SCOTUS okays Trump’s firings in the Department of Education
Another 6-3 win for Trump, along the usual lines. Its significance:
The Supreme Court cleared the way for the Education Department to fire hundreds of employees on Monday, a move that advances President Donald Trump’s plans to dismantle the department. …
The decision temporarily pauses an order by a lower court judge that had reinstated roughly 1,400 employees at the Education Department.
In March, Education Secretary Linda McMahon laid off half of the department’s workforce as part of the Trump administration’s broader reduction in force efforts. Later that month, Trump announced in an executive order that he planned to shutter the department altogether. …
The plaintiffs argued to the high court that the Trump administration’s “record abundantly reveals” that its “true intention is to effectively dismantle the Department without an authorizing statute.”
The Trump administration responded that the layoffs did not prove the department was being shuttered and that the department plans to carry out its legally required functions. Congress would need to approve a full shutdown of the department’s functions.
So the injunction to stop the firings – and the dissent by the three liberal female justices in support of the injunction – is one of those “we know what Trump intends so we will stop him before he does it” decisions. The firings were perfectly legal but the left says they were preliminary to shutting the department down entirely, which Trump has said he plans to do. Of course, he also says he will do it through Congress, which is legal. It’s not been shuttered yet, so the dissent is absurd.
The Department of Education, however, is one of the left’s biggest beneficiaries and one of their most effective propaganda tools. No wonder they would and will do almost anything to keep the money flowing to it.
Wouldn’t it be great if Trump gets opportunity to appoint another Supreme?
Have seven un-biased instead of six.
If those employees average $25.00 an hour, it is a 72,800,000 a year savings.
“The Systematic Unraveling Of The Administrative State”—
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/systematic-unraveling-administrative-state
@fullmoon:If those employees average $25.00 an hour
Oh you sweet summer child. In 2020 Department of Education spent about $500 million on salaries and $160 million on benefits for 3800 FTE, which averages $60 / hr (or about $130K annually) in salaries and $20 / hr ($40 K annually) in benefits.
You can look at Glassdoor too. OpenPayrolls has a similar estimate but more up to date:
If their average (about $54 / hr) is counting over employee numbers and not FTE then they’re going to get a different average, of course, because not everyone there is full time.
The benefit here is not the money saved, this is doing nothing for our unsustainable spending trajectory, but getting rid of the personnel who are Democrat lifers makes all sorts of changes easier later.
As we watch Democratic Party judges trying THEIR very best to hogtie Trump and Jerome Powell doing HIS best to kneecap him—with the corrupt Media constantly yapping their total agreement with such “Democratic” tactics—the following should come as no surprise:
“Democratic insider admits to praying for an economic depression as party’s popularity continues to plummet”—
https://www.foxnews.com/media/democratic-insider-admits-praying-economic-depression-partys-popularity-continues-plummet
In fact, it should be entirely expected.
File under: If we have to trash the place to stay in the running then scorched earth it will have to be. Trump’s fault, of course, not ours—we LOVE this country…
“…we LOVE this country…”, continued….
“…The Democrats’ Big Tentifada.”—
https://instapundit.com/732068/
Key “WOW!” moment:
fullmoon, I have elsewhere said I wish Thomas would retire now. It would give Trump a chance to appoint whom he wants. After next yr, Congress may be Dem.
I like Thomas, do not wish him ill, but now would be a good time.
It would be great for POTUS Trump to get another bite of the SCOTUS apple; or two if one of the verified lefties could move out.
I wish that Trump would repurpose Ed to track all social media posts of all college professors, and develop viewpoint diversity indices. Objectivity,
Then also define non-partisan as 30% Dem & 30% Rep, at least, for colleges to be able to claim tax exemption status. (Registered 2024 or earlier).
The US needs more Rep professors. Quotas work. Not perfectly, but better than anything else—that’s why Harvard used them to illegally discriminate against whites & Asians.
In the meantime, a lot of taxes will be paid by the colleges until they get a LOT more Reps, including NeverTrumpers like Liz Cheney, far better than most Dems.
The Department of Education has about one satisfactory function: it collects data and publishes statistical compilations. This could be done by some other department.
