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unidentified
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Every morning and it is unbiased and you bring in factual information for the callers to understand where they are in their comments. | |
| This is probably the only place that we can hear honest opinion of Americans across the country. | ||
| You guys at C-SPAN are doing such a wonderful job of allowing free exchange of ideas without a lot of interruptions. | ||
| Thank you C-SPAN for being a light in the dark. | ||
| We are back this morning with Senior Fellow and Director of Education Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, Rick Hess, joining us to talk about the Education Department. | ||
| Mr. Hess, thanks for joining us this morning. | ||
| I want to begin with yesterday at the very top of the White House briefing. | ||
| We heard from the Education Secretary Linda McMahon. | ||
| I want to show our viewers what she had to say. | ||
| Come back and get your response. | ||
| The Democrats government shutdown proved that without a doubt, now I'll reiterate what you said, that the Department of Education was not necessary during the shutdown. | ||
| Now, this is what I've seen already on my 50-state tour that I've embarked on. | ||
| Educators are innovating in their schools. | ||
| States are customizing their budgets and standards, and post-secondary institutions are planning for the economy of the future. | ||
| We're not leading them. | ||
| They are informing us. | ||
| That's why our final mission as a department is to fully empower states to carry the torch of our educational renaissance. | ||
| Education is local. | ||
| It should be overseen locally by those who best know local needs. | ||
| We're not ending federal support for education. | ||
| We are ending federal micromanagement and paving the way for education renewal through state reforms like school choice, the science of reading, and restoring the right priorities in higher education. | ||
| President Trump promised to send education back to the states, and we're keeping that promise. | ||
| America's Next Generation will look back on the work we've carried out, thankful for an education system that prioritizes students over bureaucracy. | ||
| Rick Hess, your response, reaction to the Education Secretary there, and what do you know about what has been done so far? | ||
| You're obviously following this from your perch at AEI. | ||
| Yeah, so what happened this week was the department signed what they call interagency agreements to move a number of programs to four other cabinet agencies, Health and Human Services, Department of Labor, Interior, and State. | ||
| Interagency agreements are a standard feature of Washington. | ||
| There's lots of these. | ||
| What's different about what the department did was instead of using them to do small portions of a job, it's used them to move over whole programs. | ||
| How big a deal is this? | ||
| Depends how you look at it. | ||
| At one level, if you're a student, if you're a teacher, if you're a professor, there's really no impact. | ||
| This doesn't change any of the money that Congress has appropriated. | ||
| This doesn't change or end any of the programs. | ||
| It really just changes who's managing that in Washington. | ||
| It is, though, a big deal in the sense that it fundamentally changes the role of the Department of Education. | ||
| It's moving all these programs over to the other agencies. | ||
| The theory here is that this could be good. | ||
| It could make services more seamless. | ||
| For instance, if the Department of Labor is also handling career and technical education, it certainly reduces the footprint of the Department of Education. | ||
| But the ways in which it's important is really more of an inside-the-beltway conversation rather than one that's likely to have a significant impact on Americans when they think about schools or college. | ||
| I want to note from USA today the Education Department and the moves that have been made under the Trump administration so far. | ||
| Labor Department will administer programs for colleges, universities, and K-12 schools, Office of Elementary, Secondary Education, and Office of Post-Secondary Education. | ||
| The Interior Department will oversee responsibilities related to Indigenous education. | ||
| HHS will manage grants for parenting college students and assessing accreditation standards for foreign medical students. | ||
| And the State Department will do more work related to foreign language studies and international education. | ||
| Rick has, is that what you're talking about here? | ||
| Yes, that's exactly right. | ||
| Most of the hyperbole about this, the folks who are cheering it or the folks who are worried about it, are overstating how this matters. | ||
| Again, these programs aren't going away. | ||
| So the Title I program for low-income students, every dollar Congress that appropriated earlier in the year is still going out the door. | ||
| Pell Grants for higher ed, unchanged. | ||
| Workforce pro workforce support programs, unchanged. | ||
| What's not changing is whether the money is getting spent. | ||
| What is changing is where it's getting spent in Washington. | ||
| Again, the way to understand why this might be good is if it simplifies things for states or colleges to manage these grants, that could be helpful. | ||
