The Department of Education changes size and focus
Here’s the story from Professor William Jacobson at Legal Insurrection:
That political change includes plans to scale-down the U.S. Department of Education. Not truly to “eliminate” it, which would require an act of Congress, but to eliminate the leftist-NGO funding and woke education mandates, and to send most of its functions back to the states. I wondered aloud in recent posts what would become of the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) through which we [Legal Insurrection’s Equal Protection Project] have filed so many complaints.
Although Trump’s executive order regarding the Department of Education does refer to closing it, it actually – according to Professor Jacobson – is “more like putting the [DoEd] on a crash diet.”
So DoEd will retain some spending and assistance program funding, as much of its current burden cannot be fully eliminated or offloaded Significantly, the remaining spending must be monitored to make sure that “any program or activity receiving Federal assistance” elimiates DEI discrimination and simlar agendas.
Will this hold up? Once again, time will tell.
NO. An activist Dem judge will try to stop it. Some say this will go on until the SC weighs in. But I don’t trust Roberts. If Trump is overruled, the US is Dead, Done and Dusted.
In the case of the Department of Education, as well as every other move Donald Trump has made using his power under Article 2, people would do well to read “The Art of the Deal.” It’s 38 years old and it only covers his rise from helping his father build low-income housing in the outer boroughs to building skyscrapers in Manhattan, but many of the facets of Trump’s personality now are in the book where he tells stories that are 40 to 50 years old.
What stands out the most is his lack of fear when it comes to lawsuits. He always hired good lawyers to defend him or to attack when necessary. One thing he says that stands out is, “I never felt it was necessary to back down, especially when I thought I was right.”
The President understands that court cases and appeals take time, and that he is still free to act on other things as it does. And he is relentless. If he is blocked in one way, he will try to find another way to do what he wants. He is always using the law and its processes; he’s not being used by it.
I’m not concerned. These cases will get to the Supreme Court sooner or later and his powers under Article 2 will be confirmed.
I am concerned about what the left will do when that happens. That’s probably when the violence will begin in earnest.
The survey research the Department of Education does could be done just as well by the Department of Labor. Any consumer protection function performed by the Department could be transferred to the Federal Trade Commission. Almost nothing else the Department does is salutary. If the Department has to continue to exist by statute, just leave it with the survey research function.
I agree with Michael Strand.
In the case of the Education Department, he is using executive authority to transfer and reduce things not specifically mandated by Congress. Most of this should stand up.
Unless the Dept of Ed is completely abolished by Trump, it will
re-emerge, bigger than ever, when the demonkrats are once again in charge.
Shrinking the size of the bureaucratic state will only be a temporary solution unless the many useless agencies are abolished.
Would Amy Conney Barrett just go with whatever Roberts decides? Not just with this case, but more broadly regarding all the Lefty Judges?
Even temporarily shutting down some of the Department of Education is worthwhile, because all the leeches sucking money from it have to find something else to pay the bills while it’s down. The next time Democrats get elected, if they bring it back up, that ecosystem has to re-establish itself over time.
In addition, laying off most of them would break the institutional culture that exists there. A new one would have to grow up and that takes time.
But all Trump has done is establish a breathing space; expecting him to fix everything is pointless. We need to expect more of the people in Congress who claim to be on his side, and ours, among many other things we need to do if we want real and lasting change.
“These cases will get to the Supreme Court sooner or later and his powers under Article 2 will be confirmed. ”
“Would Amy Conney Barrett just go with whatever Roberts decides? Not just with this case, but more broadly regarding all the Lefty Judges?”
I have lost confidence in SCOTUS in the last few months. That conservative majority seems to be flipping around. Roberts is never a sure bet, and something happened with Barrett. Having Art 2 powers confirmed by the court is no longer a sure thing.
