Page 69 “Program Administration”: Am I doing the math wrong? $321 million budget for Comp and Benefits for 1,625 Full-Time Equivalents = $198K / FTE? Seems quite high for an average… similar numbers for “Office of Civil Rights” ($191K / FTE).
Separately, the author’s comparison to Citigroup expenses is not intellectually honest. You’d have to look at SG&A associated with servicing loans because that’s basically what he’s comparing against…
…interesting article but not sure I buy “most efficient department” argument…
Person with a vested interest in the status quo argues that we should maintain the status quo, and that there are no downsides to maintaining the status quo, except you should give us even more money. Pro tip: any time you make any argument for anything, it is going to be more persuasive when you at a minimum acknowledge that the downsides even exist.
“Those clamoring to shutter the Department of Education have always played coy with exactly what they mean.”
This, to me, is the nub of the problem. How much of the activity of the DOE is Trump going to stop entirely? I could see it ceasing any civil-rights work because obviously, but everything else? State grants (red states won’t like that)? College loans? Data collection? I think you end up just moving almost all of the same functions elsewhere, effectively creating new bureaucracies. It’s not about cost-saving or efficiency, it’s a shell game played simply to punish an agency they hate for ideological reasons.
Anyway, as with all DOGE cuts, it goes without saying that the way to make government function more efficiently is not simply to slash the workforce. The only argument for doing it that way is that you want government to function worse so people hate it more, so they clamor for it to be cut more, and on and on until it can be drowned in a bathtub.
You lost me with the false claim that Title IX is being used to prevent transgender students from joining athletic teams. No—they can join teams, but only in their sex category. That is not barring any student from participating. It is ensuring that students play within their sex class.
AMAB people participating in women’s sports is definitely problematic, but your comment betrays ignorance of transgender people’s experience. It’s not simple at all. I have a child who was hardcore trans (AFAB) for three years* and the thought of joining a girls team or using the girls bathroom made him want to die. It’s not like, “I’m doing everything possible to pass and be accepted and have friends of my gender, but I’m totally fine outing myself everyday at practice!”
*it’s been an interesting and enlightening journey
I’m so sorry your child feels such distress. I hope your child finds ways of being in the world with less stress. However, we can’t make policies based on feelings (however strongly felt); we need to make policies based on facts. We either have policies based on sex (a fact), or we have policies based on gender identity (a feeling), but we can’t have both. I understand that you would urge the latter, but I believe that policies based on facts are better.
I never said my child is in distress. She’s great. Was great while she was trans, too - happier and more stable than most teens. In large part because her school and community accepted her transition without batting an eye. Instead of being told “no” which, for a teen, is like waving a red flag on front of a bull, she was given the space to explore who she is and to think things over. After three years of living as a boy, she decided she wanted to try being a girl.
Fwiw, neither my daughter nor I ever thought amab students competing in women’s sports could be fair due to, yes, the fact of biological advantage. Trans people using facilities that match their gender identity, though, hurts nobody. Bans against it are based on feelings, yet are defended as being based on fact.
As some who is going into teaching and is critical of a lot about the K12 system, it is pretty hard to find problems that are specifically downstream of the DOE. The steelman case is something like
-The student loan architecture just administers the subsidized loans, it doesn't create them. But the subsidized loan system has obviously bloated up higher ed. For those who are hostile to higher ed for a variety of reasons, it would make sense to target the finance subsidization. Since actually changing that would be a congressional political lift beyond the Republicans abilities, it looks like they're trying here to just sort of blow up the administration of it and hope for the worst.
-IDEA funding for special education has a lot of dubious aspects to it but will never be touched and probably not reformed. So again, the idea seems to be just remove strings and safeguards and hope things get worse.
