In “Straight Talk with Rick and Jal,” Harvard University’s Jal Mehta and I examine the reforms and enthusiasms that permeate education. In a field full of buzzwords, our goal is simple: Tell the truth, in plain English, about what’s being proposed and what it means for students, teachers, and parents. We may be wrong and we will frequently disagree, but we’ll try to be candid and ensure that you don’t need a Ph.D. in eduspeak to understand us. Today’s topic is the state of federal education research.
—Rick
Rick: The federal education research operation has been shredded. In February, the Trump administration canceled $800 million in federal education research contracts. In March, as part of sweeping reductions at the Department of Education, it laid off about 90 percent of the staff at the Institute of Education Sciences. This has rattled the education research community and generated furious pushback. But let’s take a step back from the hot-button commentary and discuss what the federal role should be in research, what’s motivating the cuts, and how much all of this will actually matter.
Here’s my two cents. For starters, I’ve long held that the federal government has an appropriate role in collecting national education data, one that Uncle Sam has played since the 1800s. Article I of the Constitution charges Congress with overseeing federal “weights and measures,” and I think that includes gauging whether the nation’s students can read, how many publicly subsidized college-goers complete their degrees, or how many teachers and administrators work in the nation’s schools.
So, what’s driving the cuts? After all, during the Bush administration, Republicans cheered IES director Russ Whitehurst’s Herculean efforts to strengthen education research. And Trump 1.0 didn’t feature anything like this. I think two big forces are at work. First, we live in an era of marked distrust in experts, especially since the pandemic. Whereas research was once shielded by bipartisan deference, it’s now a target for populist ire. Second, Republicans are increasingly convinced that, for all intents and purposes, the education research community functions as an arm of the Democratic Party. After all, the American Educational Research Association has unapologetically and unabashedly waded into ideological and political waters. And there’s a sense that university-based education research is enamored of progressive identity politics and policy agendas.
Research is strongest when viewed as an apolitical enterprise and a shared good. Maintaining that status is always going to be tricky in an era of polarization and distrust. But it’s not clear to me that many research associations, institutions, or leaders have even tried. Indeed, I’d argue that the education research community hasn’t done itself any favors in recent years, embracing COVID lockdown culture and “woke” nostrums regarding gender, race, and immigration—putting it squarely on one side of hot-button cultural divisions. Now, I want to talk about what this all means. But let me pause here. I suspect you see some of this pretty differently, and I’m curious to hear your take.
Jal: This is a situation where the broader winds are much more significant than anything happening in our little corner of the public policy landscape. Trump is undoing the post-war order—autocrats are now our friends, democracies are our enemies, NATO is an inconvenient fiction, and everything is defined by a might-makes-right realpolitik. When the secretary of Health and Human Services has been a public advocate against vaccines, it is not that surprising that IES is on the chopping block. You are right that education, particularly higher education, is seen as the center and the originator of “woke,” which makes it particularly suspect to the Trump administration.
Since this all seems obvious, and given that there’s already so much commentary about the recklessness of the DOGE approach, I’m going to use my space to take on a slightly broader issue—how has expertise become a partisan issue? I think there is an interesting story here. As Max Weber pointed out more than a century ago, there are real limits to science when it comes to public policy issues because science cannot answer the most important question, which is about how to live. There are several reasons for this. First, and most importantly, policy is largely about values, and thus no study can determine which values we should put forward and why. Second, social science is insufficient for predicting what will happen in any new, real-world circumstance. As Stanford scholars Larry Cuban and David Tyack wrote in Tinkering toward Utopia, policy is no more than a hypothesis—a theory of what will happen when a new rule is introduced into a complex environment. Thus, while there is an Enlightenment dream that we can make policy based on rational scientific study, the connections between science, policy, and outcomes are much more tenuous than we would like to admit.