| If you think the Department of Education has been bureaucratic and often frustratingly slow, as I do, this is a chance to potentially speed those things up. | ||
| Critics also, though, have fair questions to ask. | ||
| Are we actually going to make things simpler on states and colleges, or is this going to actually make things more confusing? | ||
| Should we be confident that moving these programs out of the Department of Ed to these other agencies will make them operate smoother? | ||
| Are these other agencies less bureaucratic or less frustrating? | ||
| You know, it's not obviously clear how this is going to play out, and it's really incumbent on Secretary McMahon's department both to execute on this, to explain how this is working, and to anticipate and address any problems that might arise. | ||
| The U.S. Education Department began operating in 1980. | ||
| It employs 4,400 people. | ||
| The 2024 budget was $238 billion. | ||
| So, Rick has, do you expect that the number of employees goes way down and that that money that is given to the Education Department is significantly less? | ||
| So, the number of employees is already well down, in fact. | ||
| Doge earlier in the year, the Department of Education was one of Doge's big targets. | ||
| After several rounds of cuts, it's now under 2,000 employees, so less than half of what it was nominally in January. | ||
| What's going to happen is whole units of the department are now being moved over to these other agencies, or the functions are being moved, and some of the employees are going to be let go. | ||
| So, absolutely, the department is now much smaller than it was 10 months ago, and is going to be smaller still. | ||
| But none of that money actually changes. | ||
| I mean, here's where it's uniquely Washington. | ||
| The way to think about this is if like if you get a letter, if you get a letter or an email that tells you your insurance company is reducing its workforce by 50%, that might have an impact on your actual insurance. | ||
| It certainly might have an impact on customer service, but it doesn't necessarily change the insurance you have. | ||
| That's what we're talking about here. | ||
| Congress decides how much money to spend on education, educational programs. | ||
| Congress has made its decision. | ||
| It's in the midst, obviously, of making decisions for next year. | ||
| However much Congress decides to spend is going to flow. | ||
| What we're talking about here is whether those resources are going to flow through the department or through another agency. | ||
| Rick Hess is here. | ||
| He is the Director of Education Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute. | ||
| He'll take your questions and your comments about how education works in this country. | ||
| Start dialing in now. | ||
| If you're a parent or a student, 202-748-8000. | ||
| Educators and administrators, your line this morning is 202-748-8001. | ||
| All others can call in at 202-748-8002. | ||
| And of course, you can text if you don't want to call, include your first name, city, and state at 202-748-8003. | ||
| Rick Hess, is Linda McMahon, the Secretary of Education and the President, moving to completely abolish the Education Department, or would that take an act of Congress? | ||
| To abolish it would take an act of Congress. | ||
| Congress created the Department of Education under President Jimmy Carter in 1979. | ||
| As you noted, it opened in 1980. | ||
| Only Congress can dismantle an agency that Congress has created. | ||
| But what we're seeing here is something that I think even many of us who have been highly critical of the Department of Ed and who have hoped to see it downsize, this is much further than I think we thought they would be able to go without congressional action. | ||
| It's important to understand Republicans have been trying to eliminate or radically downsize the Department of Education for 45 years, partly because there's concerns that it tends to create bloat, that it has generated lots of red tape for schools and for colleges. | ||
| And there's a real frustration that it has often seemed to serve as a one-stop shop for Democratic interest groups, particularly the teacher unions. | ||
| But you'll notice from 1980 through President Trump's first term, there was never any real movement on trying to shut down the department. | ||
| So a lot of folks are wondering: well, what's different this time? | ||
| Why, after 40 plus years, are they suddenly so intent on it? | ||
| And I think one way to understand this is that the experience over the last four years under President Biden and during the pandemic, in many ways, was a breaking point for a lot of Republicans. | ||
| The Department of Education played a role in helping the National School Board Association sick the FBI on parents who were worried about school curricula. | ||
| It offered, it turned out backdoor access to the teacher unions to delay school reopening. | ||
| There was a highly controversial effort to spend a half trillion dollars on loan forgiveness, transferring money from taxpayers to borrowers. | ||
| One way to understand a lot of what this is about is it's really an effort to make the department so small and so weak that it can no longer serve as a source of that kind of mischief. | ||
| And so if you're trying to say, what are the Republicans really doing? | ||
| That's a lot of it. | ||