-The Civil Rights department has done a lot of arguable identity politics stuff. For instance there is a lot less suspension of kids for behavior now, downstream of the DOE putting pressure about disparate impact in suspension & expulsion and instead pushing restorative justice and PBIS as a discipline system. I think you can safely say these changes have led to lowering behavior standards in schools and in low-income areas contributed to more disorderly environments with less learning. If you can't exclude the worst 2% in a rough middle school you are gonna have a bad time.
Anyway this gutting doesn't really approach these problems or any other in any kind of constructive or well-intentioned way. Then there are the purely bad aspects of this gutting. More than anything else, I think destroying the IES is the most 'bang for your buck' evil act here. That will 100% make schools worse over time if future administrations don't reverse. It's hilarious because typically conservatives role in trying to impact education is to try to figure out better empirical practices and push the schools to adopt them, and do various research and measurement for purposes of accountability. Now that all is impossible. Gutting IES is the giveaway that this whole move is just more libertarian sociopathy and moron pyromania. Indefensible.
You mean, after these changes? What they're cutting is the staff who do the administration that ties strings to things, does oversight etc. Of course this only applies to the small minority of funding and domains in K12 that the DOE administers or oversees in any way
Which local officials are you asking about, to be held accountable by who, for what?
Are you asking about the deleted administrative oversight regarding the Title 1 and IDEA funding?
I mean if you really mean that as a question, no, the administration has not set up any new process to devolve administration oversight to at some other local level.
Sure, but each doesn’t differently rendering the data useless for nationwide analysis. You can’t draw conclusions about apples by comparing watermelons to peanuts.
Why on earth do "95 percent of districts and just over 60 percent of public schools" qualify for Title I funding? If you are going to give grants to impoverished schools, they should be going to the bottom 10% (in spending per student), not the bottom 60%!
Yes. The food itself is provided by USDA. DOE just uses the number of kids who qualify for free or reduced luncH - i.e. are poor - to determine how much the school gets in Title I grants. Those grants are for educational and support services, not for food.
My guess is that Republicans have two main goals with their war against the Department of Education:
-by making it harder to get student loans, Republicans are discouraging young adults from attending universities, which they see as the key societal institutions for the creation and dissemination of "wokeness"
-weaken the Civil Rights division of the Department of Education, that way individual states can have more autonomy to do what they please with little concern for disparate impact
Would have nailed it if you’d added the third overarching goal: to make government function poorly so people hate it more and thus call for even more punitive defunding until we’re caught in the death spiral the right wing has been salivating for for fifty years.
Seriously. The number of "meh who cares, kill the DOE, we don't need it anyhow" comments, and agreement with same, is disheartening.
Like, I get being upset about wokeness in the American education system, but is that a good reason to cut off funding for poor and disabled kids' education?
And the people who are like "just turn over all education to the states, it's super easy, barely an inconvenience" - do they not know about the history of anti-Black discrimination in the Old Confederacy states, or do they just not care?
One theme I’m seeing hinted at here is that the issue is not so much the *funding* of education for students with disabilities, so much as the way that *accommodation* of students with disabilities has hurt education for everyone else. I haven’t seen much actual description of what these accommodations are, or how they have impacted other students, but that is the one meaningful case I have seen hinted at here.
Yes! That is exactly what I am calling for! Someone should describe these so that I can evaluate! All I see is insinuation from one side that these are the worst and from the other side that these are helpful for the students involved and fine for others, but no one is actually giving any evidence! I have not made any assumptions, but everyone here seems to have their own conclusions about it.
People -- parents, especially -- get very fired up about education policy. They tend to think local spending decisions are better, whether true or not. And they probably see the DOE as too heavily influenced by the teacher unions.
Add to this the recently released NAEP scores which showed broad declines in learning post-COVID and the overall vibe of most conversations will be broadly negative toward the status quo.
I don't necessarily read most of the comments as "kill the DOE" (absent a couple of wackos) as much as a reflection of this underlying dynamic.
Why does criticism of the status quo, though, always lead people to think programs and funding should be cut? Why not, oh shit, looks like we need more money for specialists, class-size reduction, vocational programs, restorative justice, teacher training, etc etc?