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Regulating interstate transactions in educational services could be done by the Federal Trade Commission, by some new stand-alone agency or by a new Department (to which the FTC was appended) whose mission was to regulate producer-to-producer and producer-to-vendor transactions occurring across state lines (with the object of fighting collusion among producers and fighting rip-offs).
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Providing and financing primary and secondary schooling could be left to state, territorial, and local governments bar for certain niche clientele. The niche clientele could be provided for by other departments. The State Department and Defense department could provide for the children of civilian employees posted abroad, the Defense department could provide for military dependents (here and abroad), the Bureau of Indian Education could provide for the reservation population, inter-state compacts could provide for youths in low census territories who would benefit from specialized courses of study, etc.
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Federal provision of tertiary schooling is properly limited to training academies for the military and the civil service and franchise-type programs like ROTC. Again, you have the State Department, the Defense Department, other departments to operate such academies for their personnel. and the Office of Personnel Management.
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Federal financing of tertiary schooling is properly limited to veterans, to federal employees for staff development, and to a subset of the niche clientele noted above. This could be implemented by distributing vouchers which could be used for specified purposes and which the school could present to the Treasury for redemption. The distribution of said vouchers could be by the VA, the Office of Personnel Management &c. Providing such financing to students is properly a function of state governments.
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If the federal government owns real estate in a given locality and the locality has a compliant system of tax assessment and appeal, the federal government should pay property taxes to said localities. These disbursements to school districts would be part of their general revenues, and not generate obligations for schools. The compliance cost here would be in reconfiguring your property tax system to be compliant. Certifying a locality as having a compliant system could be done by the General Services Administration.
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Ideally, the federal government would distribute an unrestricted grant to state and territorial governments with the value of each grant positively correlated with population and employee compensation per worker in a jurisdiction and inversely correlated with per capita income. Mississippi’s per capita grant is comparatively large, New York’s is comparatively small, and Connecticut gets nothing. You supplement this with episodic disaster relief for local government and (now and again) state government and that’s it.
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WRT higher education, institutions might be eligible to submit bids as federal contractors, to receive re-imbursement for services for which the federal government is an insurer (e.g. university medical centers who serve Medicaid and Medicare patients), and to receive disaster relief. Otherwise they get nothing.
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If our institutions and practices are rightly ordered, there is no use for a federal department of education. The regulatory function (located in a department which regulates providers generally) might be deployed toward salutary ends.
One would be hard pressed to find an academic major as useless as a degree in education.
Those hired as teachers should be required to have a real major – math, foreign language , history, science, English literature , etc.
How ironic is it that the most (almost all?) “professor’s” of education have never been in a classroom as a teacher.
And here they are, presumably teaching others how to teach.
Unbelievable.
As for increasing education budgets; well, most of the $$$ goes to teacher salaries and benefits. If a lousy teacher (and we, when students, all have had several) gets a raise in salary, it will not make him or her a better teacher; it will just provide an incompetent teacher a bigger salary.
Take a gander at per pupil spending in the USA and you will find there is little correlation between spending per pupil vs. educational outcomes.
The US dept of education has been a total failure and has served only to impose a nightmare of wasteful and useless bureaucratic demands upon school districts that do not help students nor teachers in any way.
Eliminating the DOE can not occur fast enough.
One would be hard pressed to find an academic major as useless as a degree in education.
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Robin diAngelo is an ‘education professor’ at a state college near Springfield, Massachusetts. Her published work indicates she knows nothing of any academic subject, nothing about the psychology of learning, and nothing about teaching methods.
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Teachers used to prepare in two year normal schools. I may be mistaken, but I think these emphasized hands-on training by working teachers. In the 1920s, these were replaced with baccalaureate programs in teacher’s colleges which favored classroom education supplemented with arts-and-sciences courses. The rap on ‘schools of education’ forty years ago was that they were purveyors of gut courses shot through with mush, filler, and promotion of loopy educational theories. In the last generation, they’ve become loci for the promotion of rancid social ideologies. Blow it all up.