| Rachel Gineman, who is the head of a union representing Education Department workers, said this in USA Today, breaking apart the Department of Education and moving its responsibilities elsewhere will only create more confusion for schools and colleges, deepen public distrust, and ultimately harm students and families. | ||
| Let's get to calls. | ||
| Nick in Michigan, an educator. | ||
| Morning, Nick. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, Greta. | |
| Thanks. | ||
| I have 65 years of experience in education, 10 as a student in K-12, and another five in college, and five as a research assistant in graduate school, 40 as a professor in the nation's top public university, and five as a retired professor. | ||
| And the Department of Education did not exist before 1975. | ||
| So for 200 years, the U.S. worked without the Department of Education. | ||
| And after it became a department, and we spend all these billions, do you think students that graduate from our schools are better today than they were before the department? | ||
| Ask that question to yourself. | ||
| All right, Nick, I'm going to jump in. | ||
| Rick Hess, how do the U.S. students compare to other countries? | ||
| Middling. | ||
| There's two major international assessments, the PISA and the TIMS. | ||
| We tend to score fair to middling on both. | ||
| The questioner raises a terrific issue. | ||
| For folks to understand, if the department were abolished, those federal programs, federal student loans, Pell Grants, money for special education, would not go away. | ||
| Most of these programs predated the Department of Education. | ||
| Washington has had an office of education since the 1800s. | ||
| What really changed in 1980 was President Carter moved a lot of these educational programs into one building, and we named it the Department of Education. | ||
| So when we're talking about whether or not you abolish the department, that's actually a different conversation from which educational programs should Washington be involved in or not involved in. | ||
| Rhonda, Jersey Shore, a parent, good morning to you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, good morning, Greta. | |
| You know, I don't understand how the United States Congress is allowing Donald Trump to divert all of our treasury to his personal desires. | ||
| This is all Project 2025. | ||
| They want to take our money, divert it to these private Christian schools and these Catholic schools, which black and brown people aren't being allowed to go. | ||
| They took away food, lunch. | ||
| I don't understand. | ||
| Where is the oversight? | ||
| Where is the oversight over the treasury? | ||
| First of all, Donald Trump should be impeached. | ||
| All right, Rhonda, I'm going to jump in on the education part of this. | ||
| Rick Hess, is their money going to these Christian charter schools that she was talking about? | ||
| And what about her argument here? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| So there's a couple things. | ||
| The school lunch program, as far as I know, has not been affected. | ||
| That's actually run out of the Department of Agriculture. | ||
| So if listeners are wondering, what does this mean for school lunch? | ||
| That's actually not affected by what we're talking about. | ||
| There's no such thing as a Christian charter school. | ||
| There's charter schools in the United States. | ||
| There was a Supreme Court case which ended 4-4. | ||
| Right now, states write laws which require that charter schools be non-sectarian. | ||
| Charter schools are not allowed to have a religious component at this point in time. | ||
| That may change going forward. | ||
| There are obviously voucher and education savings accounts programs in which states allow parents, kind of like you would with a Pell Grant voucher or a Section 8 housing voucher, to use state funds to attend private schools of their choice. | ||
| That's not really implicated in anything that we're talking about about this week's news. | ||
| Stephanie in Brooklyn, a parent, welcome to the conversation. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, yes. | |
| Hi, good morning. | ||
| Morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm sorry, concerned, because Project 2025 and part of it is to target minorities and mostly women. | |
| They're stopping them from getting degrees. | ||
| They're taking away their degrees. | ||
| They don't want us to prosper in America. | ||
| They want us to be subservant to the man. | ||
| They do not want us to work anymore, especially minority black ladies. | ||
| They're taking everything away from us as part of Project 2025. | ||
| All right, that's two calls in a row about that. | ||
| Rick Hess, that's two calls in a row saying that this move, these moves at the Education Department is outlined in Project 2025. | ||
| Can you respond to that? | ||
| Sure, yeah, that's absolutely true. | ||
| Project 2025, for folks who've maybe seen the clickbait and understand exactly what it is, there's a think tank in Washington, D.C. called the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing conservative foundation, excuse me, think tank, that has, you know, was established in the early 1970s. | ||
| Every year since 1980, Heritage has published what they call a mandate for change. | ||
| In 1980, it was hugely influential in shaping the Reagan administration agenda. | ||
| Project Heritage, excuse me, Heritage's 2024 version of this was called Project 2025. | ||