One of the many examples of our nutty funding practices: During NCLB, a “failing” (poor)school was given a School Improvement Grant (SIG). The principal hired two vice principals to help her with the hours and hours of non-educational work principals are required to do now. She was then able to focus on being in classrooms, seeing her teachers at work, learning and implementing what her school needed in order to educate better. And it worked, and so the school no longer qualified for the SIG, and the principal could no longer afford her vice principals. Pardon me, but it doesn’t take many brain cells to see that this defies f***ing logic.
Why not do a little research rather than react to the concept as stupid on its face? Young people make mistakes. Unlike the blunt instrument of suspension or expulsion, the process of restorative justice actually teaches them accountability, teaches them that there are victims on the other side of their impulsive actions. It’s more time and money-intensive but it’s not ridiculous to think it’s worth it. Do we have an higher obligation as a society than to do our very best for kids?
I agree, and I think we see a parallel with the idea on the left that failings of the police prove the police should have less money, where the opposite conclusion could also be reached.
I'd like the pro-elimination side to articulate what they think would happen to severely disabled students without a mandate for the state to educate them. Do they assume that every state government would be altruistic enough to do it anyway? That all those kids would go to special private schools?
This article feels like an attempt to win an argument without arguing. The department of education dispenses money to it's programs efficiently. Good! I wasn't under the impression that ED was full of venal corruption, but I guess it's still good to see it confirmed.
But the argument isn't 'is ED efficient considering what it spends on overhead?' but 'Is ED spending it's time and money on good things?'
I want the GiveWell evaluation and this piece is Charity Navigator
My main criticism is the point about the Education Department being statutorily prohibited from dictating to schools. Yes, that is true, but the fact of the matter is that a lot of Education money comes with attached strings, some of which directly influences curriculum in certain directions. In theory, states can say no to that funding and avoid the strings, but in practice, none do.
The second criticism (not of this piece necessarily) of the Department in general is that there is not much evidence that it's improved educational outcomes.
Your child’s elementary school is overseen by many layers of state and local administration. What otherwise unobtainable wisdom is provided by the federal government and the Dept of Ed.?
They send money? Where does that money come from? Instead of sending your tax dollars directly to your local school board, you send it to Washington and wait for it to trickle down to your local schools with all kinds of strings attached. Does that make sense?
"sending your tax dollars directly to your local school board" is a great way to screw over kids who, through no fault of their own, were born in poor school districts that don't collect enough tax revenue
Because, for example, Mississippi is much poorer per capita than Massachusetts? And within each state you get lots of residential sorting into rich counties and poor counties.
“Keep wealth redistribution at the county level” = “tell kids from poor counties to go pound sand”
I suppose you could make the same argument regarding any function of state or local government. Ultimately, state and local elected officials are responsible for the economic health and quality of life in their jurisdictions, at least relative to the rest of the country. Or should we just have the feds run everything because you don’t trust California to make sure that the schools in Bakersfield are as good as the schools in Beverly Hills?
That assumes more money = better outcomes. The two worst school systems in my state have a difference in spending per pupil of about $5,500, which comes out to be about a 30% difference. Yet the outcomes are the same.
Prompted me to go look at the Salary and Expenses section of the 2024 DOE budget: https://www.ed.gov/sites/ed/files/about/overview/budget/budget24/summary/24summary.pdf
Page 69 “Program Administration”: Am I doing the math wrong? $321 million budget for Comp and Benefits for 1,625 Full-Time Equivalents = $198K / FTE? Seems quite high for an average… similar numbers for “Office of Civil Rights” ($191K / FTE).
Separately, the author’s comparison to Citigroup expenses is not intellectually honest. You’d have to look at SG&A associated with servicing loans because that’s basically what he’s comparing against…
…interesting article but not sure I buy “most efficient department” argument…
Person with a vested interest in the status quo argues that we should maintain the status quo, and that there are no downsides to maintaining the status quo, except you should give us even more money. Pro tip: any time you make any argument for anything, it is going to be more persuasive when you at a minimum acknowledge that the downsides even exist.