Well having a psycho around her house and others threatening her sister might have some impact
I’m the rare non-lib/regressive social worker who works in SPED. Basically I’m one of the service providers within SPED. Personally, I’m all for making the DoE lean and more efficient. but I am worried about how states will use the spending on SPED positions, be it service providers or Title 1 positions, paraprofessionals, and ELL positions.
If Trump’s cutting affects state SPED negatively then that will leave a very bitter taste in my mouth. In general we aren’t paid enough for the work we do. Cut out the dumb Woke curriculum and material; cut out the dumb Diversity positions, but don’t touch SPED because that’s one thing that actually makes US education truly progressive in comparison to the rest of the world. If Trump is going to touch SPED then he should advocate for a budget that increases salary for people like me, more resources for those with severe learning disabilities and whatnot, and in general just make the already existing framework stronger and better.
I think I heard Trump say the special education needs will be supervised/funded by HHS. Didn’t say anything about eliminating it.
@GRA:If Trump is going to touch SPED then he should advocate for a budget that increases salary for people like me, more resources for those with severe learning disabilities and whatnot, and in general just make the already existing framework stronger and better.
Tax money comes from the people, not from the Federal government. Your state’s taxpayers can pay for their own SPED if they choose to make that a priority. There is no reason why SPED or anything else education-related needs to be a Federal issue.
The funding is just a dance: the Federal government collects money from everyone in the country, does a dance, and doles it back out a year later. Why not let the money stay where it came from? There’s not a magic pot of Federal money.
I heard Trump say the special education needs will be supervised/funded by HHS.
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You know, state governments can make revenue sharing grants to local school districts, with the share of the global distribution due each school district determined by a formula – directly correlated with district population and the ratio of school age youth to the remainder of the population, inversely correlated with district per capita income. To the grant, which might account for a quarter of a district’s expenses on average would be local property tax revenue &c. The districts can provide common-and-garden schooling and be assembled into consortia to provide English immersion programs, high-overhead schooling for youths with severe deficits, secondary vocational-technical schooling, and operate community and technical colleges. Behavioral incorrigibles can be remanded to day detention centers run by local sheriff’s departments. The consortial programs would be run by boards made up of delegates from member district boards and proceed by weighted voting. Their fixed costs can be financed by a per capita assessment on each member district and the variable costs by capitations assessed on each district for each student therefrom who enrolls (FTE). Quality control could be maintained by state regents’ examinations administered by proctors employed by the board, not local schools.
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Please note that state and territorial governments could be partially financed by a revenue sharing grant from the federal government accounting for about 15% of state and local expenditure on average, with each state’s share positively correlated with resident population and inversely associated with per capita income. You don’t need a Department of Education to administer that. Just have the Treasury cut 56 checks.
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The utility of federal involvement in such matters is nil for all but some niche clients. The niche clients would be the children of civilian government employees posted abroad, military dependents, residents of the low census insular dependencies, reservation Indians, and the dependents of those in itinerant occupations.
Well, yes, states could more easily fund special education if they’d drop all the
DEI and SEL stuff and focus on teaching basics well.
I get the impression that Team Trump has gamed out a lot of the legal Democrat counters to the Trump agenda.
Such as not eliminating DOE but scaling it back severely.
>states could more easily fund special education if they’d drop all the
DEI and SEL stuff and focus on teaching basics well.
DEI, yes, drop that. SEL is what I teach. Not sure what you mean by “focusing on the basics” as if you have a clue on what is actually being taught. Primary? High school? SEL isn’t the boogeyman many non-progs
think it is.
I honestly don’t think when non-progs talk about SEL in a critical way, as you did Kate (are you a non-prog? I don’t know) they have the faintest clue on what they’re talking about.
Here are two SEL curriculums that have been used in my school: https://www.secondstep.org/
I’m currently teaching this to 1st graders: https://zonesofregulation.com/
I honestly don’t think when non-progs talk about SEL in a critical way, as you did Kate (are you a non-prog? I don’t know) they have the faintest clue on what they’re talking about.
