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I'm not sure I can steelman it but my sister is a fairly high-level employee there (GS 13 or 14--I should probably know). She works specifically with the adult education department (which is never mentioned nor considered when people complain about DoE, IMO) and doesn't have a ton to say about K-12. Everything that follows is my understanding of what she's told me, not heavily researched data.
She points out that most of what the DoE does, I think she said 1/3-1/2 of the budget(?) is managing FAFSA. Most of the K-12 stuff is state level with recommendations from DoE with few hard requirements. Another major part of what they do is fund research programs that either focus on specific groups and methodologies, or collect data for analysis. She's pretty adamant that what people think they hate about the DoE is not really what the DoE does. She also claims that were the DoE disbanded, half of the people would go to the Dept. of Labor (where DoE originated from) and others would go to places like Dept. of Health and Human Services. That removing the DoE wouldn't really do anything except push bureaucrats around.
I mused out loud that maybe it wouldn't be the end of the world if it were disbanded and it nearly destroyed our relationship. She complains bitterly about being passed over for promotions and the ineptitude of her co-workers. She seems bitter and resentful, so as her brother I wonder if there isn't a better job out there for her to be doing. Her position is that it's an easy job she almost literally phones in (she's on the phone constantly with researchers and other DoE people) and it allows her to donate half her money to charities (not much of an exaggeration) and time for volunteering. She's deeply motivated to help the less-fortunate, but also seems like the exact type of bureaucratic cat lady people are complaining about.
To me, it seems to me that Dept's of Ed belong to state level bureaucracies. It makes sense to keep it federated and the states in light competition with each other. However, I also see some value in the FAFSA. The government providing some funds and low interest loans to students who may want to go to universities anywhere in the US seems fine to me. It's at least using taxes to put some money back into some peoples' hands. But that's fairly weak support as I'm not certain university degrees aren't overvalued in the first place nor can I attest to any fraud waste or abuse inherent in the system. (There are DoE programs for jobs programs and The adult education angle is interesting to me because we really do have a problem with under-educated adults in the US, either those who failed out of crummy schools, the chronically unmotivated or those who arrived here without the ability to read or speak English, etc. But I'm still not sure why this shouldn't be a state or even municipal level organization.)
It's a strange superposition: I'm not inclined to save it but I also doubt that it's the pernicious institution others are convinced of. It definitely looks like a make-work program when I hear about the morons my sister has to deal with on the daily, but it also doesn't seem like it's nearly as powerful as the people who hate it claim. I'm mostly indifferent and probably bend a little toward keeping it for my own peace of mind and QoL.
This seems to be a strange hypothetical where the DoE is axed but its full budget is reallocated to the most similar departments. It seems like anyone who would actually axe the DoE would either be looking to shrink the federal government's budget or would at least move the money into very different departments.
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I don't hate the federal government as much as most people here do, and I think we could live without the DoE. To the degree they do anything useful, it's what your sister described: managing funds, financial aid, etc. That doesn't require an entire department of the government.
GS 13-14 isn't particularly "high level," btw. It's relatively late career (lots of people retire as a 13 or 14), but it's not someone with significant decision-makiing or policy-shaping authority. That starts at 15 and the real high level people are those who make it to the Senior Executive Services.
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I don't think is the argument she thinks it is. All that does is paint a target on two more departments that should probably be axed as well. The point is not to push bureaucrats around, it's to have fewer bureaucrats. As Milei has put it, afuera!
Yes, exactly this. This kind of bureaucrat should not be paid by the taxes of productive people. If they were actually providing value, they would be remunerated in private enterprise by people who need to produce products or services in exchange for revenue, and their remuneration would be constrained by the revenue they could generate.
Two of my in-laws are a pair of public school teachers, and I think the same thing about them. If they were truly valuable, they would be working in private schools where the school itself must generate revenue by performing valuable functions, not simply awarded money by the state which is extracted from captive taxpayers. Thus, they are not valuable, and are instead parasitic.
It's not a very nice way to think about your relatives, but it's the inescapable conclusion I come to.
The people, in this case, being the administrators of the institutions that end up receiving these funds. I say administrators, because that is what has seen the growth in employment in the last two decades.
This is highly confounded by the fact that public spending has greatly crowded out the private school market. If your option is a public school which costs (after taxes and fees) nothing vs. a private school of about the same quality and costs thousands of dollars a semester, it would be irrational to take the latter option. If public schools didn't exist at all, there would undoubtedly be more private schools, needing to hire more teachers.
Yes, but those private school teachers would be (and are) more liable for results, as a teacher failing to teach would result in parents pulling their kids. Same thing with administrators, as they’re strictly a cost center.
That is in stark contrast to what we have now, where they’re functionally impossible to fire consistently for anything less than literally fucking the students.
One reason why it's best to fire en masse and then rehire as needed.
No (wo)man, no problem.
Fortunately for the statistically average bureaucrat, we have an aversion to physically removing them as ancient societies would do (since they’d all be men).
Unfortunately for the average bureaucrat, they’ll be financially ruined. Career prospects for former welfare recipients are not great- good thing they didn’t import a ton of workers that don’t even make a minimum wage too slim to support a decent lifestyle through a cost disease they pushed for… oh wait, that’s exactly what they did.
The Progressive party machine is, quite literally, their only lifeline. And they know it only exists so long as they continue tricking young women into thinking they’ll get a permanent paycheque out of [young] men if they keep voting for it in a pyramid scheme even larger than Social Security.
It’s a faction of Amway ladies.
What trick? The bureaucracy is only expanding.
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Yes, the distorting effect of government is one of its worst features.
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