By Maria Maalouf
President Trump’s announcements that he is going to abolish the Federal Department of Education was no surprise because it was a campaign promise that he reiterated many times and it has been a long demand by conservatives and Republicans. The questions are: Will President Trump succeed in cancelling the Department of Education, and what will be the consequences of such a decision?
Trump does not want to miss this opportunity since he has a majority of Republicans in the two houses of Congress and they will vote for his decision to abolish the Department of Education. Republicans and conservatives do not like the federal education policy seeing it as the enforcement of liberal policies and biases on American schools and families. They think that it hinders the policy known as school choice.
School choice is an expression for education options that permits students and families to select alternatives to public schools. It has a nexus with the taxing system in the U.S. It is called the school voucher system. It works when a family pays for the private education of their children and they register the money paid as tax deductible. This is why the liberals and the Democrats fear that public education must be supported by a Federal Government agency that will provide funding for the public schools systems in the United States.
In turn, pre-college education in America is related to the States. The Department of Education is seen as too powerful and too imposing, trying to dictate how states must abide by a unified curriculum and one policy that has standard notions about what constitutes good education. Several States feel that the U.S. Department of Education does not benefit them and does not give them enough money to help implement the policies that it mandates. In addition, education is also a process of constant improvement and reform. This is due to the changes in the knowledge and the demographic and population growth that the United States has been undergoing. The Department of Education has been in existence since 1979 when President Jimmy Carter created it. It has not changed much since that date, and it has not been able to keep up with the pace of change that the American society is witnessing.
The tenth Amendment in the Bill of Rights gives the power and authority to the States to determine what kind of public policies they will promote. This includes education. Therefore, the U.S. Government should not set up general education programs for the whole fifty states and the District of Columbia. A federal policy of education is a meddling in how States are educating their residents’ children. It should not allow any bureaucratic interference to occur in the education of the students.
Trump claims that the Department of Education is very expensive. It embraces more than eight sub- departments and sub-agencies. It has four thousand employees. Its budget is $70 billion dollars annually. When adding other federal spending like Head Start and the School Lunch Program, that budget jumps to more than $100 billion dollars. It could increase to higher figures because of inflation. There is also a tendency by many liberals and Democrats in Congress to push for higher government spending. This means that President Trump wants to save money and to make people pay less taxes. Moreover, conservatives multiply the budget figure for every year by the number of years which the U.S. Department of Education has been around. The figure could be an accumulated budget of over one trillion dollars.
In truth, many officials in the U.S. Department of Education have admitted that many of its policies have failed. They counted the following policies and procedures as shortcomings: Common Core,
No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, Head Start, and most recently the Every Student Succeeds Act. They acknowledged that these programs did not work. There is also a fixed feature in the way that department works. It has a penchant to collect data and make complex data analysis patterns and models that have little impact on both the students’ performance and the schools’ administration. This provides the rationale to question the effectiveness of the U.S. Department of Education and wonder as to why it continued despite its failure throughout 46 years.
President Trump views education policy as a market policy. It has to rely on incentives, investment, feedback, and recovery in case educational outcomes are affected badly. Markets do well when they have freedoms. Therefore, schools will do better when they have the freedom to apply flexible policies to enhance the learning process and the educational environment. President Trump desires more parental responsibility and guidance in the educational process. Yet, he has to address other issues such as the future of the grants and students’ loans that are part of the Department of Education policy. Most likely, he will transfer them to another Federal agency. At the end, the ultimate success for Trump’s cancellation of the U.S. Department of Education will be measured by how many governors of the fifty States will endorse his decision. It is expected that the majority of them will agree with him on that plan.
