Lindsey Burke
Subject: Dismantling the Department of Education
Bio: Director of the Center for Education Policy at the Heritage Foundation
Transcript:
Larry Bernstein:
Welcome to What Happens Next. My name is Larry Bernstein. What Happens Next is a podcast which covers economics, politics, and culture.
Today’s topic is Dismantling the Department of Education.
Our speaker is Lindsey Burke who is the Director of the Center for Education Policy at the Heritage Foundation. I will ask Lindsey about the implications of firing most of the workers in the Department of Education. And I want to know what is going to happen with the ongoing responsibilities for this department and how work that is statutorily required will be performed by other government agencies.
Lindsey, please begin with six minutes of opening remarks.
Lindsey Burke:
Thanks for having me, Larry. The Trump administration cut half of the staff at the agency, which was a huge step in the right direction, and there is a potential to see more. The onus now is on the proponents who want to maintain this federal agency to make their case because their track record has been one of utter failure.
Washington has been on this spending spree for decades. Inflation adjusted per pupil spending increased about 3.5% per year every year throughout the 20th century. From 1965, education spending per pupil has more than tripled in real terms. Since 1980, per pupil spending has more than doubled in real terms. Maybe we would not care about increased spending if it was having a positive effect on student academic outcomes, but it has not. Reading and math performance since Lyndon Johnson launched his war on poverty in ‘65 look unchanged.
It is true that the math and reading performance of the earlier ages has improved slightly of the 9-year-olds and the 13-year-olds. But those improvements do not carry through to the end of high school, to the time that students graduate college, and then enter the workforce. So even though we are seeing some gains in the early years, they are not sustained gains, which is what we should care about.
The other thing that we should care about with the War on Poverty was to help low-income children improve their academic outcomes to narrow the achievement gap. That gap is unchanged from the time the War on Poverty launched. If you look at the gap between the bottom and top decile of students by family income, this is the 90/10 gap, it's the same as it was in 1965. It's the equivalent of four grade levels worth of learning. And so disadvantaged children that this federal spending was designed to help have seen no improvements in their education outcomes.
The money over the decades has largely been spent on financing staffing surge in the public education sector. If you go back to 1950, we have seen a roughly 100% increase in the number of students in public schools across the country. However, we have seen a 243% increase in the number of teachers. Incredible enough is that is we have seen a 709% increase in the number of non-teaching administrative staff.
Federal education programs have done nothing to improve academic outcomes. It has simply bolstered this ongoing staffing surge. Since the War on Poverty began, we have spent $3 trillion at the federal level alone on K-12 education. And remember, the federal component represents only about 10% of all K-12 Education spending. I would argue we have to restore education to states, localities, and ultimately parents.
Larry Bernstein:
In your paper you mentioned that there are some programs that you think are worth saving and that those programs should be managed by other agencies. Why do you want to save them and why do you think they are better run in these other agencies?
Lindsey Burke:
Top of the list is spending and federal protections for students with special needs through the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. Historically these students were not well-served by the traditional public education system. Maintaining that program and commensurate spending is something that I think there is a federal role for. That does not mean that it needs to be managed by a standalone federal agency at the Department of Education. The education for All Handicapped Children Act of 1975 predated the creation of the department. So, maintaining IDEA spending and protections, but shifting that money and management over to say HHS would be appropriate.
There is also an argument to be made that we need some data collection. The data collection component moving that over to the Census Bureau would make sense for statistics gathering.
Larry Bernstein:
Jimmy Carter's idea for the Department of Education was to take programs that were within the federal government and place them if it related to education to this new department. Why was that a bad idea?
Lindsey Burke:
There were some consolidations over the years, but we did not see the spending efficiency that Carter was suggesting we would see because of that. He said it was about efficiency, but it was about winning an election.
If you go back to the 1976 election, he saw the creation of the department as a key to winning that election. The teachers’ unions were newly powerful organizations, and Carter recognized that their endorsement could go a long way in his quest for the White House. So, he made two promises to them. He said, first I will appoint Walter Mondale as my VP running mate. Walter Mondale's brother was a higher-up in the teachers’ union. But more importantly, he said, I will create a standalone cabinet level agency for education, which prior to that had been part of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW). And it worked out for him, and he did make good on that promise and got it signed into law.
Larry Bernstein:
With statistics what I have noticed is that states misrepresent their success in education. Why not cheat with statistics? How do you handle the cheaters at the state level and has the Feds been historically a good ombudsman?
Lindsey Burke:
We can look at state test score outcomes and state level outcomes from the National Assessment of Educational Progress. We can see that states will be gaming the system saying we have got 80% of kids who can read proficiently, and then you look at that same state on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. And lo and behold, a third of kids can read proficiently. You are correct in that the National Center for Education Statistics, which is run out of the Department of Ed, has been a good check.