The CCP strongly endorses the shutdown of the VOA.
https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202503/1330246.shtml
Comparing all of city group to the student loan portfolio and deciding that what the student loan program does is more complicated is pretty wild.
Reads like one of the usual left winG nerd pieces.
I think you should be running around, HAIR ON FIRE, screaming "SOUND THE TOCSIN"!!!!!!!
Matt confuses a slush fund with efficiency!
“Those clamoring to shutter the Department of Education have always played coy with exactly what they mean.”
This, to me, is the nub of the problem. How much of the activity of the DOE is Trump going to stop entirely? I could see it ceasing any civil-rights work because obviously, but everything else? State grants (red states won’t like that)? College loans? Data collection? I think you end up just moving almost all of the same functions elsewhere, effectively creating new bureaucracies. It’s not about cost-saving or efficiency, it’s a shell game played simply to punish an agency they hate for ideological reasons.
Anyway, as with all DOGE cuts, it goes without saying that the way to make government function more efficiently is not simply to slash the workforce. The only argument for doing it that way is that you want government to function worse so people hate it more, so they clamor for it to be cut more, and on and on until it can be drowned in a bathtub.
You lost me with the false claim that Title IX is being used to prevent transgender students from joining athletic teams. No—they can join teams, but only in their sex category. That is not barring any student from participating. It is ensuring that students play within their sex class.
How many other false claims are in here?
AMAB people participating in women’s sports is definitely problematic, but your comment betrays ignorance of transgender people’s experience. It’s not simple at all. I have a child who was hardcore trans (AFAB) for three years* and the thought of joining a girls team or using the girls bathroom made him want to die. It’s not like, “I’m doing everything possible to pass and be accepted and have friends of my gender, but I’m totally fine outing myself everyday at practice!”
*it’s been an interesting and enlightening journey
I’m so sorry your child feels such distress. I hope your child finds ways of being in the world with less stress. However, we can’t make policies based on feelings (however strongly felt); we need to make policies based on facts. We either have policies based on sex (a fact), or we have policies based on gender identity (a feeling), but we can’t have both. I understand that you would urge the latter, but I believe that policies based on facts are better.
I never said my child is in distress. She’s great. Was great while she was trans, too - happier and more stable than most teens. In large part because her school and community accepted her transition without batting an eye. Instead of being told “no” which, for a teen, is like waving a red flag on front of a bull, she was given the space to explore who she is and to think things over. After three years of living as a boy, she decided she wanted to try being a girl.
Fwiw, neither my daughter nor I ever thought amab students competing in women’s sports could be fair due to, yes, the fact of biological advantage. Trans people using facilities that match their gender identity, though, hurts nobody. Bans against it are based on feelings, yet are defended as being based on fact.
As some who is going into teaching and is critical of a lot about the K12 system, it is pretty hard to find problems that are specifically downstream of the DOE. The steelman case is something like
-The student loan architecture just administers the subsidized loans, it doesn't create them. But the subsidized loan system has obviously bloated up higher ed. For those who are hostile to higher ed for a variety of reasons, it would make sense to target the finance subsidization. Since actually changing that would be a congressional political lift beyond the Republicans abilities, it looks like they're trying here to just sort of blow up the administration of it and hope for the worst.
-IDEA funding for special education has a lot of dubious aspects to it but will never be touched and probably not reformed. So again, the idea seems to be just remove strings and safeguards and hope things get worse.
-The Civil Rights department has done a lot of arguable identity politics stuff. For instance there is a lot less suspension of kids for behavior now, downstream of the DOE putting pressure about disparate impact in suspension & expulsion and instead pushing restorative justice and PBIS as a discipline system. I think you can safely say these changes have led to lowering behavior standards in schools and in low-income areas contributed to more disorderly environments with less learning. If you can't exclude the worst 2% in a rough middle school you are gonna have a bad time.
