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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   6021 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 21, 2024

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What do you think will happen with regards to the department of education in the US depending on the results of the election?

For my part it seems like the left would just keep watering it down, more of the same etc. There doesn't seem to be any acknowledgment of issues over there.

I’m also not optimistic that the right will do much either though, republicans have tended to be very Ham fisted in the past with this sort of reform.

Anyone have interesting or different perspectives here?

If it came with a total nuke of common core, most americans would consider the swap of the guard a success.

What is so bad about common core? From what I've seen, it's a boring inoffensive educational standard.

If the entirety of the funding of the Department of Education was instead given as a block grant to the state-level organizations things would get marginally better, if only for the fact that dumb progressive fads thought up by PhDs who never taught in a classroom can't be imposed from the top-down anymore.

That this approach would be true for every policy-creating federal organization is the great secret of politics.

The dumb progressive fads aren't coming from the federal agencies, they're coming from the education schools.

Can someone steelman the value of the Department of Education?

What if we literally just removed it? I'm a little confused why the federal government is involved at all. And, if they are involved, then surely they deserve to be disbanded for the horrible failures in places like Chicago and Baltimore.

It depends on what you mean by "disbanding" the Department of Education. Its abolition has supposedly been a top priority of Republicans more or less from the day it was established, yet I think its nameplate budget and the implication that Federal bureaucrats are meddling in what is supposed to be a local concern create a perception of it that doesn't square with reality. So it largely means whether you're talking about a symbolic reorganization wherein the Department's functions are simply divided among other government agencies, or elimination of the actual programs the Department administers.

We can easily dismiss the first option, since it wouldn't result in any substantive changes other than the huge bill involved for administrative costs relating to the reorganization. At the very least, I'd need to see some sort of comprehensive study suggesting that the cost savings of such a reorganization would justify the cost of doing it. If we're talking about the second option, we need to look at what the Department actually does.

60% of the Department's budget is related to higher education assistance, split roughly evenly between direct loans and Pell Grants. I imagine we'd both agree that the student loan system in this country is fucked up and probably responsible for the massive cost increases schools have been experiencing for decades, but this isn't something we can just eliminate overnight. I've seen statistics that suggest Federal student loan and tuition assistance accounts for about 18% of revenue for 4-year public universities. At first glance, no institution can afford to lose 18% of revenue overnight. But it's actually more than this. The same statistics show that 28% of revenue comes from "sales and services". This theoretically includes everything from profits made from the bookstore to t-shirt sales, but the vast majority of this is revenue from university-associated hospitals. While this technically counts toward the entire institution's revenue, I'd imagine that hospital fees subsidize education about as much as tuition covers the costs of the hospital. In other words, these are functionally separate entities whose only real overlap is that the hospital is a teaching hospital for the medical school, so I'm keeping this separate. Doing that, Federal support now accounts for up to 25% of revenue. As I said earlier, I'm all in favor of forcing costs down, but a 25% across the board cut will likely result in the kind of emergency cost-cutting measures that are likely to throw the entire higher education system into crisis. Not to mention the fact that a lot of existing students will find themselves with debt from unfinished degrees they can't afford to complete. I'd prefer a system that makes eligibility for federal funding contingent on cost-control, but such a system would require more Federal oversight, not less. This, of course, doesn't even account for all the existing loans that the Department services.

Beyond that huge chunk of the budget, about 15% each goes to Title I grants and special education grants. Title I grants are grants to schools with low-income students to pay for remedial reading and math services. While this may give the impression that the funding goes to low-income school districts, pretty much every school qualifies for some level of targeted funding. Again, the result will be that these programs will be cut entirely or simply replaced by state or local funding, which may be difficult in some areas.

So now we're down to the 10% of the budget that accounts for miscellaneous items like compiling certain statistics, administrative costs, etc. I'm sure there's stuff here that can be cut, but eliminating an entire cabinet-level department in order to trim out a little fat seems like an inefficient way of doing things. Unless we're willing to make some serious changes to education funding and the student loan system in the United States, and talk of eliminating the Department of Education is nothing more than a buzzword that shows we're Serious About Doing Something, so long as that something doesn't actually do anything. If the goal is to eliminate student loans or remedial and special education funding entirely then that's the discussion we should be having, not some red-herring thing where eliminating a department will magically eliminate 200 billion dollars from the budget.

this isn't something we can just eliminate overnight

Why not? It seems rather simple to me to just declare that the offices will be closing and programs will all be ending on such-and-such date.

