Last month, Sen. Mike Rounds, a Republican from South Dakota, introduced a bill to eliminate the U.S. Department of Education. In a public statement explaining his rationale for the legislation, Rounds decried federal control of education. “Any grants or funding from the Department are only given to states and educational institutions in exchange for adopting the one-size-fits-all standards put forth by the Department,” the statement says in part.
President-elect Donald Trump has voiced support for this idea, such as when he announced former World Wrestling Entertainment CEO Linda McMahon as his selection for secretary of education. “We will send Education BACK TO THE STATES, and Linda will spearhead that effort,” he wrote on Truth Social.
There may be a legitimate debate regarding the proper role of the U.S. Department of Education, especially considering that education is not included as a responsibility of the federal government in the U.S. Constitution. However, it is covered by the 10th Amendment (ratified less than two years later), which reserves any powers not constitutionally delegated to the federal government to the states or the people.
Based on the 10th Amendment, it would seem that Rounds and Trump have a point, and that the federal Education Department does not have any authority to dictate standards or curriculum and that control of education should be left to the states.
Except that Congress has long addressed these concerns by explicitly constraining federal power over education. In fact, the very first iteration of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965 specifically restricted the federal government from dictating curriculum to schools: “Nothing contained in this Act shall be construed to authorize any department, agency, officer, or employee of the United States to exercise any direction, supervision, or control over the curriculum, program of instruction, administration, or personnel of any educational institution or school system.”
Similar language has been included in each reauthorization of the ESEA. But legislators were still concerned that the language was not strong or clear enough. During the last reauthorization in 2015, members of Congress went further and included additional restrictions on the secretary of education and, by extension, the Department of Education.
That reauthorization, the Every Student Succeeds Act, not only forbids the federal government from directly controlling state or local curricula, standards, and assessments but also goes on to say that the federal government cannot condition any grant or funding opportunity to the adoption of specific materials.
A plain reading of existing law shows that the “concerns” addressed in Rounds’ new bill are already prohibited and not what the Education Department is doing. Therefore, the question remains: What problem is this bill attempting to solve?
Perhaps the legislative text offers an answer.
First, it’s important to note that the draft bill introduced by Rounds is only seven pages long. The Every Student Succeeds Act is 443 pages long. Obviously, a seven-page bill cannot account for everything in the current law.
Approximately half the seven pages cover block grants to states, including a new block grant program for K-12 students. One important component of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act is that the funds are distributed to states through various titles.
The program that provides the most funding to states is Title I, which utilizes census data of all school-age children, regardless of where they attend school.
Rounds’ bill, which calls for proportional distribution of funds based on public, private, and home school attendance, would require states to engage in a new data collection, one that many private and home schools may be reluctant to participate in. If this—changing which data are used to distribute federal education funds—is the problem the bill is attempting to solve, it seems like the solution is for a much more complex and difficult way to get the same information.
There is a big difference between the draft bill’s funding equation and the current distribution of Title I funds: The draft bill would base funding allocations on all children, without accounting for need. Currently, Title I funds are allocated based on numbers and percentages of low-income children, and other titles distribute funds based on numbers of students in foster care, in neglected and delinquent institutions, transient students and families, and English learners.
Research and experience have shown that each of these populations of students costs more to educate, so the federal government has provided additional funding to ease the burden on schools.
This is the one clear break between the draft bill and current legislation, so the true motivation behind this bill seems to be to stop distributing education funding based on needs. Over the past 60 years, since the passage of the ESEA, Congress has consistently supported providing additional funding for students who need more services.
Rounds and other supporters this bill addressing Trump’s goal of eliminating the Education Department seem to have determined that needs-based funding is what really needs to be eliminated.
If this really is the “problem” that the bill intends to address, proponents should clearly articulate their case for closing the U.S. Department of Education to the American people and see what support their proposed alternative draws.
If not, I call upon the supporters of this bill to clarify exactly what problem they are trying to solve.