What seems to have happened in politics is that the baby has gotten thrown out with the bathwater. That science is an uncertain basis for making policy doesn’t mean that it cannot inform policy. But this mixed truth seems inconvenient for many right-leaning proto-populist politicians, of which Trump’s “off with their heads” DOGEing of the research apparatus is just the logical conclusion. The fact that college-educated voters have swung left while working-class voters have swung right accelerates this trend, as does the partisan sorting of our media and social media, which fractures the possibility of a shared consensus. And the left shares some blame, particularly during COVID, for asserting that public health should make decisions that rightfully belong in the hands of elected politicians and voters. While each step in this chain is not hard to follow, where it ends up seems truly crazy—there is no world where it is better for the federal government to stop collecting basic data on student performance.
That should give you enough to chew on—what do you think?
Rick: You raise some terrific points. One problem with Trump’s approach to government is that it triggers everyone’s atavistic, tribal impulses. But a reaction can be heated and still on point. In that spirit, given your allusion to the pandemic, I want to talk a bit about why the populist revolt against expertise was hard-earned.
The pandemic experience illustrates how we got here. It wasn’t just that public health officials exceeded their brief or used their authority to mislead the public. It’s that, in education, as in health care, science got weaponized. In spring 2020, 1,200 health professionals issued an open letter endorsing “anti-racist” protests, after months spent hectoring Americans to stay indoors—even if that meant parking their kids in front of screens all day. Over time, many Americans concluded that “science” was being wielded for political ends. After all, respect for “science” appeared to very much depend on whether progressive authorities liked the recommendations. Evidence of learning loss or that masks impeded the normal development of young children? Brushed aside. Evidence that schools could be safely reopened? Denounced as misinformation. Meanwhile, dubious union claims of mortal peril were treated as gospel—used to justify school closures, masking theater, and social-distancing regimes that hindered learning and human interaction.
The education “experts” have too often dressed up normative views in the garb of science when it came to value-laden disputes over gender dysphoria, race-conscious admissions, school discipline, or school choice—no matter how mixed or scant the evidence. Meanwhile, those willing to make the opposing case tend to be deemed “nonexperts,” even if they come from reputable conservative think tanks or advocacy groups. Look, I’ll be the first to admit that there are plenty of cranks and scam artists on the right (as there are on the left). The problem is that academic “experts” are frequently granted a degree of credibility that’s divorced from the evidence or their thoughtfulness. On the right, this has fueled the sense that academic research is a racket that uses public subsidies to platform those with the “correct” views.
Look, you’re obviously right about the limits of expertise when it comes to the complexities of policy. And that was on vivid display with the troubled plight of the Obama-era teacher-evaluation push or the Common Core. And those missteps certainly contributed to the general distrust that has become so pervasive today. But those troubled by the Trump administration’s attempt to slash education research do well to appreciate the frustration at work. That’s a crucial first step if researchers are to regain their footing and reclaim allies across the ideological spectrum.
Jal: Interesting. We said we would model disagreement and we are going to!
From my perspective, the fact that academia leans to the left (true), and that universities and associations have sometimes overstepped their place by taking some political stances (also true), is relatively small potatoes compared with what the Trump administration is beginning to attempt. What has happened across the Ivy League is just the beginning of the administration’s efforts to remake universities along ideological lines using the stick of withholding huge amounts of federal funding. Add that to Trump’s penchant for attacking, sidelining, or firing his critics, and you see how authoritarianism begins to take hold.
As Steven Levitsky, the author of How Democracies Die, recently wrote with Ryan D. Enos, “Autocrats—both left-wing and right-wing—always attack universities. The public rationale varies. Some, like Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua and Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, reportedly accuse universities of promoting terrorism; others, like Viktor Orban’s Hungary, claim they work for foreign interests.” But, as they put it, “these are pretexts. Universities are independent centers of ideas and often prominent centers of dissent. Autocrats are allergic to sources of dissent, so they almost invariably seek to silence, weaken, or control them.”
That’s what is happening here. All we can do is be honest about what we see and speak out as long as we still have the platform to do so.