Now it is important the way that that it is a random sample of students. It is not a national test. It is not tied to any curricular materials. It's very different than a criterion reference test that we would see at the state level versus this nationally norm-referenced test. That assessment has provided helpful long-term data over the years. They have used the same test questions since the 1970s. And that gives us a good sense of how students are performing on these items over time. And that is how we know 12th graders are not reading proficiently, and that has been the case for the past 60 years.
That line is flat. And so we do want to maintain that check on how students are doing. That random sampling does not mean we need to have a standalone federal agency to do that. Move it over to the Census Bureau to collect that data. It's important and useful to people like me who look at the research and think about ED policy. The average parent is not necessarily saying, “let me pull up the long-term trend assessment or whatever other NCS data are out there and make a school decision based on that.” They are making their decisions in a localized fashion. They are having student teacher conferences. They get to know the principal; they talk to their child.
That is very different than what the bean counters in Washington like me need to know. I would say that the NA and what NCS does is important as a check on the public system because that is the best form of accountability we have on a public system.
Larry Bernstein:
Trump is trying to undermine the future of the Department of Education. He is cutting it in half. What does that mean?
Lindsey Burke:
For the average family, it means little for the day-to-day education of their children. Only 10% of K-12 education funding comes from federal taxpayers from Washington. It is a small slice of the revenue pie. The Department of Education does not run a single school, does not educate a single child. It does not pay a single teacher salary, and some of those core programs would remain.
I mentioned IDA earlier is a good example that spending will be managed by HHS.
93% of all student loans originating is being serviced now by the Department of Ed. It is nearly $1.8 trillion in outstanding student loan debt now. If the Department of Ed were a bank, it would be the third largest bank in America by loan volume. You have got a lot of people who have Ed policy experience running the department. They are not finance minds. To run a loan portfolio of that size might be out of their scope of expertise. Shift that loan portfolio over to Treasury while working to restore it to the private lending market and to get it out of the public portfolio.
We want to insulate taxpayers from having to pick up loans when students default or when you get the Biden administration trying to cancel student loans and provide debt amnesty. Of course, taxpayers bear the brunt of that.
Larry Bernstein:
I have friends that have worked for federal agencies, and what they told me on that there are some staff members who are either incapable or do not do any work and that there are other workers who are capable and highly productive. In the private sector, this could not happen. If there was deadwood or someone not doing any work, they would be fired.
How do you feel about a non-merit-based decision to fire 50% of the department?
Lindsey Burke:
While it does not appear that they went through person by person and made a merit-based decision. It was not 50% for every center or office within the Department of Ed. When the prior Education Secretary Betsy DeVos came in the first Trump administration, they were eager to make major reforms at Ed.
They took a measured approach the first time around and felt a little burned because they faced so many roadblocks. This time around, they are saying this agency is ineffective. The public is behind us on this effort. We want to restore dollars and control back to states, localities, and families. And we know the way to do that ultimately is to eliminate the department that will mean cutting staff and then down the road, spending and reorganization.
Larry Bernstein:
How will the teacher's unions try to stop the Department of Education abolishment?
Lindsey Burke:
They are wailing and gnashing their teeth over the prospective elimination of the department. Becky Pringle, the head of the NEA, Randy Weingarten, the head of the American Federation for Teachers, the two largest teachers’ unions in the country are just beside themselves. Randy Weingarten has been all over the mainstream media saying what a detriment this will be to American education. It should not matter to them in terms of membership numbers. Their membership is derived from the over 3 million teachers across the country who largely are dues paying members to the unions.
What they lose is their ability to have a one-stop shop to lobby in Washington, which is what is so attractive to them about having education as a cabinet level agency. Your typical parent knows that if they are unhappy with what is happening in their school, they go and they knock on the schoolhouse door and talk to the principal or the teacher. It does take a lot to change federal policy. The unions are well suited to do that, and so it makes it much easier for them to maintain their power when they have education established as a cabinet level agency.
Larry Bernstein:
There was an announcement that the Trump administration is cutting $150 million of grants to the University of Pennsylvania related to allowing males to engage in female sports. What does this mean for these schools?
Lindsey Burke:
It is important to remember that only a third of Americans have bachelor's degrees today. This idea that we should take from hardworking American taxpayers and subsidize these elite institutions when they need such a dramatic cultural course correction. That is why we are seeing the administration embraced by most Americans when they are saying to places like UPenn or to Columbia is where something fanatical is happening, that you are no longer going to be able to do this willy-nilly on the taxpayer’s dime.
Jay Greene had a piece out where he talks about, why not say we are going to shift that funding to universities down South where these hot button issues are more aligned with the median American voter.
There are reforms that the administration can pursue to that end this long overdue cultural course correction. And the way to do that is through the federal subsidies that universities have gotten addicted to since 1965.
