Insatiable Greed Gutting Public Education

I think of this when I hear the rationale for 47 and the elongated muskrat firing 50% of the staff at the federal Department of Education: students will benefit from local funding and local control. No, they won’t.

In fact, nearly every time I attended a school board meeting in districts where I was employed for 25 years, the insane amount of time spent discussing topics like whether or not the boys basketball team should get new jerseys a year ahead of schedule filled me with dismay. The board would vote to cut a social worker position with NO discussion after spending an hour on sports uniforms, or scoreboards, or coaching positions. And I would drive home thinking, I can’t work for these people — we don’t share the same values. I did keep working, though, and mostly I just avoided going to school board meetings.

Here’s what I have to say to those who argue that cutting the DOE won’t affect teaching positions: you don’t know what you’re talking about. Yes, Maine pays for about 50% of public school costs via federal/state funds and about 50% locally. This makes the school systems in wealthy areas outperform those in areas with high poverty and unemployment. It’s partly about local property values, partly about local poverty levels, and partly about whether or not parents in the community have college degrees. (Standardized testing mostly measures the latter i.e. whether or not your parents are doctors vs. work for minimum wage will largely determine your score.)

Federal funding for education also plays a huge role in equitably educating special needs students. That is a benefit to those students, their peers, and society as a whole. Research suggests the regular ed peers are less likely to turn out like the elongated muskrat, throwing around the slur “r***rd” and citing empathy as a fundamental weakness of Western society.

Federal funding also contributes to improvement plans to shore up schools lagging in reading or math scores. I’ve helped write and administer three such grants and can attest that some were a boondoggle that wasted taxpayer money e.g. sending a team several thousand miles to study a program they would never faithfully implement, while others funded an entire reading specialist/instructional coach position for several years to support learners in a high poverty area who were struggling with literacy skills.

For context, let’s look at the overall federal budget — as it has been, and as it will be. The temporary funding bill passed by the House this week would cut $13 billion in non-military spending from the levels in the 2024 budget while increasing military spending by $6 billion. To see where we are now, the bar graph at the top of this post shows the first two categories — contractors who build weapons systems, and Pentagon staff like troops — dwarfing other categories. According to the National Priorities Project federal budget analysis, “In 2023, the average U.S. taxpayer paid $11 for Musk’s SpaceX.”

The question of whether a billionaire with extensive federal contracts should be empowered to cut competing federal expenditures is a conflict of interest issue, not an educational issue, so I’ll leave that for now.

FY2023 military spending of $921 billion (easily $1 trillion with hidden budget items like nuclear weapons and CIA black sites) could instead have funded 9.5 million elementary school teachers, or 23.65 million scholarships for university students. Students who might become doctors or teachers themselves. But who needs an educated populace? Not billionaires who will pay to educate their own children privately with other elites while believing that robotics and AI will replace most workers.

According to NBC News:

Around 3,000 people work in the [DOE]’s Washington headquarters, and roughly 1,000 are in 10 regional offices — making Education one of the smallest Cabinet-level federal departments. Its $268 billion appropriations last year represented 4% of the federal budget.

[Incoming DOE Secretary Linda] McMahon said in an interview Tuesday night that the layoffs were the first step on the road toward shutting down the department.

Back in Maine, school budgets are being formulated locally to put before voters in late spring. A relatively large, diverse district in South Portland heard from their superintendent this week about how shortfalls in federal funding are likely to affect their school system. Per reporting in the Portland Press Herald:

Matheney unveiled his proposed $73 million budget.., a 5.98% increase over last year. It includes reductions that will impact all seven schools and dozens of other programs and departments. The layoffs include 11 teachers, seven educational technicians and several administrative staff or districtwide employees (including the director of curriculum)..

In recent years, Matheney said, the district has declined in enrollment but increased in special education students, multilingual learners,.. and homeless students. At the same time, staffing has continued to rise. The district will need to fund more than 10 positions in special education and teaching that were previously supported by outside funding sources.

Guess which countries fund schools entirely at the local rather than national level? Not France, not Australia, not China, not Japan, not Russia.. I could go on but you get the picture.

I believe the current administration in the U.S. especially wants to defund schools because teachers unions are powerful. And if there’s something that billionaires really hate, it’s workers who have organized to bargain collectively for salary, benefits, and working conditions. They are also historically the strongest advocates for student needs. Because nobody goes into teaching as a career to make a bunch of money. Most do it because they care about kids.

Finally, just because I believe in robustly funded schools for everyone doesn’t mean that I think all meaningful education takes place in a school setting. When faced with the either-or attitude toward homeschooling often expressed by parents, my question is: Weren’t you planning to do both?

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