| And it's a collection of a lot of ideas promoted both by conservative scholars at Heritage and elsewhere. | ||
| And one of those objectives, like we've mentioned, has been to do away with the U.S. Department of Education. | ||
| That's been true for 45 years. | ||
| It was true again. | ||
| And so, sure. | ||
| But it's not so much, I would suggest, that there's anything conspiratorial about Project 2025 being responsible. | ||
| Project 2025 was kind of like a group chat of a whole bunch of what a bunch of conservative advocates had been hoping to see on education. | ||
| And because of the nature of this administration and because of what unfolded the last four years, efforts to dismantle the department have moved in a way that simply never happened before. | ||
| Elijah is an Upper Marlborough, Maryland Democratic parent. | ||
| Excuse me, parent, Elijah. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, good morning. | |
| And first and foremost, just to comment on the notion that Project 2025 with some sort of group chat is just patently irresponsible to say. | ||
| We know that there was actual documentation and that the administration has shown in very clear ways that they intend on carrying out a large portion of that policy or that documentation that's been put in place. | ||
| But let me just pivot real quick to the Education Department. | ||
| You sound like a very rational person. | ||
| Disassembling the Education Department and placing it throughout different bodies of the government, or let's just say within the executive branch, to me sounds insane, right? | ||
| I mean, that is going to cause more confusion than what it's already causing right now. | ||
| You don't go into a department and just simply do away with it because you don't like how it's functioning. | ||
| Go in, reform it, and kind of move forward that way. | ||
| But to go in and wholesale change it and take pieces out and put it in different areas is going to cause way more confusion than it's already causing right now. | ||
| Let's take your point. | ||
| Rick Hess. | ||
| Yeah, so first off, if I misspoke, when I said group chat, I meant kind of crowdsourced, the Project 25. | ||
| It's absolutely a real document. | ||
| It's hundreds of pages long, and it absolutely does have a blueprint on a whole series of policy areas, including education. | ||
| What I meant by group chat was that it's, you know, it's essentially a compilation of what a lot of different right-leaning advocates have urged on education. | ||
| I mean, I think the caller's question is a good one about if your concern is that the federal government creates issues with the amount of red tape that surrounds these federal grants, that it has all kinds of really frustrating reporting requirements for school district colleges, things like time and effort reporting requirements and supplement, | ||
| not supplant strictures that if you spend time with superintendents or college presidents can make their lives difficult when it comes to spending federal funds. | ||
| These are real things. | ||
| And it's absolutely a fair question to say, should we address these more effectively by scraping the rules, by taking a hard look at what's not working, by reforming these programs? | ||
| Is that a better strategy than moving them to other agencies? | ||
| Hopefully they will do both. | ||
| I think there is a plausible argument for moving them to these other agencies. | ||
| When you're dealing with workforce issues, for instance, it's good to have both workforce support and career and technical education potentially handled by the same folks. | ||
| But at the same time, the caller's not wrong that this can actually start to create confusion or headaches of its own. | ||
| Either way, though, all of those rules and regulations that Secretary McMahon alluded to in your clip, they don't go away just because this stuff moves from the Department of Education somewhere else. | ||
| There is still a need for this administration or any future administration to take a hard look at how all these rules and requirements may be making it harder for educators in K-12 or higher ed to spend money effectively to run programs effectively. | ||
| And that work needs to be done wherever, at whatever agency these programs sit. | ||
| Laura, Cleveland, Ohio. | ||
| Good morning to you, Laura. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, good morning. | |
| I have a question about how would moving the Department of Education to the labor department will affect the curriculum of our children. | ||
| You know, what they will be taught, what the teachers will be able to teach about history. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Laura, we'll take your question and your concern. | ||
| It's a great question. | ||
| And here's where a lot of this, again, on both sides, are responsible for sowing a lot of confusion. | ||
| Gret, as you mentioned, in January, when it was at full, the Department of Ed had 4,000 employees. | ||
| None of those 4,000 are teachers. | ||
| None of those 4,000 are professors. | ||
| None of them are superintendents or curriculum developers. | ||
| The Department of Education is mostly in charge of moving money around. | ||
| Student loans, Pell Grants, money for children with special needs, and so forth. | ||
| So there is actually federal law that says the Department of Education is not allowed to write a curriculum or require school districts or colleges to use particular curriculum. | ||
