It’s not often that I have trouble finding people to discuss the politics of public education. Of course, nothing is usual about this administration’s first few weeks. So I was happy to have this conversation with The Cato Institute’s Neal McCluskey, Director for The Center for Educational Freedom, who may not leave you happy with what he has to say, but maybe less worried.
The computer-generated transcript is below:
Kevin Hogan, Content Director eSchool Media
OK. Hello and welcome to the latest edition of Innovations in Education E School loses podcast on the latest and Greatest Trends in Ed Tech. My name is Kevin Hogan. I’m the content director for East School News, and I’m glad you found us. Well, they did it after decades of threats by the Republican administration. And. The Department of Education was slashed and burned by executive order last week, and while the records will be analyzed and fought over for weeks and months to come, there’s still very little clarity of what will happen to the current programs and processes. That’s why I appreciated this conversation with the Cato Institute. Neil McCluskey, he’s the director of. The Center for Educational Freedom on what he foresees as possible next steps you might not like what he has to say, but you might be able to glean some insights into how things will operate going forward. Have a list. OK, Neil. Thanks so much for joining me today. I really appreciate it.
Neal McCluskey, Director for The Center for Educational Freedom
Thanks for having me on.
Kevin Hogan
And as I mentioned before, we started recording the hot topic, right? I mean it’s one of many, but. One that I haven’t been able to find, to be honest. Want to talk about it in terms of folks in DC or folks from my traditional sources of information? You know, whether it be various nonprofits in, in the area, other folks just there seems to be just a confusion and just kind of an uncertainty. About what’s going to happen, and I know there hasn’t been anything you. Known as our. Our recording today, anything definitive in terms of Miss McMahon or, you know, and putting things together, but maybe we can start by talking about. Where you see the current state of play is for the fate of the Department of Education, and if we’re going to assume things progress into what seemed to be the intentions for our readers and for our listeners, what should they be expecting next?
Neal McCluskey
Right, so I have to agree with a lot of people that there’s a lot of uncertainty here. So everything I say is going to be based on sort of what I’ve been able to gather by following this for a while. And I think that the proposal we’re going to see from the administration in the form of an executive order is going to be. One saying I think that the President believes he has the authority on his own to do a lot of hiring, firing, so he will continue to see what we’ve been seeing through Dodge and other approaches of saying, look, I think the Department of
Education has too many employees and we’re going to reduce that just as they’ve been saying lots of things in the federal government have. Too many employees. But it gets a lot more complicated when it comes to, well, what do you do with the various programs that, that, and laws that the Department of Education has been tasked with executing by Congress? Because Congress, the one who writes laws, creates programs. And I think what we’re going to see is an effort to move. Most of those functions are to other departments than the Department of Education. In part, that’s because a lot of people have been talking about that. There’s been one bill in the Senate so far that starts to get into how we handle the Department of Education. Addition, it used kind of the dismantling of moving things to other departments as well as block granting some funds. It wasn’t totally clear what would be blocked, granted what would be moved, but that sort of set the tone. And then when Linda McMahon was at her confirmation hearing, she talked a lot about. She can’t, you know, the president and the secretary don’t have the author. Ready to end? Really any programs or parts of the department or move them, but that she would be working with Congress. And then it makes sense to move, at least, you know, a lot of the parts to different places, not necessarily get rid of them, but move them. And in the last few days, she’s been talking especially about the president. About the student aid functions. The department has you think about Pell Grant, student loans, things like that. There’s been a lot of I think maybe additional emphasis on moving those maybe to the treasury or the Small Business Administration. But that seems to be what we should expect is some sort of plan or order to develop a plan to move the parts of the Department of Education. Other departments.
Kevin Hogan
OK, so if I’m an administrator in a public school district that relies to a certain degree on Title 1 funding for their district, or also when you look at the idea of the idea funds, IDEA funds. Will there be a disruption there from what you can perceive or is this going to be just letterhead from a different office?