This is a general point that I'm not aiming at you in particular @Rov_Scam but I've noticed that people (on all sides) use "can't" to mean "shouldn't". The "can't" is hiding an unspoken "because X consequences will result". Sometimes this happens because X is literally unthinkable for the speaker, or because they consider it too obvious to need saying, or because they haven't thought their response through all the way. Sometimes (from professionals) it's a manipulative rhetorical tactic.

You actually elaborate more later, saying that we can't abolish the Department of Educator overnight because it would throw higher education into crisis, and strand students with unfinished degrees. But so many people don't. They say things like, we can't halt immigration, we can't withdraw from green treaty requirements, we can't ignore calls for reparations. I would urge people to write/demand the full argument whenever they find "can't" being used for something that isn't actually physically impossible. I think it encourages more rigorous thinking and more clear lines of debate.

It's not just in political discourse either....

but this isn't something we can just eliminate overnight.

Why not? It seems rather simple to me to just declare that the offices will be closing and programs will all be ending on such-and-such date.

I've seen statistics that suggest Federal student loan and tuition assistance accounts for about 18% of revenue for 4-year public universities. At first glance, no institution can afford to lose 18% of revenue overnight.

So what? If anything, this 18% isn't big enough.

Doing that, Federal support now accounts for up to 25% of revenue. As I said earlier, I'm all in favor of forcing costs down, but a 25% across the board cut will likely result in the kind of emergency cost-cutting measures that are likely to throw the entire higher education system into crisis.

And what's so bad about that? Besides, that is, that it doesn't go far enough. The "entire higher education system" doesn't need "thrown into crisis"… it needs to be burned down — somewhere between Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries and Qin Shi Huang's burning of books and burying of scholars (including the executions).

May I ask what it is you do for a living?

This is a great steelman and I really appreciate the comprehensive reply.

This is a great example of how the federal bureaucracy uses funding to weave itself into every fiber of an education system that should be, in theory, nearly completely independent of the federal government.

The argument for getting rid of the department, I suppose, hinges on the belief that it will never be easier to expunge than it is right now. In another 20 years it will just be that much harder.

And if we take a targeted and incremental approach, it will be argued about for 4 years, something minor will happen, and then all the changes will be undone the next time there is a political shift in the wind. Instead of cleaning the barnacles from the stuffed pipe, better to remove the pipe entirely, even if it's disruptive.

But obviously this is wishcasting, and we're likely just stuck with more barnacles forever.

I'm all in favor of forcing costs down, but a 25% across the board cut will likely result in the kind of emergency cost-cutting measures that are likely to throw the entire higher education system into crisis.

As of the end of FY 2021, American college and university endowments totaled over $927 billion, up 34% from $691 billion at the start of the fiscal year. That slightly outpaced the S&P 500's growth during the same period, which was only up 26%. Even if FY 2022 and 2023 weren't quite as bumper years, the tertiary education system in the U.S. undoubtedly has at least $1 trillion in the bank, not to mention that most of the top research universities are also state institutions, with direct support from state-level taxpayers.

There's plenty of money to go around.

Endowments aren't piggy banks that schools can raid whenever they need quick cash. They consist of donor-restricted funds that have strict guidelines on how they can be spent and invested; the purpose of the underlying donations is to fund specific things in perpetuity. If a wealthy donor gives you 5 million to fund the George V. Hamilton Professor of East Asian History (who will be making 200k/year), you can't just fire the professor and spend whatever's left in the endowment. If, for whatever reason, you wanted to end the professorship, you'd have to follow whatever procedures were specified in the original donation to end the endowment, usually under the supervision of the state attorney general. Yeah, these numbers are huge. But they're meant for funding things that are, by definition, already funded.

