Skip to main content

In regard to the Department of Education

 From the Dispatch, March 14, 2025:

Despite being associated more with K-12 education, a far greater share of the department’s resources go toward higher education. The Education Department is charged with administering student loans and distributing the Pell Grant, which awards low- and middle-income students up to $7,400 per year toward college tuition. The former is by far its largest role: The department oversees $1.5 trillion in student loan debt for more than 40 million people—a job that required about one-third of its workforce prior to the administration’s cuts. 

“The Department of Education is basically a mega bank with a small K-12 policy shop attached,” Frederick M. Hess, the director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, told TMD. “Far and away, the biggest part of what it does is handle financial aid for folks going to college.”

The cash that is distributed to K-12 schools through the Department of Education is primarily via two main programs: Title I and the Individuals with Disabilities Act. The former provides supplementary funding to low-income districts, while the latter ensures that students with disabilities can access education. Smaller directives include funding charter schools and initiatives focused on teacher quality and class size reduction.

But despite generally making up a small percentage of public schools’ overall budgets, the federal funding has allowed Washington to exert influence over curricula. Beginning in 1994, the Education Department began using funds to pressure states to adopt uniform standards and testing in math, reading, and science. This strategy culminated in the 2009 creation of Race to the Top, a $4.35 billion grant program that encouraged states to use the controversial Common Core Standards and accompanying tests.

This truth is known to those of us in higher ed--a dirty little secret, I would say--but not most other citizens. It seems that the duties could be placed into other departments, such as Health and Human Services. 

I don't have a strong feeling about the issue of "saving" or "destroying" the Department of Education; putting a woman known as the leader of professional wrestling seems pretty weird. At least Betsy DeVos had a background in education, even if mostly private. But let's not mourn that so many children will be affected and uneducated. Public Education is doing a terrible job overall of getting our children where they should be with literacy and numeracy skills, to say nothing of critical thinking and general knowledge.  Local control, with of course guarantees for non-discrimination, couldn't hurt because P.Ed. is already mostly under local control--of bureaucrats, unions, and interest groups. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

January 26, 2025: Joseph Campbell's view of things

  A colleague sent me this quote the other day. He said that it had really helped him through life and as he faced changes and retirement, and it also helped him follow his bliss and find what he really wanted to do.  “The problem in middle life, when the body has reached its climax of power and begins to decline, is to identify yourself, not with the body, which is falling away, but with the consciousness of which it is a vehicle. This is something I learned from myths. What am I? Am I the bulb that carries the light? Or am I the light of which the bulb is a vehicle? One of the psychological problems in growing old is the fear of death. People resist the door of death. But this body is a vehicle of consciousness, and if you can identify with the consciousness, you can watch this body go like an old car. There goes the fender, there goes the tire, one thing after another— but it’s predictable. And then, gradually, the whole thing drops off, and consciousness rejoins consciousn...
Post a Comment
Read more

Why to Read Fiction, Idea #27: Empathy, anyone?

The Idea #27 is tongue in cheek.  But these are some ideas about writing fiction, which I have done in ten novels (and counting), a dozen short stories, and two produced plays (I know, not exactly the same).  Background: In 2015 a colleague and I wrote an open educational resource public speaking textbook for a grant provided by our University System. We didn't realize at the time that it would go viral and be used all over the world within a few years. There are two reasons for that: it is good (as good as anything on the market) and it is free, although only in digital form. Check out www.exploringpublicspeaking.com for it. We also didn't know at the time that my co-author would die at 39 in 2016. I still miss him. Back to the point, I receive requests for the test banks every other day, and this morning I received one from Pennsylvania. The writer had a signature line: "Reading fiction is important. It is a vital means of imagining a life other than our own, which in t...
Post a Comment
Read more

Starting Over

We are ridiculously dependent on information technology.  I found that out two weeks ago when my MAC of ten years went inoperative. "Crashed." "Died."  Fortunately, some smart technicians were able to salvage my files; I should call them my life, my work, my creativity.  But I did lose my passwords. Specifically, I lost the password to my two blogs, which I have not posted to since the crash.   My first blog, partsofspeaking.blogspot.com had been in operation since 2006. It had almost 3000 posts on it.  Fortunately, I can still get to them. The whole world can. The fact that I can't get into edit or post it any longer means I also can't take it down. It is going to be there as long as Google Blogger will be. If anything there would get me in trouble, well, I'll have to live with that.  The second one, highereducationobserver.blogspot.com, is where I wrote about my professional expertise as a department chair. It reflected more research. In both blogs, ...
Post a Comment
Read more