Neal McCluskey
So a lot of that depends. I don’t think anything will happen if it’s just the president saying it. But if Congress does it and these things actually are moved, in theory it would be totally seamless. It would say we’ve seen 180 days. I think that’s too short, maybe it’s 365 days or a full year between when the law is signed and when things have to. Move. But during that transition period you would hope and the expectation is everything would be moved seamlessly. So when you shut off the lights at the Department of Education and you shut on some new lights at the Department of Health and Human Services, they’re ready to go. And people who work with the various programs, including titles. Mine or I DEA would just see a seamless transition, so that’s ideally I don’t know that the federal government or even most organizations are capable of a seamless transition like that. We certainly haven’t seen when the federal government has tried to. Make sizable changes that it’s just kind of gone off like clockwork and nobody noticed. So I think there would probably be some probably temporary, maybe even minor disruptions in who you’re talking to and how the information flows and money flows are working just in terms of the logistics of them, but that that would probably be temporary.
Kevin Hogan
I’ve only come to some more of the big picture issues and maybe some of the topics. That I’ve covered over the years, specifically from the Office of Education Technology, when you look at things like advancements in the past 10 years, when it comes to digital equity, which was certainly one in terms of trying to ensure access to the Internet, to all students, especially from underserved communities or underserved. During COVID, when we had gone into that great remote beta test of education and people trying to figure. And discovering even district administrators themselves, not realizing that within their own districts there were a lot of students that didn’t have access to the Internet from home. A lot of those things, you know, kind of driven by the Department of Education then led to an increase of those students actually having access. So those, those big picture things blended learning. Is there another one that was in effect during COVID that I know that there were programs put together by the department which were soft and squishy, right? I mean, maybe there’s. Like particular data that comes from them saying this, this is maybe increasing literacy scores, but kids still have access to the Internet. But also I guess the other big Picture 1 is when it comes to data. I mean I think that is one of the things currently that the Department of Education did was to try to track data across. Districts and across states of which we have 15,000 different school districts, some are going to be better than others, right? And some are going to be more of. Aggressive or even progressive when it comes to what they do with their students. Maybe you could talk a little bit about those things that you think should be left to the states or even individual districts versus some sort of overall umbrella that the federal government had.
Neal McCluskey
Sure. When it comes to the federal government, the first thing we ask is, well, is it constitutional? Does the Constitution give the federal government authority to do these things? In education and the first thing we see well or don’t see is the word education in the Constitution. It’s nowhere among the specific enumerated rights. So we start off with sort of an assumption, or at least I do that the federal government should be involved in these things. And then I look at effectiveness and what if the federal government weren’t? What we tend to see is people like to blame other people when things don’t go well. So when you’ve got the federal government, it’s easy for the states to say, well, the reason we dropped the ball or the districts to say the reason we dropped the ball on being prepared for something like COVID or on covering sort of digital access or whatever. They are saying the problem is it’s easy to say, well, the federal government should have done this or didn’t do enough, or if your district, you say the state didn’t do. Enough. And that’s a problem when there’s no accountability, you reach each level, blame another level, and the federal government, interestingly, has never actually said it’s responsible for education. It’s set up a Department of Education, said we’re here, we kind of help with stuff, but constitutionally, legally, we can’t actually control anything. So it makes a lot of promises and then doesn’t follow through on them, and then the States and local districts and say. Well, it’s really the federal government’s fault or we need leadership from the federal government. That’s something we saw a lot under COVID with school districts saying the U.S. Federal government, we can’t make our own decisions. And I think it’s actually better if you have much more clear accountability. It’s either your district or your state set. Get rid of the federal government. It’s well-intentioned. But there’s so many unintended consequences that go with that it’s problematic. And then one of my I wouldn’t say hobby horses because I use a lot of federal data and I in a way, I like the data and people who want to talk about the national education system. They like the data. But on the flip side, it’s really kind of poor. So I do a lot with you know, how much are we spending per pupil. And I think the last time I checked, which was a few days ago, the federal government will give you spending data. I believe the most recent is from the 2020-2021 school year and maybe up to 2021-2022. Right now, but we’re into the 2024-2025 school year and so the data is really old. I track private schools, the private school universe data is really. Sold most of it’s not useful then so well, I like the data. I’m not sure that the federal government even does a good job of that basic function of data collection, certainly not collecting it in a timely manner. So while a lot of these things sound good, I think we’d actually be better off if the federal government was not a player in this. And in particular, people couldn’t say it was the federal government’s fault when it wasn’t their responsibility to begin with. It was the state or the school district. And then the other sort of thing that you can take is encouraging. I think at the state level it is. While the federal government was supposed to come in and do some compensatory funding, it was originally its main job for low income districts. Not sure I did a good job, but in the states you have lots of states have lawsuits to compel the state to have equitable funding. And that’s really the way to do it. That’s much more. Concrete and kind of hoping that the federal government will keep pitching in some money when again it says we’re here, but we don’t really have any responsibility in this area.