Some endowment donations are subject to that tight of a restriction, sure. However, there are also unrestricted donations which may be put towards general educational purposes, and donations whose restrictions are much more flexible (for example, a donation restricted to the support of a school's history department generally could likely be used for just about anything - professor salaries, administrative support, facilities maintenance, student scholarships/grants, archival and research purchases, etc.)

Of course, far more common is a restriction that the principal of an endowment can't be spent; only the profits flowing from investment of that principal, which makes endowment absolute numbers a bit deceptive. Given the speed with which endowments have been growing recently, I'm not that worried about this.

Ultimately, colleges and universities are known for being masterful in manipulating bureaucratic processes to achieve their desired results, no matter what the black letter law may say (see, e.g. the lengths administrations have gone to in order to enshrine race-based preferences in admissions). I'm confident that they'd find a way to put that money to real productive work if they had to.

If a wealthy donor gives you 5 million to fund the George V. Hamilton Professor of East Asian History (who will be making 200k/year), you can't just fire the professor and spend whatever's left in the endowment.

How true is this? At some point, rules against perpetual trusts must surely apply. And if they don't apply well.. they should.

It's unconscionable for huge chunks of the economy to be tied up by the wishes of long dead people.

It's time to tax the endowments.

The law is excruciatingly clear that perpetuity limits don't apply to charitable donations, or charitable trusts, for that matter. Technically speaking, the Rule Against Perpetuities only applies to contingent remainders and executory interests, and charitable donations have neither. Practically speaking, courts and legislators are reluctant to invoke perpetuity limits on charities as a matter of public policy. I'm on the board of a nonprofit, and large donations to the general fund are rare. You can get this money from annual fundraising events, membership fees, and small donations, but if someone is looking to drop serious cash they're going to want to know in advance what projects you have coming up that it can be used for. If your projects consist of ongoing expenses, like salaries or scholarships, you'll need to raise about 20 times the annual cost and invest it so the money is always available. The alternative is that people just don't donate because they don't want their money going into a black hole. Sometimes you can get out of it, but usually only in extraordinary circumstances, and even then you'll need court approval and have to notify the AG. There's a lot of fuckery surrounding charitable orgs as it is, and removing restrictions without good reason only encourages that kind of fuckery.

Dang. It's worse than I thought. Thanks for the color. Your posts are always very informative.

I wonder what percentage of wealth is controlled by dead hands at this point?

Of course, in reality, it's often worse than dead hands. It's very live hands with a radical agenda and no accountability. Imagine if Henry Ford could see what his foundation is up to today. These endowments simply must be taxed. I'm always blown away by how much wealth they control, and how it's controlled by a group of elites who have almost no checks and balances. (The whole OpenAI fiasco shined a light on non-profit boards that way).

There are random foundations all over the country with billion dollar endowments. For example, the Kellogg foundation in Battle Creek Michigan has $8.8 billion.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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!

She's deeply motivated to help the less-fortunate, but also seems like the exact type of bureaucratic cat lady people are complaining about.

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.

It's at least using taxes to put some money back into some peoples' hands.

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.

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.

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.

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.

What trick? The bureaucracy is only expanding.

Yes, the distorting effect of government is one of its worst features.

There's a pretty straightforward steelman for a Department of Education:

  • There are significant economies of scale, many of which are hard to exploit at the county or even state level. Curriculum, IT, large bulk purchasing orders, software development, so on. There are dangers to overoptimizing here -- putting all your eggs in one development basket means a lot of vulnerability where errors pop up -- but it's not unreasonable.
  • There are likely to be mismatches between jurisdictions with higher tax bases and those with large numbers of people who are seeking education. While I'd rather fix the parts of the Richmond Fed philosophy that has made the disparity as large as it's gotten, we demonstrably aren't doing that, so having some way to keep primary education funding from going bonkers or depending on a million local levies has both practical and political benefits.
  • If you're doing federal funding of higher education, you want some level of oversight to prevent it from getting used for absolute garbage, either in the sense of schools that teach nothing, or in the sense of degrees that have no value when learned.