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I think a certificate program wherein they took courses in teaching methods, educational testing, and order maintenance and then had an internship and stipended apprenticeship would be of use. Posit a training school which had about eight different certificate programs – (general elementary teacher, academic secondary teacher, vocational secondary teacher, arts-and-crafts teacher, music teacher, ‘special education’ teacher, ‘ESOL’ teacher, and athletic coach). Each would have a signature set of pre-requisites, a signature course list, and be placed with a state-certified master teacher who worked in their subject area. All aspirants would have to take a screening examination. That would be a sufficient pre-requisite for a general elementary teacher or a special education teacher, while for the others you’d have to have course preparation in discrete subjects and / or pass specialized examinations. Posit elementary teachers could enhance their certificate by taking examinations in history / geography / civics or examinations in the natural sciences, for which the teachers college would offer preparatory courses. Your side-subjects teachers could enhance their certificate with a second year of apprenticeship, taking one year in an elementary setting and one in a secondary setting. Academic secondary or vocational secondary teachers could enhance theirs by following courses of study or apprenticeship programs in a another discipline.
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Miscellaneous school employees could be trained in programs specific to function (business programs for the bursar, nursing programs, trades for the custodian, &c). School psychologists might be trained in schools of occupational psychology. Deans, vice principals, and principals might obtain certificates or degrees occupational psychology programs and / or schools devoted to public and philanthropic administration. The psychology of learning and the operations of schools might be the subject of research degrees, but in arts-and-sciences faculties, not ‘schools of education’ (psychology, history, sociology, political science, perhaps economics).
As for increasing education budgets; well, most of the $$$ goes to teacher salaries and benefits. If a lousy teacher (and we, when students, all have had several) gets a raise in salary, it will not make him or her a better teacher; it will just provide an incompetent teacher a bigger salary.
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IMO, teachers should receive a stated compensation, with fringes and retirement accounts financed out of levies on that stated compensation. Defined-contribution plans should be the order of the day in the public sector, as they are now in the private sector. Certain categories of public sector employee – the military, uniformed police, firefighters and other hands-on protective services workers, manual construction workers – should be earning early-retirement credits and have more of their compensation deferred. Others should be expected to retire at an ordinary age. (The median retirement age for school teachers is currently 59.0 years). As a rule, employee compensation per worker in governments should resemble that in the surrounding society. That in autonomous and self-supporting government corporations should resemble that in private sector institutions in that sector. In local government, your enhanced compensation for protective service employees and the building trades should be financed out of a corresponding reduction in the compensation of other sorts of employee. In regard to schoolteachers, you’d have a standard compensation plan. Teachers of certain subjects (i.e. chemistry) would have an enhancement taking account of market conditions. Master teachers who train other teachers would have an enhancement. Teaching department heads would have an enhancement. Administrators would receive the low end of the managerial scale, &c.
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One problem you get with ‘merit pay’ is that effective teaching can be observed and recognized, but it’s quite challenging to design satisfying operational measures of competence. Another is that public employees tend to be satisficers who have a weak response to incentives. My aunt was for 30 years a science teacher in Fairfax County, Va. When my mother complained about across-the-board raises, she told her that what merit pay plans and the like would do would be to act as kindling for office politics and back biting. I have a dear cousin who was an elementary teacher in Duchess County NY for shy of 30 years; she can tell you some stories about the office politics as is. Principals should have a free hand to fire the cr!p teachers and sequester the trouble-makers in the student body. The state board of regents should be sending out proctors to administer standardized tests to all students and produce league tables from those tests. You can also eliminate school-issued diplomas in favor of state-issued certificates derived from performance on examinations. Other than that, I don’t know that there’s much you can do to improve effectiveness in school.
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While we’re at it, unions in the public sector should function as mutual aid societies to provide services to members. You should never have collective bargaining in the public sector.
Not tired of winning yet
“If you can’t do, teach.”
If you can’t teach, teach others how to teach.
Excellent.
Arnold Kling has links & comments about edu orgs & teaching & learning.
https://arnoldkling.substack.com/p/conformity-and-education
In Ed, as in most things, people want the results of hard work, without doing the work. All involved, teachers, students, administrators, even parents. They say the want high standards, but don’t want to work for achieving them.
Reducing Fed student loans is a bigger long term problem, but it involves some 46 million students with loans, most of whom vote.
Arnold Kling has links & comments about edu orgs & teaching & learning.
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Not buying anything he says.