| That's actually been an issue earlier in the year with some of the administration's efforts around higher education reform. | ||
| So nothing should change in terms of your children's curriculum. | ||
| The questioner does raise an issue. | ||
| For instance, one of the programs getting moved to the Department of Labor is the federal charter schools program. | ||
| It is very fair to ask, as some of the questioners have, why we suspect that the charter schools program is going to be better supported and better run at the Department of Labor than it was at the Department of Education. | ||
| This is not a question of curriculum, but it is a question of, you know, Secretary McMahon's team is a job to do of making sure that these things work as promised and of explaining to American voters and taxpayers how they can be confident this is working like the way they've promised. | ||
| Susan Gaithersberg, Marilyn. | ||
| Hi, Sue. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| I wanted to make a point about: does your guest remember we used to have a Department of HEW, Health, Education, and Welfare? | ||
| And as a campaign promise by Jimmy Carter to the teachers union, the NEA, which stands for the National Extortion Agency, he promised to move the education over because the Teachers Union had supported his campaign. | ||
| It was a campaign promise. | ||
| And since then, education quality has gone way down. | ||
| And if you don't believe me, go to any high school that is graduating students with a high school diploma, and then they go to a junior college and have to take remedial English, remedial math, remedial reading. | ||
| So what we need to do is end the Department of Education, get rid of the influence of the NEA, and then maybe kids can start learning again and not be beholden to a private political organization that only supports Democrats. | ||
| Rickett? | ||
| Yeah, the caller makes it. | ||
| So it is absolutely true that what happened was when President Carter was running for president in 1976, in order to get the first ever endorsement from the teachers union, the National Education Association, he said, I'm going to create you a Department of Education. | ||
| There was a lot of opposition, a lot of questions about how this would work, but Congress passed it in 79, and the caller's exactly right. | ||
| What had been the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, education programs, some of them were left behind, like Head Start. | ||
| Some of them were moved over. | ||
| Some other programs were pulled over from random other parts of the government, like State Department and Interior. | ||
| So in some ways, what you're doing is you're reassembling agencies the way they used to run. | ||
| And there's reasonable arguments about whether it makes more sense for, say, education for Native American students on reservations to be handled at the Department of Interior by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. | ||
| These are reasonable questions. | ||
| You know, if this were a commercial era, we'd probably be talking about this with less vitriol. | ||
| As far as American student achievement, I would say the callers got it part right and part wrong. | ||
| If you look at academic achievement today in the U.S., it is a debacle. | ||
| Our students have been losing ground for over a decade, well before the pandemic. | ||
| If you look at the National Assessment of Educational Progress in Reading and Math, it's absolutely true. | ||
| There's just horror stories when you look at what's going on in college in terms of declining expectations, falling workloads, real questions about student preparation and performance. | ||
| But you will hear folks tell simple stories about the role of the Department of Ed. | ||
| The truth is, we saw remarkable gains in this country from 1992 to 2012. | ||
| 20 years of gains in which our students, especially low-income and low-performing students, had outsized gains. | ||
| And since 2012, we have seen across Democratic and Republican presidential administrations, a 12-13-year steady decline. | ||
| This does not map onto the history of the Department of Education. | ||
| It maps onto some other trends we could might want to talk about, like social media and cell phones. | ||
| But I think it's important that we not romanticize the Department of Education, either the notion that it's really important for us to serve kids well, or to imagine that while I think the Department of Education is problematic and has generated too much red tape and has too often been too political, especially the last four years, I think it's a big mistake to imagine that just getting rid of the Department of Ed is going to make a big difference in the lives of children or families. | ||
| Rick Hess, we are all out of time. | ||
| The director and senior fellow for education policy at the American Enterprise Institute. | ||
| Thank you for the conversation. | ||
| Good to be with you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
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| Well, next, immigration advocates hold a press conference addressing immigration and customs enforcement, or ICE, activities around Chicago. | ||
| They expressed concerns about the Broadview, Illinois detention facility, as well as a recent Seventh Circuit Appeals Court ruling halting the release of Of ice detainees. |