(The Center Square) – President Donald Trump hasn’t been shy about his aversion to the U.S. Department of Education, but a report from the National Association of Scholars suggests that an executive order abolishing the department may not result in the change for which he hopes.
“Waste Land: The Department of Education’s Profligacy, Mediocrity and Radicalism” is a nearly 300-page deep dive into some of the department’s problems and why true and lasting reform might be best achieved through legislation and regulatory reform.
“Most of what ED (the education department) does centers on disbursing money” through Title I and special education funding, Pell Grants and direct student loans, according to the report.
And Americans haven’t clearly indicated in the time since the department’s founding in 1980 that they want that spending to go away, said David Randall, NAS director of research and the report’s lead author.
“The American people have, for the last few generations, determined by their elected representatives that they want that spending. I think it’s reasonable to say that spending should continue,” Randall told The Center Square.
However, the department’s main function is currently entangled with hundreds of other programs and byzantine regulations, according to the report. These are some of the programs, regulations and policies that might survive if the department were to be eliminated by one fell executive stroke.
“A very large amount of the education department’s spending is done by statute down to and including a very large number of individual programs. Dozens and dozens of them have individual statutory sections,” Randall said. “The most successful use of the executive order and administrative power – if it leaves those laws on the statute books – will allow the programs to spring back to life if a different president with different priorities comes to power.”
“If you want enduring reform, you have to have the statutes repealed,” he added.
Though Randall applauds the executive orders Trump has issued impacting education and explicitly mentions the “prohibition of discriminatory ideologies” as a “praiseworthy accomplishment,” he said that harmful ideologies have been active within the department since its inception and need to be addressed.
He points to disparate impact theory as an example, which is indivisibly linked with the concept of equity and the various justice movements that have become a louder part of the cultural discourse in recent years. It’s a judicial theory that developed in the 1970s that allows employment or educational practices that uniquely negatively impact “legally protected” subsets of people – though the practice or policy may not be discriminatory in intent – to be challenged. It’s the same principle that effectively made all job IQ tests illegal and diminished school discipline because it had disparate effects, according to Randall.
“Every policy has some disparate impact or another. When you use disparate impact, you grant arbitrary power to the government to prosecute people selectively,” Randall said. “There is a deep history, which we should not forget – not least because it is tempting to simply repeal the last few outrages and forget about the previous ones.”
‘Dear colleague’ letters and case resolutions have also come to have the effect of substantive regulation even though they shouldn’t, according to Randall.
“Theoretically, you’re not supposed to make huge regulations … without going through a formal administrative procedure – ideally, frankly, having a law,” Randall told The Center Square. “They were supposed to be used for minor things, but they’ve been using them for ever-bigger things,” including pieces of gender ideology and due process procedure.
The report contains a host of detailed recommendations for reforming the department and its spending, like reducing the number of grant formulas in Title I funding, unfunded mandates in special education and altering accreditation systems.
“The point really is, there is this extraordinary amount of detail and it’s worth taking on board the detail so as to make equally detailed reforms that will then actually endure and be effective,” Randall said. “The long babble of different subject matters is meant to convey that.”