Anyway this gutting doesn't really approach these problems or any other in any kind of constructive or well-intentioned way. Then there are the purely bad aspects of this gutting. More than anything else, I think destroying the IES is the most 'bang for your buck' evil act here. That will 100% make schools worse over time if future administrations don't reverse. It's hilarious because typically conservatives role in trying to impact education is to try to figure out better empirical practices and push the schools to adopt them, and do various research and measurement for purposes of accountability. Now that all is impossible. Gutting IES is the giveaway that this whole move is just more libertarian sociopathy and moron pyromania. Indefensible.
Local school officials cannot be held accountable? Why not?
You mean, after these changes? What they're cutting is the staff who do the administration that ties strings to things, does oversight etc. Of course this only applies to the small minority of funding and domains in K12 that the DOE administers or oversees in any way
I mean why can’t local officials be held accountable?
Which local officials are you asking about, to be held accountable by who, for what?
Are you asking about the deleted administrative oversight regarding the Title 1 and IDEA funding?
I mean if you really mean that as a question, no, the administration has not set up any new process to devolve administration oversight to at some other local level.
I believe the point is that they can’t be held accountable for something nobody knows is happening because nobody’s tracking anything anymore.
Schools don’t track performance?
Sure, but each doesn’t differently rendering the data useless for nationwide analysis. You can’t draw conclusions about apples by comparing watermelons to peanuts.
Why on earth do "95 percent of districts and just over 60 percent of public schools" qualify for Title I funding? If you are going to give grants to impoverished schools, they should be going to the bottom 10% (in spending per student), not the bottom 60%!
It’s based on free and reduced lunch stats. I don’t think it’s at all hard to believe that 60% of public schools have kids who qualify.
I don't know; the post also says "funding for the food in school cafeterias comes from a different federal agency."
Yes. The food itself is provided by USDA. DOE just uses the number of kids who qualify for free or reduced luncH - i.e. are poor - to determine how much the school gets in Title I grants. Those grants are for educational and support services, not for food.
My guess is that Republicans have two main goals with their war against the Department of Education:
-by making it harder to get student loans, Republicans are discouraging young adults from attending universities, which they see as the key societal institutions for the creation and dissemination of "wokeness"
-weaken the Civil Rights division of the Department of Education, that way individual states can have more autonomy to do what they please with little concern for disparate impact
Would have nailed it if you’d added the third overarching goal: to make government function poorly so people hate it more and thus call for even more punitive defunding until we’re caught in the death spiral the right wing has been salivating for for fifty years.
My goodness! The Angry Folks brigade and the "No Wonder You Pinkos Lose Elections" crowd are really out in force today amongst the commentators.
Seriously. The number of "meh who cares, kill the DOE, we don't need it anyhow" comments, and agreement with same, is disheartening.
Like, I get being upset about wokeness in the American education system, but is that a good reason to cut off funding for poor and disabled kids' education?
And the people who are like "just turn over all education to the states, it's super easy, barely an inconvenience" - do they not know about the history of anti-Black discrimination in the Old Confederacy states, or do they just not care?
One theme I’m seeing hinted at here is that the issue is not so much the *funding* of education for students with disabilities, so much as the way that *accommodation* of students with disabilities has hurt education for everyone else. I haven’t seen much actual description of what these accommodations are, or how they have impacted other students, but that is the one meaningful case I have seen hinted at here.
Maybe you want to find an actual description of what these accommodations are before making assumptions about their effects?
Yes! That is exactly what I am calling for! Someone should describe these so that I can evaluate! All I see is insinuation from one side that these are the worst and from the other side that these are helpful for the students involved and fine for others, but no one is actually giving any evidence! I have not made any assumptions, but everyone here seems to have their own conclusions about it.
People -- parents, especially -- get very fired up about education policy. They tend to think local spending decisions are better, whether true or not. And they probably see the DOE as too heavily influenced by the teacher unions.