Larry Bernstein:
The NIH in its funding has restricted the amount of administration allocation for the funds to something like 15%, whereas some programs have as high as 50% administration. And this goes back to the same general point you were making, is that we have this enormous new administrative staff, someone has to pay for it and why not make it the federal government.
Lindsey Burke:
A quick primer for people who do not think about indirect cost. But for university, these are overhead costs that the university will charge a grantor to conduct research. The administration has said that we are going to cap that indirect rate at 15%. There is a formula, and if a state school in say Maryland is trying to say to the federal government, we are going to charge you a 50% indirect rate, the federal government is now saying, we're going to cap that at 15%.
Jay Greene has a great reform idea where he has said, why not cap your overhead costs that you charge to whatever the lowest rate is that a university charges a grantor in the private sector. That might sound like a small reform, but these overhead costs subsidies it is a tremendous amount of money and it is a leverage point that the administration has. There are a lot of levers out there that we could pull to reduce subsidies that are flowing to these institutions.
Larry Bernstein:
From a constitutional perspective, the power of the purse is in the hands of Congress. Tell us about the budget reconciliation process in its ability to endorse DOGE.
Lindsey Burke:
Reconciliation can only reinforce on mandatory spending programs.
Larry Bernstein:
What does that mean?
Lindsey Burke:
The spending that is on autopilot that happens every year that Congress appropriates via formula. For example, most of the Pell Grant program are grants that students receive to attend college if they are income eligible and do not have to be repaid. Most of that program is mandatory spending. We know how much is going to be spent on it year after year; it is set in statute.
Larry Bernstein:
And what would be an example of one that is not mandatory?
Lindsey Burke:
The 21st Century Community Learning Centers is a competitive grant program where schools must apply every year and give notice that they are going to participate in that program. Most of the K-12 programs would fall under that.
Title 2 is largely discretionary, and this is teacher professional development. They are smaller relative to the formula funded programs that districts have to apply for every year, and they are not automatically renewed from year to year. With reconciliation we can tackle the mandatory spending that's out there.
The good part of reconciliation is it only has a 50-vote threshold to get over the finish line. It makes it easier to move that spending bill forward, but you can only tackle the mandatory programs, which means to answer your question on DOGE, there is a lot that we can reconcile. But there still will have to be an effort by Congress to tackle the rest of those discretionary or competitive grant programs down the road, which is why you need a comprehensive Department of Education Reorganization Act to be introduced to fully wind down the agency.
Larry Bernstein:
What are you optimistic about as it relates to the restructuring or elimination of the Department of Education?
Lindsey Burke:
I'm optimistic that it's actually going to happen this time. This has been a hope and aspiration for conservatives since 1980. A year ago, if you mentioned outright eliminating the Department of Ed, people would laugh. It is not a punchline anymore. There is a real possibility that we are going to see this “bureaucratic boondoggle,” to quote Ronald Reagan eliminated for good. Ultimately, it is about situating dollars and decision making closer to the parents and the students that those dollars affect. And when they have more control and more say, we will see better outcomes for students. And in the Higher Ed space, this is a huge benefit to this needed cultural correction. I am optimistic that the Department of Ed will be downsized to such an extent that it will not bother the day-to-day interactions of local schools in the way that it has over the past 45 years.
Larry Bernstein:
When Trump first became president in 2016, my daughter would come home from high school and say, dad, what did the president do today? And the President Trump in his second term is now two months in. I am flabbergasted by the breadth and extent of his executive actions. I do not understand why it is different this time.
Lindsey Burke:
The scope and the speed at which the administration is issuing executive orders has been speedy and over the target. Executive orders on combating antisemitism, on school choice, on maintaining free speech by curtailing DEI bureaucracy. They feel the wind at their back because they know that they are over the target on these issues. But time is short. Trying to get these things accomplished knowing that you have got a window of 18 months or so to get it done; it is full steam ahead. It is knowing that they're over the target and that the clock is ticking. I think that explains a lot of it.
Larry Bernstein:
Thanks to Lindsey for joining us.
If you missed our previous podcast, the topic was Embracing Reality and NOT your Smartphone.
Our speaker was Christine Rosen who is the author of a new book entitled The Extinction of Experience. Christine discussed why new technologies like the smartphone and virtual reality undermine our mental health and wellbeing.
I would now like to make a plug for our next podcast with Robert Kaplan who is the author of a new book Waste Land. We are going to hear why the world is in permanent instability and why we should expect ongoing conflict in economics, trade, migration, and war.
You can find our previous episodes and transcripts on our website whathappensnextin6minutes.com. Please follow us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Thank you for joining us today, goodbye.
Check out our previous episode, Embracing Reality and NOT your Smartphone, here.
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