McCluskey: Neither glee nor gloom in ending the education department
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Neal McCluskey
Photo by Richie Downs for the Cato Institute
By Neal McCluskey | Director, Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom
The presidential election has brought back a topic that always seems to need more momentum to succeed but always has enough support to stick around: ending the Department of Education. Why has it stayed in political purgatory? While there are good reasons to end the department, there is no huge benefit if the programs it administers remain.
Unfortunately, we cannot discuss eliminating the department (typically shortened to “ED”) because the suggestion elicits claims of doom, as if ED were the nation’s primary educator. In other words, kill the department, and you threaten education itself.
That is at odds with basic facts.
ED has existed since 1980, while American public schooling draws its origins to at least 1837, the start of Horace Mann’s “common schooling” crusade as the first secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education. Education was widespread before that because parents recognized the value of educating their children.
Federal intervention in education also predates the birth of ED, though essentially dating only to 1960s “Great Society” laws and programs, including Head Start, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, and the Higher Education Act. Why so long before such involvement? Because it was widely recognized that the U.S. Constitution gave Washington no authority to govern education. It was an area reserved for the states and people.
Education has not needed the department, as even former American Federation of Teachers president Albert Shanker argued when it was being debated.
As long as it has been involved in K-12 education, the federal government has been by far the smallest of the three major public schooling funders. On average, since the 1969-70 school year, it has provided only 8.5% of all public-school revenues.
That said, Washington has leveraged those relatively small funds to take control of education. The No Child Left Behind Act, operative from 2002 to 2015, forced states to have uniform standards and tests in math and reading and punished schools that failed to make “adequate yearly progress” toward full proficiency in those subjects.
ED also drove a national curriculum. In 2009, it coerced states to adopt the Common Core standards and aligned tests and evaluate teachers on them. By 2015, people on the left and right declared that they had had enough micromanagement and reduction of education to math and reading scores. NCLB was replaced by the Every Student Succeeds Act.
However, we need federal money to fund lower-income districts fairly, right?
Federal funding tends to go to lower-income districts, but that frees states and districts from spending as much of their own money. Meanwhile, there has been significant success in increasing support for lower-income districts with state-level “adequacy” litigation. It is not necessary to violate the Constitution, threaten ham-fisted federal control of K-12 education, and exacerbate the already draining national debt to push equalized funding.
ED’s effect on higher education has arguably been worse than in K-12 education.
Over the last few years, we have seen bountiful evidence of the department’s failure in running student loans, including poor record-keeping of loan repayments and bungling simplification of the Free Application for Federal Student Aid. Last school year, the latter left students in the dark about their financing far into the time when aid and enrollment decisions should have been made. Delays are on the horizon this year, too.
Far from being a disaster, ending the Education Department and moving student lending to, say, the Treasury Department would almost certainly be an improvement.
That said, ending the department but keeping its programs would not significantly improve education.
More effectively run student aid programs would likely save some taxpayer money and make life easier for students and colleges. However, we still have the vast student-aid problem: it fuels tuition inflation. Fixing that will require downsizing federal lending, including ending notorious debt-generating Graduate and Parent PLUS loans.
Similarly, there is little evidence that federal K-12 funding markedly improves K-12 education. This is especially true absent rules that connect funding to testing outcomes, which might reflect more focus on testing than deep learning.
End ED, but keep the spending, and little is likely to change.
It is time to end the unconstitutional, ineffectual Department of Education. But that alone would be only a modest improvement.