Kevin Hogan
But then do you see them, the duties of say, the data collection and that analysis going to a different department as well, how do you, how do you track? The overall results of the nation as a whole.
Neal McCluskey
For me, if I were setting it all up and this is not what most people are aiming at, we would have to separate what I’d like from what I think is going to happen. But for me, I think that you could still have data collection at the state level and there would be lots of private entities who would collect that. Data and use it on a national basis. In fact, you can go to the economics lab at Georgetown University, and they’re much more quickly gathered together. Data on all sorts of things in education than the federal government has. Stanford has big data sets that you can use, and they’re more accessible than what the federal government has. So. Even though I think data collection is one of the more innocuous things that the federal government does, I just don’t think it does that well. And it’s a mistake to rely on them to do it. That said, I haven’t seen any proposals that actually remove the federal government from that role. What I’ve typically seen is that the data collection should be done usually for the Census Bureau. Actually, they already collect a lot of education data, so it wouldn’t even be necessarily a new thing they do, but they’re already sort of a data collection. Entity agency and it would make more sense for them to do it, since again, in many cases they’re already collecting data on. Then to keep it at the Department of Education.
Kevin Hogan
Huddle with the other big squishy topic when it comes to and I mentioned digital equity, and I can even just focus it on that idea of digital equity when it comes to E school news.
Kevin Hogan
In reading some of your blog posts you see some of that being connected to civil rights. Responsibilities in a big picture and those being moved over to the Department of Justice, does that. Am I describing that accurately?
Neal McCluskey
Yeah. You got it.
Kevin Hogan
Yeah. So what would that mean in terms of say, digital equity, even if I go back to the idea that you? So every student should have some sort of access or the ability to have access to the Internet in order to do their learning. I mean kind of an essential part as much.
Neal McCluskey
Yeah. So civil rights. Ohh sorry, sorry.
Kevin Hogan
As much as having indoor electricity or or water in.
Neal McCluskey
Right. So civil rights enforcement is a legitimate job of the federal government, but it’s enforcement against States and local governments, but in particular states that discriminate in their provision of. Things that they say are going to be available to everyone. So if the and then again, this is what a lot of these equity lawsuits are about that we’ve seen in states across the country is, hey, state, you say you’re going to provide an equitable education for everyone in the state and you’re not providing it. And so again, in many cases. States and the state justice systems are doing that, but the federal government does have a role to say, OK States, you know, state of Montana, I don’t know that they have a problem with just picking them randomly but. State of Montana. It looks like you know you are under funding your low income districts. So I don’t know if $2000.00 of people or something or you clearly have inadequate access to the Internet in your rural districts versus your more urban ones. We think that that violates equal protection and so if the federal government says that and the federal government takes it to court and says, look, we are suing you to do what we think you should. New that means the federal government is taking an enforcement position, but not a provision to enforce a position. There’s nothing in the Constitution that says it’s the federal government job to provide it. It is their job to make sure that other governments don’t discriminate in their provisions of things. Of course, there’s a lot of law involved there and you know, it has to be a particular class of students and things like that. But that’s the role it should have as an enforcer, not as a supplier. And we should want more, much more emphasis on people in states saying to the states. You are responsible for this and what you are doing is inequitable. It can also apply to districts, of course. I mean, if you have a big district, lots of schools and they are inevitably providing things within the district, the same thing should happen. It should start with state enforcement of equity or equality under the law. But if they don’t do it again, then the federal government can be involved. But it’s not the federal government’s job to pay for this, and I think I should always remember, and I never do. But in the background of all the things that we tell the federal government to spend money on is that we have a 37, almost $37 trillion deficit or debt. And so the federal government, well, it seems to be able to print money. It can’t print money forever. And so everything we ask it to pay for, we tend to ignore. It doesn’t actually have the money to do it. It’s got to reach into many future generations and say, well, you’re going to pay for this. And so that’s a problem too. And we need to remember that there are lots of great things. Valuable things the federal government could pay for.
Speaker
There.
Neal McCluskey
But we’ve got to remember, it’s got limited resources just like everybody else.