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No, but if they follow your links, they’ll get the impression that the remit of the schools has now expanded to include psychotherapy delivered by the issue of teachers’ colleges. Which is rather disturbing.
Teaching “the basics” is no mystery, and many other countries do so very effectively for far less per student than we put into it…. we have the best universities in the world and the worst K-12 of any OECD nation, and the mismatch in expectations is large, but narrowing: Harvard is offering remedial math this year.
New York is ditching the Regents exam too.
But other countries fail students low-performing students out and track them in a way that if done here, would be a civil rights violation.
@ Art Deco: Then their impression would be wrong given the curriculums shown in the links posted aren’t a form of psychotherapy.
“Which is rather disturbing.”
Yes, it is disturbing when people talk about things they aren’t familiar with with confidence simply because like minded people don’t like X and Y so therefore X and Y must be bad and need to go. You see, even non-progs have their biases, misconceptions and blind spots.
My district received extra funding. These funds will be used towards math programs in the form of morning tutoring and, you guessed it, SEL. This has allowed me and another social worker to teach the curriculum I linked. It will also fund the training of our 1st and 4th grade teachers so they too can teach the curriculum in their classroom in specific blocks.
Yes, it is disturbing when people talk about things they aren’t familiar with with confidence simply because like minded people don’t like X and Y so therefore X and Y must be bad and need to go. You see, even non-progs have their biases, misconceptions and blind spots.
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Or, you’re on the payroll and you think pulling rank is an effective rhetorical strategy.
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The links (and others) are to people in your stable making the case for what they do all day. They’re not getting the job done, unless they wish to persuade people that they’re purveyors of mission creep, the appropriation of parental roles, and / or the latest fad out of the teachers’ colleges.
For the state DOE experiments to work as a laboratory of the states, there also needs to be reliable metrics captured and documented by somebody independent of the “suppliers”. Is that done in the private sector now? [I don’t know.] Can the results from the current processes be trusted as valid for comparison purposes? Given the major impact of the “teachers” unions looking out for themselves, is there any other education related NGO that can be trusted to promote better/ best practices to other states once the data is in?
The core argument against the federal/national DOE is that after spending X $T over 50 years the student performance has not improved, but declined substantially, per those assessment metrics. That should be justification enough to remove that department. But can those former employees also be trusted to then join state level DOE’s in some capacity and not corrupt them further at that level? Increased local attention should reduce bad behavior but not all states are doing well [I believe at one time both MA and CA had top reputations but might now be nearer the middle or bottom?]
>Or, you’re on the payroll and you think pulling rank is an effective rhetorical strategy.
I do have experience in what I talk about. I don’t think you do – you talk from a distance thinking you know because you have it against teachers’ colleges. If I’m pulling rank then you’re just talking to hear yourself talk. But I’ll give you credit – you may bring up a decent point every now and then when you rant against education, but for the most part, especially here, you’re way out of your depth.
>The links (and others) are to people in your stable making the case for what they do all day.
That’s what everyone does with their job – or whatever they care about – regardless of what they do or what they care for. You don’t have much of an argument.
There’s an argument for every job that has existed or currently exists, whether that job is privately or state funded.
>They’re not getting the job done,
How do you know that? You don’t know what’s happening in the classrooms, so your view is just based you speculating on ignorance and a sort of vengeance.
>unless they wish to persuade people that they’re purveyors of mission creep, the appropriation of parental roles, and / or the latest fad out of the teachers’ colleges.
Unfortunately many parents fail these days at being sound, though flawed, individuals. You’re thinking of the ideal world. We do not live in an ideal world. What I do when I enter the 1st grade classrooms, and what SEL tries to aim for in general, can also be done even in a community where a parent, or parents, provide a safe home and food on the table for their kid. And where I live teachers’ colleges don’t do whatever you think they do, at least not a good chunk of the program.