America’s charter schools sector, which is showing what public education can be with a different set of governance arrangements. A charter sector that, by the way, has benefited hugely from targeted federal grants!
[1] If they don’t eliminate its programs and policies, then it’s just an exercise in moving boxes around—a symbolic gesture that won’t have any real-world impact.
[2] Few would disagree, for example, that we generally do a terrible job supporting teachers or making them feel valued; or that we fail to invest in identifying and developing talent for our principal pipelines; or that we rarely help all students achieve their full academic potential; or that we consistently choose to spend our money on the wrong stuff, like more staff, instead of higher teacher salaries; or that our schools are quick to adopt all manner of dubious ideas coming out of academia.
[3] Sure, there are pockets of excellence, and yes, our schools are better than they once were, or at least they were making progress until the 2010s. But let’s stipulate that most traditional public schools are mediocre or worse.
[4] A different question is whether federal power could be used to improve our schools. We certainly gave that a try with No Child Left Behind and saw some gains thanks to accountability, but Congress and the public decided the juice was not worth the squeeze.