Kevin Hogan
Yeah. So I mentioned this earlier as well, just talking about the confusion and some despair involved with our readers and our listeners about what’s going to happen next. And I know it’s not under the umbrella of the Department of Education. The E rate is one of these federal government programs and you talk about providers versus enforcers. I think it has been identified amongst our community as one of the great successes of the federal government, enabling the use of the Internet in schools. So and, and you’re going from 1996 when it was first introduced to where it’s basically been a bipartisan agreement and it has progressed year over year over year. Is that and and now there’s a worry that that’s gonna go away too. I mean, that’s kind of it’s kind of like part and parcel of the idea that, you know, the part of education. What’s next is that. Do you have thoughts when it comes to regards to E rate in general and that effect or or that worry?
Neal McCluskey
Yeah. So as you can imagine, I’m not a big fan of E rate. Again, I don’t think this is something the federal government should be involved in. I haven’t focused on it a whole lot in part because it’s not part of the Department of Education. And that has been the focus. But I do follow a lot of education news and I haven’t seen anybody. Mentioned E rate as something that they want to eliminate, at least not somebody in the Trump kind of doge ambit. But maybe someone would go after the E rate. My guess would be if someone is going to do something with it. It could be that the Congress is heading to budget reconciliation and that seems like the kind of mechanism by which irate might be affected because it’s a whole lot of tax and spend kind of stuff. That’s very in the weeds, and there’s going to be a whole lot of things thrown in there. Honestly, I have no idea how E rate would sort of measure in their accounting calculus, good, bad, indifferent. But that’s probably where it will be affected. I don’t think it’s something that Trump will necessarily target or Doge will necessarily target because it’s not really exactly a program or an agency. It’s not something you can just kind of pin down and say, look, here’s the building where all this happens and it employs all these bureaucrats. So my guess is it’s probably. Safe for now, because it’s probably flying under most budget cutter radars. But if it isn’t that, it’s probably going to be. If people are paying attention, it’ll be part of this budget. Reconciliation is my guess and it has not been one of the major topics of discussion for that. But the main thing they’re discussing right now is just can the Senate and House agree on basically how to do it.
Kevin Hogan
Right, I know the toughest part of this conversation would be to end it. There’s so much. There’s so many different aspects of this, but maybe to wrap up, I know in one of the pieces that you wrote, I guess it was last week or the week before when you were dressing kind of like state officials, it was reassuring, actually, or 1 pager in terms. While the department might be going away, some of the elements of it warrant. If we can wrap up a little bit, maybe do you have a similar message to our readers, our listeners, who might be at that district level who again are concerned about the way they manage their buildings, their schools?
Neal McCluskey
So again, I haven’t seen any talk. Talk from the administration, now, originally just from Trump or from Musk, but also now Linda McMahon. That suggests there are big cuts to programs coming, and so, and that includes the big pots of money, like Title 1 and IDEA. So if you receive money those ways, I don’t anticipate there will be. Any or at least not sizable cuts in those. Where we are seeing more cuts and this is kind of developed just since Trump took office and we’ve seen dodge operating, it’s a lot of targeting of employees. So what could happen is a lot of employees that are at the Department of Education. Sort of moving money along and administering programs as they may be gone and they’re it’s possible that that will. Have a negative impact on how quickly things are done, or how accurately they’re done, so that might be something to look out for, but the worry that a lot of programs and and or large funds are going to be zeroed out. I haven’t seen anything from the administration that says they want to do that and they acknowledge that they can’t do that. Without Congress acting and for Congress to act except in budget reconciliation, but generally, if we’re talking about eliminating programs, it’s not through budget reconciliation and then they would need 60 votes in the Senate. There are only 53. Tokens and I think at least two of those are unlikely to vote for any major cuts, so I just don’t think there will be large slashing reductions made in spending that used to be on the Department of Education, but may be under a few other departments going forward.
Kevin Hogan
Well, you know once again. I appreciate your time and your insights. I know that you’re really deep into all of this stuff, and I think your words actually couldn’t be reassuring to a lot of our audience about that. They’ll be able to continue to do the work that they do with what they wish to do. So thanks again.
Neal McCluskey
My pleasure. Thank you.
Kevin Hogan
And that’s all we have for this edition of innovations in Education. Be sure to go to eschoolnews.com for all the latest news, analysis and other resources you may need during these uncertain times. Once again, thanks for listening.
It’s not often that I have trouble finding people to discuss the politics of public education. Of course, nothing is … Read more Innovation in Education, Podcast Articles, administration, Department of Education, ed-tech, Education, IT, news, public education, school, trends eSchool News
