If the Education Department Can’t Be Closed, at Least Fix It by Breaking It Up
Schneider: In research, data management and especially FAFSA, the department has shown it is not up to the task. Some ways to do things better.
;)
Untangle Your Mind!
Sign up for our free newsletter and start your day with in-depth reporting on the latest topics in education.
Education is at a Crossroads: Help Us Illuminate the Path Forward.Ěý
Closing the U.S. Department of Education is an evergreen goal for conservatives. Created in 1979 as a payoff to teachers unions for their support of Jimmy Carter’s presidential campaign, the department is by far the smallest Cabinet-level agency and has accumulated a grab bag of functions that could — and should — be handled by others at the state and federal levels.
In 2018, the Trump administration reorganizing the department out of existence. That effort failed, showing that even under a Republican administration, dissolving the Department of Education is difficult. But it’s not impossible.
A reform-minded, results-oriented executive could begin by rerouting many of the department’s functions to other agencies rather than abolishing it wholesale. I use years of personal experience in the Department of Education, leading both the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) and its parent Institute of Education Sciences (IES), to show how a conservative president could achieve some first steps — and why they’re needed.
First, and most urgently, the department must answer for its recent FAFSA debacle, which has affected millions of students and their families. The Government Accountability Office has painstakingly documented the myriad failures in how the department managed the Free Application for Federal Student Aid process this year. In testimony before the House Education and Workforce Committee, GAO official Melissa Emry-Arras no fewer than 40 technical problems with the FAFSA form at launch alone. These errors led to significant in the number of students — especially low-income ones — who applied for federal aid, reducing college enrollment across the country and eroding social mobility for struggling families.
With its FAFSA failure, the department has proven it cannot effectively administer student aid programs. Its extensive student loan portfolio must be moved to the Treasury Department — and this should happen regardless of the Education Department’s eventual fate. At $1.7 trillion, the federal student aid program roughly equals a bank the size of Wells Fargo or Citibank, the third- and fourth-largest in the nation. Wells Fargo has over 226,000 to manage its portfolio, while the department has fewer than 4,400 spread across all its functions and fewer than 1,500 in the Office of Federal Student Aid. Managing the equivalent of a large bank clearly lies outside the capacity and skill set of the Education Department.
Though not as urgent as shifting $1.7 trillion to Treasury — a Cabinet agency that deals with money — the research and evaluation activities of IES should be moved to the National Science Foundation. In bills like the CHIPS and Science Act, Congress has repeatedly closer cooperation between the foundation and the Department of Education, especially IES.
There are several benefits to bringing IES under the foundation’s roof. IES would bring much-needed evaluation experience to NSF, ensuring taxpayer funds are spent on programs that work. Such assessments are at the core of IES’s mission, while the foundation’s education unit has not done much to study the effect of its investments on student outcomes.
Additionally, both agencies have launched in the past few years, mostly focused on a key emerging issue: how artificial intelligence can improve learning. Education research has benefited from the expertise of the foundation’s larger, more intellectually diverse sets of researchers. These include engineers, data scientists and other experts who can improve education but do not usually consider it as a research domain or IES as a potential source of support.
Having researchers work together in a unified organization would lead to closer collaboration and generate more creative innovations with greater positive impact. Moving IES into NSF would also allow the of a unit like DARPA, but for education research and development. This would lead to programs that embody the rapid turnaround and transformative vision essential to the future of education R&D.
A DARPA for education could support new partnerships with states, school districts, researchers and ed tech companies. It would certainly enable better research using AI, machine learning and cutting-edge data science methods. Already, there is considerable support for this type of program (see the , for example).
Moving IES to NSF would also give Congress the opportunity to evaluate other parts of IES’s portfolio, such as the , which have been on the chopping block repeatedly but persist at close to $60 million per year. There is far too much overlap between these and the Department of Education’s . Right now, by statute, there must be at least one comprehensive center for each of the lab program’s 10 regions across the United States. Not only do these programs overlap geographically, but it’s unclear how their missions differ. According to their , the labs, “have collaborated with school districts, state departments of education and other education stakeholders to help generate and apply evidence, with the goal of improving learner outcomes.” How does this differ from the mission of the centers, which themselves as providing “capacity-building services to state educational agencies (SEAs), regional educational agencies (REAs), local educational agencies (LEAs) and schools that improve educational outcomes”?
The labs and the centers appear to be much the same program, just duplicated, thanks to bureaucratic bloat and turf wars. Knowing who does what is challenging even for experts at navigating bureaucracy, let alone for educators or policymakers seeking advice. Either the comprehensive center program should be merged with the regional labs, or both should be terminated.
If they survive, moving them to NSF would allow closer coordination with the , a program that promotes regional partnerships among the private sector, academia and nonprofits in critical technology fields. Strong, effective education systems must be central to that effort — and combining the foundation’s regional innovative strategy with regional education efforts would help by creating a pipeline for STEM students into local high-tech industries.
Finally, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) should move to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, creating the Bureau of Labor and Education Statistics. The current bureau has a long history of managing the collection and distribution of sensitive data and is committed to the timely release of information — which puts it in stark contrast to NCES. For example, despite legal requirements and the importance of school and school district finance information, NCES is several years behind in releasing those crucial data.
Programs that are not moved to other federal agencies or shut down altogether should be rolled into formula-driven block grants. This would enhance the role of the states, which are constitutionally charged with providing education and know better than the federal government what their students need. Devolving the department’s powers would also reduce its onerous regulatory requirements, which stifle much-needed educational innovation.
Government agencies . They can be — and are — terminated when their opponents win elections and gain power. Closing agencies is challenging, and nothing the size of even the small Department of Education has been shuttered so far. But political will and hard work can make it so. The right administration could give the nation a more efficient, dynamic and responsive school system — all things the Department of Education has been hard-pressed to do.
Get stories like these delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter