We believe R. Shep Melnick’s The Crucible of Desegregation is the most comprehensive and evenhanded discussion of school desegregation research and policy issues in America. Yet some of the topics that make the book evenhanded were absent from his recent article in Education Next reflecting on the 70th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education decision. We would like to comment on these missing topics.

In his book, Melnick covers topics that are too often omitted in academic discourse on school desegregation policy. One important issue is the failure of desegregation to significantly raise Black and Hispanic achievement levels; another is the problem of white flight, which undermined the effectiveness of desegregation plans that relied on mandatory busing.

The article does mention the ambivalent conclusion of Sean Reardon and his co-authors that “It remains unclear if . . . racial segregation affects student achievement,” and he cites a study by Rucker Johnson that found significant positive impacts of desegregation on long-term outcomes such as education attainment and adult wages. But Melnick’s book presents much stronger evidence from a large group of authors and studies that find no consistent effects of desegregation on the academic achievement of Black students.

These works include the early studies by one of us (Armor) and by Nancy St. John, both of which found very limited or no effects of desegregation on Black achievement. Melnick also summarized in his book one of the more rigorous assessments of desegregation and Black achievement, a meta-analysis sponsored by the National Institute of Education, and the conclusion of respected methodologist Thomas Cook that the study found no significant effects on math achievement and very small effects on reading achievement.

The book does not mention several more recent and more rigorous studies led by Armor and by Joshua Angrist, a Nobel Prize winning economist. In a 2018 study, Armor, Gary Marks, and Aron Malatinzky used student fixed effects models to analyze statewide test scores for several states, finding no significant effects of school socioeconomic status or racial composition on achievement. Angrist and his colleagues have applied quasi-experimental methods to show that busing programs for desegregation in Boston and New York currently have no significant effects on student test scores.

One of the outcomes that Melnick did not pay enough attention to in the book is the impact of white flight and why courts largely ignored it when ordering school desegregation. White flight undermines school desegregation plans because there can be no desegregation without white students. A school district with a handful of white students in every school may be perfectly racially balanced, but no one would claim that its schools are desegregated.

In 1991, the Magnet School Assistance Program in the U.S. Department of Education funded a study of desegregation in 500 school districts. We were co-principal investigators of that study. We found that, after controlling for the normal white enrollment change in the absence of a plan, as well as other variables, districts with a mandatory reassignment plan had a 33 percent reduction in white enrollment as compared to those that never had a plan.

We have examined school districts that kept data on the race of students assigned to attend schools composed predominantly by students of another racial group and then compared who was assigned to who showed up. We call these “No-Show” studies. In Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 56 percent of the white students assigned to schools that were greater than 90 percent Black in 1981 failed to show up. In 1978, the no-show rate was 57 percent in Los Angeles and 54 percent in Boston. In Savannah-Chatham County, the white no-show rate for schools above 90 percent Black was 42 percent in 1971 and 1972. By 1984, many of these schools in Savannah had no white students at all, causing the Justice Department to file a motion for further relief. It was a common practice in many school districts with mandatory reassignment plans to keep reassigning white students to the same schools where other white students had previously failed to show up. Many of those schools remained racially identifiable because white students continued not to enroll.

Why did the courts refuse to consider white flight in their decisions? In our opinion, it had to do with their failure to define school desegregation—a theme of Melnick’s scholarship—and with the general propensity of courts to follow precedent. If a court believed school desegregation was racial balance, it would not matter that almost all the white students had left so long as the remaining whites were evenly spread across schools. An ambitious judge was better off ordering a mandatory reassignment plan because those decisions were rarely overturned by higher courts. Only “freedom of choice” plans, which preserved neighborhood schools but permitted Black students to attend schools serving white students, were overturned.

Though Melnick describes these plans as “little more than a transparent fraud,” the notion that freedom of choice was a failure is contradicted by the evidence. If the definition of failure is that the dual school system was not dismantled, freedom of choice was not a failure. In our random sample of 500 districts, only two southern school districts had no Black students in white schools in 1968, which meant that the dual school system had been dismantled. Over time, the southern districts that had no formal desegregation plan, which included neighborhood schools with freedom of choice, achieved far greater interracial exposure, as measured by the percentage of white students in the average Black child’s school, than other districts.

Professor Melnick offers a reasonable assessment of Brown’s legacy, both in his article and in his book from which it draws. For the complex and emotionally fraught issues raised by school desegregation policies, a plurality of perspectives helps to round out that legacy.

David Armor is professor emeritus of public policy in the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University. Christine Rossell is professor emerita of political science at Boston University.

My Uber driver had on talk radio as I got into the car. They were talking about President Biden’s wonderful plan to forgive billions in student debt.

“Boy, that’s exciting stuff, isn’t it?” I marveled. “All those long-suffering borrowers are finally getting some relief.”

She looked up at me in the rearview mirror. “You think it’s a good thing, huh?” she asked.

“Sure,” I said. “And not just me! I mean, Representative Bobby Scott says it’ll ‘be lifechanging for millions of student loan borrowers.’ AFT president Randi Weingarten says the president is determined ‘to remove the shackles of student debt’ in order ‘to improve people’s lives.’”

My driver didn’t seem to share my bliss. “They chose to take these loans, didn’t they?” she asked.

“Well, yes, but—”

“So they could go to college or get those fancy graduate degrees to make more money than us working types, right? Meanwhile, my friends who go to college are using their loans to help pay for rent, internet, smartphones, meals . . . the stuff the rest of us pay for on our own.”

“Yes, but I don’t think you quite understand—”

“Have you ever bought a car or a house?”

“Uh, yeah,” I said. “Why?”

“I pay for this car,” she said. “I paid for community college. These people borrowed money to go to college. They promised to pay it back. Why am I supposed to pay their bills, too?”

“Look, I don’t think you quite get it,” I said. “I mean, ParentsTogether has written about Crystal Payne, who has $80,000 in student loans. Her payments take up ‘a big chunk of her paycheck.’ She says that it’s ‘disheartening’ to have to pay the bill rather than ‘things like play therapy or other enriching activities for her son.’ You see?”

“She borrowed a lot of money for college and doesn’t want to pay it back. So? Trust me, I don’t want to pay my car payment.”

“Don’t you think she deserves a break?” I asked. “She didn’t get what she wanted out of college.”

“Well, then her college can repay the loans,” she said. “They’re the ones who got the $80,000.”

“That’s not how it works,” I said. “MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow has pointed out that this is really about Republicans wanting ‘banks to make more money off people who took out loans to go to college.’”

“That’s not true,” she said. “The talk radio people were just saying that the Democrats got the banks out of student lending back when Obama was president. This isn’t about banks; it’s about whether taxpayers have to pay someone else’s loans.”

“That’s not a very sophisticated take,” I said. “After all, the New York Times explains that the president’s plan ‘could help rally support among young voters.’ The people who owe this money really don’t want to pay it back. And this could help Biden beat Trump, a dangerous authoritarian who doesn’t respect the law and wants to use government to reward his friends.”

“But Biden’s ignoring the law and giving away half a trillion dollars to buy votes. Isn’t that just the sort of thing they’re warning that Trump would do? Why is it okay when Biden does it? After all, I remember hearing both Biden and Nancy Pelosi admitting the president didn’t have the power to do this—right up until Biden did it.”

“You’re missing the point,” I said. “A lot of people drop out or pay too much for a graduate degree. They feel like they got ripped off. And, heck, fewer people might go to college if they have to pay for it.”

“So?”

“Well, we want people to go to college,” I said.

“Who does?”

“We do,” I said. “College makes us better citizens and better people.”

“Really? I drive a lot of different people, and I’ve never thought those who went to college are better. They’re just more impressed with themselves. From what my friends tell me, college sounds like it’s mostly about sleeping late, taking easy classes, and scrolling on phones. How is that supposed to make you a better person, anyway?”

“I just don’t think you appreciate the stress these borrowers are under,” I said.

She looked puzzled. “Didn’t the radio say that the people who borrowed this money already got a pandemic ‘pause’? That they didn’t have to make any payments for three years?”

“Sure,” I said. “And that’s—”

“And there was zero-interest. And credit was given as if they had made payments?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said. “And that’s—”

“So, they already got over $200 billion in free money. Meanwhile, the rest of us still had to make our car payments and mortgage payments.”

“That’s why it’s so unfair to ask people to repay it now,” I said. “You see, they’ve gotten used to having that money to spend. They’ve spent it on clothes, vacations, and ‘play therapy.’ It’s inhumane to insist they suddenly start repaying those loans now.”

“Since I didn’t borrow $80,000 for college, maybe I’m not smart enough to understand,” she said, “but this sounds nuts. We gave these people a huge break and now, instead of saying thanks, they say that’s why we need to give them even more. What a bunch of deadbeats.”

“I don’t think you’re showing a lot of empathy,” I said.

“You know, I used to be in a bad relationship with a deadbeat,” she said. “It worked this same way. I thought I was being empathetic. But my therapist helped me see I was really being an enabler.”

We looked at each other through the rearview mirror.

“Let me ask you this,” she said finally. “If people don’t expect to repay their college loans, aren’t they likely to borrow more? And won’t colleges just go ahead and raise prices even higher? I mean, if the government was going to pay your Uber fare, you wouldn’t really care how much it cost.”

I was troubled by her callousness. I suggested she should try to be more compassionate.

“Maybe so,” she said. “But it seems like Biden’s trying to play me for a sucker. That’s not my idea of compassion.”

Frederick Hess is an executive editor of Education Next and the author of the blog “Old School with Rick Hess.”

An Excerpt from Miguel Cardona’s best-selling memoir, Reign of Confusion: My Years of Making It Rain at the U.S. Department of Education (Berkshire House, 2028), pp. 143–144.

Chapter 9: My Free College Plan Comes Together

While pouring money on K–12 schools was a lot of fun, I’m proudest of the plan I devised to deliver “free college” on a scale that no one had previously thought possible.

The White House was still smarting from the collapse of Build Back Better. And some MAGA apologists in the press were claiming the $200 billion in K–12 pandemic aid hadn’t been well spent. So, we knew we wanted to avoid relying on Congress or being accountable for funds.

The president had me over to the Oval. He looked at me coolly, his youthful energy unmistakable. “Our people are angry. We need to give them more stuff,” he said. “Can you make free college happen? That would get all those Warren-lovers off my back!”

He paused. “Well? Can you do it?” he asked, his manly vigor evident in every word.

“Yes, sir,” I promised. “After all, I think it was Ronald Reagan who said, ‘We’re from the government, and we’re here to help.’ You can count on me.”

After the meeting, I talked to a senior White House aide. She shared her dream that, one day, government would get past this weird fixation on balance sheets. Her eloquence haunts me still. “I cry each and every night,” she said, “for the precious souls pressed into capitalist servitude as journalists, attorneys, and DEI trainers, their sacred selves disfigured by debt.” She insisted that I find a way forward. By the time I got back to 400 Maryland, I was fired up!

The White House made it clear that I’d have a free hand, so long as I kept harassing charter schools and making the teachers’ unions happy. And I took full advantage. Our senior staff said we didn’t have the votes to pass anything through Congress, thanks to those MAGA Republicans. And our lawyers said we didn’t have a legal path forward. That’s when I just cracked my knuckles and thought, “This is why I’m here.” It was time to use my old central-office guile.

We needed to bypass obstacles like Congress, law-making, and budgets. Over the next few weeks, a three-step plan took shape.

Step one: My team found a couple sentences in the 20-year-old HEROES law, written to give military personnel a break on student loans when they were deployed post-9/11. Well, we took those phrases, pretended they applied to the pandemic (which was still, totally, completely raging), and said borrowers wouldn’t have to repay $500 billion in student loans. MAGA Republicans sued, the MAGA Supreme Court had to stop us, and the game was afoot.

Step two: Once we’d planted the idea that we could give out free money, we set out on two parallel paths. We started “forgiving” borrowers on a piecemeal basis. A few billion dollars here and there didn’t seem all that newsworthy compared to our HEROES ploy, but it let the president keep sending emails to borrowers telling them he was giving them free money. (That made the president very happy.) Meanwhile, we rewrote Income-Driven Repayment to quietly turn student lending into a vast new entitlement, one that would eventually let us give away trillions of dollars without worrying about Congress or budgets.

Step three: Congress had ordered us to simplify the federal financial aid form (better known as FAFSA). If this worked too smoothly, there was a risk it might strengthen faith in the old-fashioned system. So, we dragged our feet rolling it out as long as we could and then, when we had to move, we made sure that nothing worked. All the while, we kept changing the rules on the loan servicers and blaming them for any headaches. By the end, only MAGA types still thought people should pay for college and that loans could or should be repaid.

Our strategy worked like a charm. It left no money for something like an expanded Pell Grant, ensuring that Congress couldn’t address college costs in some boring, bipartisan fashion. It signaled that loan repayment was an unreasonable expectation, smashing the hoary, inequitable belief that students should pay for college. It encouraged students to borrow more money and community college students to become borrowers. And it infuriated those MAGA Republicans, making sure they wouldn’t compromise on something that might hem us in.

By the time I left office, we were on a glide path to free college in pretty much everything but name—for colleges private and public, for undergrads and graduates, for living expenses as well as tuition. Some observers said it looked like I was playing four-dimensional chess. When others said I seemed too confused for this to be any kind of purposeful master plan, I’d just smile and say, “Confused is as confused does.”

Today, I’m often asked how I got it done—how I poured new dollars into higher ed, boosted President Biden with his base, taught Americans to view student loans as a cash grab, and did it all without worrying about Congress or what the law said. My answer? “That was my job.” And it really was the job of a lifetime.

Frederick Hess is an executive editor of Education Next and the author of the blog “Old School with Rick Hess.”

The ranking Republican on the U.S. Senate’s Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee, Bill Cassidy has represented Louisiana in the upper chamber since 2015. Cassidy recently released a much-discussed report, “Preventing a Lost Generation: Facing a Critical Moment for Students’ Literacy.” As schools struggle to address learning loss, and at a time when “the nation’s report card” finds that just 33 percent of 4th graders are proficient in reading, it’s heartening to see leaders step up. Given that, I reached out to the senator to discuss his report and what he has in mind. Here’s what he had to say.

—Rick

Rick Hess: Senator, you’ve had a long-standing interest in literacy and dyslexia in particular. Can you talk a bit about why this issue is so important to you?

Sen. Bill Cassidy: Literacy—the basic ability to read—is at the heart of all other learning. If students do not learn to read, they cannot read to learn new material in other subjects. There are significant societal impacts for those who cannot read, including being less likely to graduate from high school and more likely to be incarcerated. Also, without a literate workforce, we as a nation cannot fill the 9 million jobs currently open or adequately staff the military, which hurts our competitiveness with other nations.

Within literacy, research shows dyslexia impacts millions of people across the country, specifically an estimated 1 in 5 Americans. Dyslexia is not about an individual’s intelligence but the need for specialized instruction and tools. As a parent of a child with dyslexia, I know how hard it can be to get your child the resources they need to meet their full potential. Unfortunately, many students are not screened for dyslexia until after they have already fallen behind, if at all. And, even after a parent finds out that their child has dyslexia, they may not be able to find or afford a school that provides the proper, tailored education.

We need to have a 21st-century approach to literacy and dyslexia based on science, including early screening and evidence-based instruction, so every child can achieve their God-given potential.

Hess: You recently issued a new report on literacy. What prompted it? And why now?

Sen. Cassidy: We are now at risk of having an entire generation of children—who were in their prime learning years during the pandemic—fail to become productive adults if reading proficiency does not improve. While many states continue to take meaningful steps to improve literacy instruction, more must be done. This report highlights this pressing issue and requests feedback from stakeholders across the nation. This feedback will be crucial to informing our efforts at the federal level so we can better support teachers, parents, students, and schools to ensure every child can read proficiently.

Hess: Your report cites a number of troubling statistics when it comes to reading. What are a few of the data points that you find most illuminating?

Sen. Cassidy: The 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress revealed that two-thirds of 4th and 8th graders are unable to read proficiently. The average reading score for 4th graders is the lowest it has been in over 20 years. For 8th and 12th graders, average scores are near a 30-year low. These numbers should concern us all; they are completely unacceptable.

Hess: As you know, there’s been growing interest in science-based reading instruction. Can you share a few of the key research findings from your report and the kinds of practices or policies that you find especially promising?

Sen. Cassidy: It’s important to be clear that when we say “science of reading,” we’re discussing an evidence-based body of research. It’s not one curriculum or program and it’s not just phonics-based instruction. This body of research has identified key components necessary for students to learn how to read and write and how teachers can best implement these components into reading instruction. Specifically, the science of reading has shown that students need explicit, systematic, and cumulative instruction in each of the five key pillars of literacy—phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension.

The states implementing the science of reading approach especially well are supporting the implementation by deploying literacy coaches, updating teacher-preparation programs, and providing explicit training for current teachers in the science of reading. These states are also supporting all educators—not just reading teachers—in learning evidence-based reading practices. It is crucial that improving student literacy be an all-hands-on-deck effort.

Hess: We’ve seen a number of states launch ambitious efforts to overhaul reading instruction, including your own state of Louisiana. Which states are doing this particularly well and what can we learn from them?

Sen. Cassidy: I’m proud of the work being done in Louisiana to improve student literacy. A key to that success has been the comprehensive nature of these efforts. Louisiana is one of three states that are implementing all 18 components of what science of reading experts outline as a comprehensive literacy policy. Unsurprisingly, Louisiana had the largest gains out of all 50 states in grade reading on the 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress.

There is also the “Mississippi Miracle,” which describes that state’s enormous gains in literacy over the past decade. Mississippi achieved these results by focusing on the implementation of science-of-reading reforms. They didn’t pass a law and just hope for the best. The Mississippi department of education worked relentlessly to create clear guidelines and resources so that teachers had the necessary support and training to improve instruction. Mississippi also ensured parents were engaged and students had access to high-quality materials.

Hess: Your report offers a general call to action rather than specific prescriptions. Still, I’m curious if you have some general thoughts about what Congress should be contemplating in terms of information-gathering, oversight, or lawmaking?

Sen. Cassidy: Feedback from teachers and families, which can be sent to literacy@help.senate.gov, will be crucial in this process. I plan to share more on this front after reviewing responses to the report and workshopping ideas with stakeholders. Any policy that is considered will need to support teachers in using the science of reading and parents in understanding and identifying it. While curriculum decisions should remain the responsibility of states and districts, there are likely opportunities to strengthen how federal funds are used for literacy and to support states in tackling the more complex pieces of this puzzle.

Hess: Twenty-odd years ago, during the Bush administration, the Reading First program sought to promote research-based reading instruction. Do you look back at Reading First as a cautionary tale, a model worth reviving, or something else?

Sen. Cassidy: It’s a cautionary tale. Reading First had worthy goals aimed at aligning literacy instruction with evidence-based methods and materials. However, it was fraught with implementation issues and conflicts of interest. My hope is this report gives the education field an opportunity to reflect on all previous attempts to support literacy and offer constructive feedback to not repeat the mistakes of the past.

Hess: Last question: Given existing law, are there things the U.S. Department of Education could do to more effectively tackle the challenges you’ve noted? Are there particular changes to existing programs, funding streams, or rules you’d like to see the department explore?

Sen. Cassidy: This is the exact question I hope to explore with the education field as we receive responses to the report. I have already heard concerns that all is not well and that we can and must do better. This is the time to put all ideas on the table and chart a path forward collectively to improve literacy. If we do not seize this moment, the long-term implications will be dire.

Frederick Hess is director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute and an executive editor of Education Next.

This post originally appeared on Rick Hess Straight Up.

We are big fans of using evidence to improve education. That’s why we wrote a book on it. But when it comes to promoting more and better evidence use in the field, more requirements are not necessarily better.

The U.S. Department of Education is updating the Education Department General Administrative Regulations (EDGAR), which govern how the agency awards and manages grants. While most of the proposed changes are housekeeping, ED is taking this opportunity to tuck in some substantive changes to evidence rules. Among other shifts, they would make the evidence tiers defined in the Every Student Succeeds Act applicable to all ED elementary and secondary programs, including competitive grants programs, where proposals backed by the kinds of evidence the law prefers could receive preferential treatment.

ESSA was the first federal education law to define the term “evidence-based” and to distinguish between activities based on the strength of the research to them. The law requires school districts to include activities that meet at least the “promising” tier when using federal funds to intervene in struggling schools. It also requires the department to prioritize proposals backed by evidence when awarding funds through seven competitive grant programs. ED’s proposed regulations would extend this logic across the agency’s full portfolio, giving the Department the option of prioritizing such proposals in any of its competitive grant programs.

The problem is that to meet the spirit, not just the letter, of the evidence requirements, state and district staff would need more time and expertise than they actually have. One of us, Carrie, served as a research director in a state education agency for over a decade and had the opportunity to observe educators’ skill using evidence up close. Virtually every educator she worked with wanted to use evidence to inform their work but had little knowledge of how.

The skills required to use evidence well are in short supply, and districts and states vary tremendously in their capacity. Some agencies have invested deeply in research staff and external partnerships. Others have the capacity to meet the requirements if they are understood as a narrow exercise in compliance: filling in the blanks of a logic model or finding one study to support their proposed work. But even this box-checking type of evidence work takes some time and expertise, and many more agencies struggle even to get this far. This means that increasing evidence requirements would magnify existing disparities in agency resources through inequitable access to competitive federal funds.

Some might argue that we could solve this problem of low and variable capacity through strong policy guidance. Since ESSA was passed in 2015, ED has attempted to do just that through its guidance on the law’s evidence requirements. That guidance is nuanced and thoughtful, yet districts and states still struggle to implement the requirements. Why would broadening the requirements to all federal grants result in a better outcome? No policy guidance, however well crafted, is going to make the proposed evidence regulations work in practice. That’s because no policy guidance can provide the real missing ingredients: time and training.

Even if we could solve all these implementation problems, practitioners would still be left to confront an evidence base in education that just isn’t built for the type of decisions they need to make. These decisions are much more granular than the typical research question: How much instructional time should I allocate to each standard in a given grade level and subject? To catch up students who are behind grade level, should I invest in double-dose math classes or intensive vacation week courses? How should I structure my teacher coaching program so that teachers get the maximum benefit?

While research can provide some insight, studies are rarely designed in a way to answer these types of questions convincingly. As a result, the evidence base on issues of concern to practitioners is thin in many areas, particularly at the higher tiers of rigor, and the settings where the available studies were conducted may limit the findings’ relevance to other places. When practitioners write grant proposals for programs regulated by EDGAR, they may be swayed by the new evidence requirements to propose projects that focus on a less relevant problem of practice but are backed by strong research. But they might have gotten better educational results by proposing a less-studied approach that addressed a more critical need or was more likely to work in their local context.

The proposed changes to EDGAR are as well intentioned as their result is predictable: more paperwork, less-equitable outcomes, and little to no increase in authentic evidence use in education settings. Fortunately, there it still time to convince the Department to change course: Public comment on the proposal is due on February 26. We have weighed in with our concerns and would encourage others in the education research and practice communities to do the same.

If we want practitioners to do evidence work well, we need to focus more on support and less on compliance. Leave EDGAR out of it.

Carrie Conaway is senior lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Nora Gordon is professor of public policy at Georgetown University. They are the co-authors of Common-Sense Evidence: The Education Leaders’ Guide to Using Data and Research (Harvard Education Press 2020).

Chester E. Finn, Jr., is a Distinguished Senior Fellow and President Emeritus at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. He is also a Senior Fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution.

This post originally appeared on the Fordham Institute’s Flypaper blog.

In the first GOP presidential debate last month, four candidates called for eliminating the U.S. Department of Education. In doing so, they embraced the same position as front-runner Donald Trump. The pledges generated headlines like Education Week’s “Broad Calls to Ax Education Department and Take On Teachers’ Unions at 1st GOP Debate” as well as the predictable passel of calls from reporters and muckety-mucks wondering how this would work and what it might mean. Given the reaction, it seems worth taking a moment to ask what this proposal means and how likely it is to come to fruition if a Republican claims the White House in 2024.

For starters, eliminating the Department is hardly a new notion. Republicans have been calling for its abolition pretty much since its inception in 1979. In 1980, the year after Jimmy Carter fulfilled a campaign pledge to the National Education Association by creating the Department, Ronald Reagan pledged to dismantle it. What actually happened, though, was that Terrel Bell, Reagan’s first education secretary, launched the blue-ribbon commission that penned “A Nation at Risk” to help forestall such a move by making the case for the Department’s importance.

National figures’ promising to abolish the Department (and then not doing so) has been a staple of GOP politics and party platforms for four decades. In 1994, Newt Gingrich’s “Contract with America” advocated eliminating the Department. In 1996, Republican presidential nominee Bob Dole did the same. In 2011, the GOP presidential debates featured an infamous moment when ED was one of three cabinet departments that Rick Perry promised to eliminate—and one of the two he could recall. (Some readers may remember Perry’s cringe-worthy deer-in-the-headlights moment: “And I will tell you, it is three agencies of government when I get there that are gone. Commerce, Education, and the . . . what’s the third one there? Let’s see . . . Oops.”)

Needless to say, Republicans have yet to follow through on any of this. In fact, the most significant expansion of federal education authority in decades occurred under the administration of Republican George W. Bush with a Republican House. Even as Trump pledges to abolish the Department if elected in 2024, the closest he came to doing so when he occupied the White House (and when Republicans had unified control of Capitol Hill) was to muse on the possibility of merging the Department of Education and the Department of Labor. Over the past 40 years, federal education spending has steadily increased regardless of which party controlled Congress or the White House.

Given the history, there’s good reason to take calls for eliminating the Department with a big grain of salt. And I say this as someone who, for the record, is hugely sympathetic to calls to abolish the Department—or at least dramatically downsize its programs and pare its payroll.

So, how seriously should observers take today’s calls to eliminate the Department of Education? To judge what candidates have to say on this score, we should ask three questions.

What do you mean by “abolishing the Department of Education”?

Congress could vote to “abolish” the Department and then simply move all its programs, funds, and personnel to other departments or agencies. Indeed, this seems most likely to happen, since none of the candidates have voiced enthusiasm for eliminating (or even cutting) Department of Education funding for Title I, special education, or Pell Grants. On this count, I remember former U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann who, when running for the presidency in 2012, called for the Department’s elimination on the campaign trail and then flew back to the Capitol to vote for maintaining special-education outlays.

So, does “abolishing the Department” mean getting the federal government out of education by eliminating federal education programs and staff? That course seems truest to the plain meaning of the promise but also the toughest to honor. Might it just mean handing programs to other agencies or cabinet departments? That seems truer to the letter than to the spirit of the pledge. Or could “abolish” just mean turning all of these programs into block grants to states? If so, how much federal direction and oversight would there be, and who would be charged with providing it? At this point, straightforward talk of eliminating the Department has morphed into a much swampier discussion of block grants, federal strings, and legal oversight.

If by “abolishing the Department” you mean eliminating or radically downsizing most of its programs, which ones will you cut?

Given the outsized role of student lending in its finances and operations, the U.S. Department of Education has been wryly described as a big bank with a small policy shop attached. That’s truer than ever after the Biden administration’s ongoing student loan shenanigans. So, when talking about eliminating the Department, are candidates committing to downsize, phase out, or put an end to federal student lending? Aside from student loans, the biggest federal education expenditures last year were Title I funds for high-poverty schools ($18 billion a year), special education funding ($15 billion a year), and Pell Grants ($28 billion a year). Does “eliminating the Department” mean slashing these outlays?

Absent clear answers on this count, it’s safe to assume that education spending would mostly continue on its current course—which means that “eliminating ED” would likely entail jamming these programs into another cabinet department. Prior to 1979, most education activity was housed in the old Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. If the plan were to essentially reconstitute the old HEW, it’s not obvious how this would change the nature or scope of Washington’s role. Any candidate who wants to argue otherwise will actually need to make that case.

How will you convince the public and policymakers to support the effort to eliminate the Department of Education?

Calls to eliminate the Department of Education play well in a GOP primary because ED is massively unpopular with Republicans. This summer, Pew polling reported that the Department’s favorable-to-unfavorable ratio among Republicans was an abysmal 29–65. (The numbers are reversed among Democrats, who approve of ED 62–30.)

The story gets more complicated, however. In 2016, for instance, Gallup reported that, when asked whether they’d like to see the U.S. eliminate the Departments of Education, Energy, Commerce, and Housing and Urban Development, Americans were opposed by a 63–18 margin. Granted, that was seven years ago. After the pandemic and in an increasingly populist party, is there a newfound appetite for getting Uncle Sam out of education? Well, this March, AP-NORC reported that 65 percent of adults said the federal government is spending too little on education (just 12 percent said it’s spending too much). Fifty-two percent of Republicans said the federal government should spend more on education.

When even Republicans say they want Washington to spend more on education, it’s hard to see how any administration—no matter how sincere its ambitions—will find the resolve to substantially shrink the federal role. Indeed, as long as the filibuster remains in place, calls to eliminate or significantly reshape the Department face a nearly impossible climb.

So, what’s the plan to rally popular support, marshal the votes on Capitol Hill, and overcome the filibuster? Without any answers, talk of eliminating the Department is little more than hollow chatter. Anyone hoping to rein in federal educrats will need to offer more than symbolic gestures.

Frederick Hess is director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute and an executive editor of Education Next.

This article appeared in the Winter 2024 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Hess, F. (2024). What It Would Mean to Abolish the U.S. Department of Education. Education Next, 24(1), 5.

In the first Republican presidential debate of the 2024 election cycle, four of the candidates called for the elimination of the U.S. Department of Education, while three also vowed to crush teacher unions.

Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida, Vivek Ramaswamy, Governor Doug Burgum of North Dakota, and Vice President Mike Pence all said that, if elected, they would eliminate the federal Department of Education. Ramaswamy, former Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey, and Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina also threatened the teacher unions, with Scott saying, “The only way we change education in this nation is to break the backs of the teachers unions.”

The U.S. Department of Education was created by a law passed in 1979 under the administration of President Jimmy Carter and began operating in 1980. Before that, from 1953 forward, the federal government’s education-related functions were part of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.

Fox News, which hosted the debate in Milwaukee, devoted a segment toward the end of the two-hour program to education, with moderator Bret Baier referring to the Nation’s Report Card exposing a “crisis” of chronic absenteeism and steep declines in reading and math achievement.

“The decline in education is one of the major reasons why our country is in decline,” DeSantis said. “In Florida, we stood up for what was right. First, we had schools open during Covid, and a lot of the problems that we’ve seen are because these lockdown states locked their kids out of school for a year, year and a half. That was wrong.

“As president, I’m going to lead an effort to increase civic understanding and knowledge of our constitution,” the Florida governor added. “We cannot be graduating students that don’t have any foundation in what it means to be an American.”

“Let’s shut down the head of the snake, the Department of Education,” Ramaswamy said. “Take that $80 billion, put it in the hands of parents across this country. This is the civil rights issue of our time. Allow any parent to choose where they send their kids to school.”

Ramaswamy also said he’d “end the teachers unions at the local level.” He did not specify how he would achieve that. Neither did Senator Scott.

Christie said Scott was correct about the need to break the back of the teacher unions. “I started this in 2010 by going right after the teachers unions in New Jersey and drove them down to an all-time low popularity rating because they’re putting themselves before our kids,” the former governor said. “That is the biggest threat to our country.”

Pence, who served in Congress and as governor of Indiana, said he’d fought against earlier Republican-backed efforts to link standards, testing, and accountability to federal funding. “I was fighting against No Child Left Behind,” Pence said. “I’ll also shut down the Federal Department of Education. And when I was governor, we doubled the size of the largest school choice program in America, and we’ll give school choice to every family in America when I’m in the White House.”

Governor Burgum defended educators. “Teachers in this country, the vast majority of them care about those kids. They’re working in low-paying jobs and they’re fighting for those kids and their families,” he said.

The president of the American Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten, also hit back. “Let’s be clear: When Tim Scott and Chris Christie attack teachers unions, they’re attacking teachers. Teachers unions exist to give teachers a voice so that they can do their best for kids,” Weingarten said in a post on “X,” the social media platform formerly known as Twitter.

Former governors Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas and Nikki Haley of South Carolina also participated in the debate. In their education policy answers, Hutchinson spoke about expanding computer-science education, while Haley highlighted reading remediation and vocational education. “Let’s put vocational classes back into the high schools. Let’s teach our kids to build things again,” Haley said.

Former President Donald Trump, who polls show with a wide lead among Republicans, chose not to participate in the debate. Instead, he sat for an interview with Tucker Carlson that was available on X (Twitter). Education policy did not come up in that interview.

Ira Stoll is editor of FutureOfCapitalism.com. He was managing editor of Education Next from 2019 to 2023.

A few months back, I reflected on the 40th anniversary of “A Nation at Risk,” the landmark 1983 report. But there’s one important point that I didn’t really address: that the report was characterized by confidence in the DNA of Horace Mann’s familiar schoolhouse, whereas the momentum today is moving in a decidedly different direction.

This struck me a few weeks back, during a Reagan Institute panel commemorating the report. Arne Duncan, Bill Kristol, Geoff Canada, and I discussed what happened to the old bipartisan education reform coalition and whether a new version is possible.

In musing on the session, afterward, I realized we’d failed to touch on a fundamental, night-and-day difference between 1983 and 2023.

While it’s not widely remembered today, the apocalyptic language in “A Nation at Risk” was married to an intense faith in the conventional schoolhouse. What do I mean? Consider the report’s major recommendations:

• Increase the number of Carnegie units that students complete in high school in core subjects.
• Resist grade inflation, encourage colleges to raise admissions standards, and test students at key transition points.
• Extend the school day and school year.
• Raise teacher pay, make pay performance-based and market-sensitive, and require teachers to demonstrate content mastery.

All of these recommendations sought to make the traditional school systems more rigorous, time-consuming, and demanding. None of it envisioned any fundamental alterations to the schoolhouse as understood by Horace Mann or the architects of David Tyack’s One Best System. One consequence was that, especially in a less polarized era, leading figures on the left and right basically agreed on the merits of more courses, more testing, more minutes in school, and more pay for teachers. (Whether this agreement led to the kind of change they hoped for, or even any change at all, is another story.)

Today? For better or worse, the conversation about school improvement has fundamentally changed. Instead of more rigor, time, or testing, the most popular proposals tend to be more controversial and more disruptive to familiar routines.

The most popular initiatives today call for fundamentally changing the nature of the traditional schoolhouse:

• Charter schooling, education savings accounts, and school vouchers
• Calls to shift from traditional courses to mastery-based learning
• The embrace of digital devices, remote learning, and AI
• The push to overhaul career and technical education

In short, today’s reform agenda features proposals that would fundamentally change that old Horace Mann schoolhouse. It eschews the traditional building blocks of grades, Carnegie units, and time spent in favor of greater personalization, customization, and inventiveness. That makes for a very different and potentially much more contentious agenda.

The upshot is that, 40 years on, we’ve exited one era of school improvement defined by the attempt to bolster the “one best system” and entered one notable for attempts to dismantle it.

For good or ill, when we talk about the future of schooling, we need to do so with an understanding that today’s leading school improvement proposals are fundamentally different from those of the nation’s recent education past.

This has the potential to be a very healthy development, if pursued sensibly. That, of course, is no sure thing. As I write in The Great School Rethink, it’s time we reimagined the work of teaching and learning. It’s our task, though, to ensure that we do this in a fashion that honors the importance of rigor, knowledge, and mastery—and doesn’t dismiss them.

Frederick Hess is director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute and an executive editor of Education Next.

This post originally appeared on Rick Hess Straight Up.

Figure 1: 20 states report no details on how ESSER dollars are spent

Should we have expected better data? State agencies did get a collective $900 million for administering the money, which might have been used to generate information to help the system learn as it goes and improve on what it does. That said, much agency time has been spent responding to different surveys, requests, and proposals made by the Department, some for reports issued long after the information was useful.

Let us all issue a hearty thanks to those states that have shared the data they do have. We’ve assembled those data on the Edunomics Lab ESSER Expenditure Dashboard and used it as a backdrop to our investigations of hundreds of districts’ financials. Without it, we’d know even less than we do.

Investments in social-emotional learning are more popular than expanded learning time.

ESSER 3 requires that 20% must be used to address learning loss from the pandemic. While it appears that portion is being spent at a faster clip than highly flexible 80%, only a few states offer spending detail on those dollars. In Wisconsin and California, just 5% of ESSER 3 expenditures have gone to lengthening the school day or year, or adding time in summer. Two thirds of districts in these states chose none of those options, instead using their 20% for investments like professional development (notable since PD doesn’t directly touch students), technology, or curriculum.

In contrast, we see a higher number of districts investing in social-emotional learning (about half) even as the spending totals tend to be low (amounting to 6% of total ESSER expended so far in California).

Half of relief funds are paying for labor, setting the stage for a painful fiscal cliff.

In the 22 states that provide some detail on what was purchased, it’s clear that labor is the largest item (just under 50%). What we don’t know is how much of that is going to new hires versus pay raises versus stipends, although federal guidance did authorize districts to use these temporary funds to award permanent salary increases. If history is any guide, districts will struggle to rein in labor expenses as the clock runs out.

A sampling of district financials finds many are using large portions of ESSER to “backfill their budgets” – essentially covering recurring expenses rather than investing the dollars in anything new. Districts like Seattle used ESSER funds for “continuity of operations” (which meant paying for recurring budget items) thereby putting off annual efforts to rein in escalating costs or right-size operating budgets after years of enrollment declines. In these cases, ESSER is treated like any other revenue source (covering lots of labor expenses) rather than the one-time money it is.

ESSER fueled a large jump in vendor contracts, and with it a burden on districts to ensure these dollars deliver value.

In states that delineate spending on contracts, some 20-30% of ESSER is going out the district door for purchased services, curriculum, supplies, one-time-projects, technology upgrades, and more. If these numbers hold, ESSER will have brought $40-60 billion in new public money for vendors (nearly doubling the prior levels). The upside? Districts can add temporary capacity while avoiding recurring obligations, especially important when dealing with one-time funds.

But there are challenges – namely that contracts bring vulnerability to financial missteps. Making sure contracts deliver value for students requires writing smart contracts and ensuring rigorous approvals. With so many contracts coming at once often with newer vendors, we worry about poorly written agreements or sidestepped approval processes. For vendors, the boom and likely bust (when ESSER ends) will be destabilizing, and probably result in fewer players in the field. Either way, blame for any poorly spent funds will land on the leaders who approved these expenses.

Amidst mixed messages on what ESSER was for, districts are spending steadily on facilities.

Despite warnings from the feds against taking on new construction or extensive renovations, some 20% of ESSER 3 has been invested in facilities (and the percentages are rising as more projects get completed). Early on, headlines raised hackles about relief funds going to sports facilities. But more investments appear to be paying for HVAC systems and general facilities repair. Assuming districts scoped and timed their facilities projects right so costs don’t stretch after ESSER money runs out, such investments won’t worsen the fiscal cliff.

What facilities investments aren’t doing, however, is resolving gaps in learning which are at the heart of what most see as the purpose of relief funds. It’s likely that disconnect that’s fueled some of the scrutiny surrounding facilities.

We’re learning very little about what matters most: Are investments helping students?

It’s not just about where the ESSER money is going. Have summer school programs improved reading proficiency? Is the fleet of newly hired counselors delivering improvements in attendance or mental health? Did a heavy investment in more teacher planning time work to improve math scores?

Only a tiny fraction of districts and states are using data to chart the effects of ESSER investments on students. Notable exceptions include states like Tennessee, which asked districts to predict the effects of their investments and then publicly examined its test scores to explore whether investments are delivering. Connecticut launched a research collaborative to study whether ESSER investments are working, finding, for example, that a pandemic-era home visit program boosted attendance. We need more of this.

One final lesson stands out on the ESSER experiment: Each district makes its own choices.

While we’ve painted some big-picture trends here, different districts have gone in very different directions on spending. And the experiment’s not over yet. There is still much to watch about how districts adjust when ESSER is gone, and how students fare over the long haul. But perhaps most notably, the experiment is a reminder of the critical role district leaders play in how US education funds are spent and in determining how much value those funds bring to students.

Katherine Silberstein is Strategic Projects Lead at Edunomics Lab. Marguerite Roza is Director of Edunomics Lab and Research Professor at Georgetown University, where she leads the Certificate in Education Finance.

Updated April 6, 2023: Arizona and Oklahoma now have publicly available dashboards that report spending details. This piece has been revised to reflect that 20 states to date report no details on how ESSER dollars are spent.