Add to this the recently released NAEP scores which showed broad declines in learning post-COVID and the overall vibe of most conversations will be broadly negative toward the status quo.
I don't necessarily read most of the comments as "kill the DOE" (absent a couple of wackos) as much as a reflection of this underlying dynamic.
Wait, so the response to falling NAEP scores is to defund the NAEP? How does that make sense?
I'm not arguing for defunding anything!
Why does criticism of the status quo, though, always lead people to think programs and funding should be cut? Why not, oh shit, looks like we need more money for specialists, class-size reduction, vocational programs, restorative justice, teacher training, etc etc?
One of the many examples of our nutty funding practices: During NCLB, a “failing” (poor)school was given a School Improvement Grant (SIG). The principal hired two vice principals to help her with the hours and hours of non-educational work principals are required to do now. She was then able to focus on being in classrooms, seeing her teachers at work, learning and implementing what her school needed in order to educate better. And it worked, and so the school no longer qualified for the SIG, and the principal could no longer afford her vice principals. Pardon me, but it doesn’t take many brain cells to see that this defies f***ing logic.
Because what is “restorative justice,” that’s why.
Why not do a little research rather than react to the concept as stupid on its face? Young people make mistakes. Unlike the blunt instrument of suspension or expulsion, the process of restorative justice actually teaches them accountability, teaches them that there are victims on the other side of their impulsive actions. It’s more time and money-intensive but it’s not ridiculous to think it’s worth it. Do we have an higher obligation as a society than to do our very best for kids?
I agree, and I think we see a parallel with the idea on the left that failings of the police prove the police should have less money, where the opposite conclusion could also be reached.
I'd like the pro-elimination side to articulate what they think would happen to severely disabled students without a mandate for the state to educate them. Do they assume that every state government would be altruistic enough to do it anyway? That all those kids would go to special private schools?
This article feels like an attempt to win an argument without arguing. The department of education dispenses money to it's programs efficiently. Good! I wasn't under the impression that ED was full of venal corruption, but I guess it's still good to see it confirmed.
But the argument isn't 'is ED efficient considering what it spends on overhead?' but 'Is ED spending it's time and money on good things?'
I want the GiveWell evaluation and this piece is Charity Navigator
I think this was a good explainer.
My main criticism is the point about the Education Department being statutorily prohibited from dictating to schools. Yes, that is true, but the fact of the matter is that a lot of Education money comes with attached strings, some of which directly influences curriculum in certain directions. In theory, states can say no to that funding and avoid the strings, but in practice, none do.
The second criticism (not of this piece necessarily) of the Department in general is that there is not much evidence that it's improved educational outcomes.
Your child’s elementary school is overseen by many layers of state and local administration. What otherwise unobtainable wisdom is provided by the federal government and the Dept of Ed.?
They send money? Where does that money come from? Instead of sending your tax dollars directly to your local school board, you send it to Washington and wait for it to trickle down to your local schools with all kinds of strings attached. Does that make sense?
"sending your tax dollars directly to your local school board" is a great way to screw over kids who, through no fault of their own, were born in poor school districts that don't collect enough tax revenue
Why couldn’t that “wealth redistribution” be accomplished at the county or state level?
Because, for example, Mississippi is much poorer per capita than Massachusetts? And within each state you get lots of residential sorting into rich counties and poor counties.
“Keep wealth redistribution at the county level” = “tell kids from poor counties to go pound sand”
I suppose you could make the same argument regarding any function of state or local government. Ultimately, state and local elected officials are responsible for the economic health and quality of life in their jurisdictions, at least relative to the rest of the country. Or should we just have the feds run everything because you don’t trust California to make sure that the schools in Bakersfield are as good as the schools in Beverly Hills?
That assumes more money = better outcomes. The two worst school systems in my state have a difference in spending per pupil of about $5,500, which comes out to be about a 30% difference. Yet the outcomes are the same.