The trouble is that's not really what our DoEd does.

What does the DoEd do in practice?

By dollar, the DoEd's main job (185b in 2024) is offering scholarships, grants, loan guarantees, and other higher education funding. It directly measures students. Measurements of school and program value overwhelmingly come through college accreditation, which is kinda a clusterfuck: the DoEd establishes reporting requirements and rules for accrediting bodies to follow, but those accrediting organizations themselves are technically 'private' organizations and have only begun acting against the worst-performing colleges in very recent years, and the threshold is both staggeringly low and readily gamed.

Charitably, these groups focus on process; less charitably, they're a deniable way to mandate a variety of rules that are politically costly or legally impermissible otherwise. Either way, they're not doing the job, and the DoEd isn't even the ones not doing it, just telling people to do other stuff instead.

((Colleges do not technically need accreditation to operate, but a college without accreditation is unable to receive most federal or federally-guaranteed funds and has very wide restrictions on its ability to transfer credit hours.))

For primary education, the DoEd has significant expenditures and grants (40b in 2024), but this is largely focused on perceived deserts, not on local funding availability. In some rare cases these overlap -- the Office of Indian Education has a bad reputation for other reasons than having difficulty finding poor kids -- but it's at least part of the reason that all the stories about racial education spending has a big asterisk about 'before public funding', and, more critically those schools still suck even as they often vastly outspend far better schools.

For curriculum, it's mostly just a mess. The DoEd sets up grants for individual assessments and projects, but it's neither a major focus nor really done at larger scale, for better or worse (eg, CommonCore is technically a National Governor's Association baby).

Attach strings to accepting federal student loans.

It’s a jobs program, like much of the federal government, and without it ISD’s might do things like get their spending under control or teach effectively, which you can’t have.

I really don’t think I can defend the DoEd as a cost-effective educator. I do think it has value as a floor on provided education.

Most of its expenditures date back to 1965 Great Society programs. However, they’ve been consistently refreshed and revisited by both parties, because no one wants to turn off the firehose assume the burden themselves. Poor states don’t have a better plan waiting; slashing their only source of funding makes their options strictly worse. That may or may not be worth the tiny percentage of federal budget you’d save.

Poor states don’t have a better plan waiting

Do we still have any of those? Mississippi looks like it's still way down at the bottom of the list of US states, but the bottom of the US list is now at like $53K GDP per capita, which even if we use PPP for the nation as a whole still puts them ahead of such hellholes as Belgium, Canada, France, the UK, South Korea, Japan...

Edit: perhaps GDP per child is the right metric to use here? Mississippi is probably behind a few of the countries I just listed on that score, though I can't quickly find numbers and I still doubt the distinction would be large enough to matter.

You know, I’m really not sure. Mississippi isn’t exactly the poster child for income inequality, so it’s not like the per capita numbers are all skewed by one city.

Elsewhere I was seeing some evidence that title I funds were less than 10% of Mississippi’s education funding. If so, maybe all our states really can afford to take up more slack.

On the other hand, there’s got to be some sort of logistic curve. At some point you have to close sites and drop some people from the system entirely. If federal funding covers that cliff, I think removing it would be pretty serious.

Even if you have within-state income inequality, that can be solved at the state level. You need whole states who can't pay for their kids before you need a solution from a federal ...

Oh my. I was going to write "Dep. Ed." because "DoE" is ambiguous with Energy, but I decided to look it up and apparently the official abbreviation, at www.ed.gov, is in fact ED? "Son, I'm afraid you've got ED. I'm prescribing the Tenth Amendment, but be sure to call us immediately if you get a school board election lasting more than four hours!"

If federal funding covers that cliff, I think removing it would be pretty serious.

In theory, you could just make up for it with the extra state taxes that everyone can afford once the taxes which paid for the federal funding are reduced. In the short term, it could be a hell of a transition in the meantime. In the long term, I suspect the question of budget changes stemming from federal debt problems will dwarf budget changes stemming from how much interstate redistribution we do for schools.

I don't think anyone would conflate the Department of Education with Erectile Dysfunction as you imply.

One is an irritating and frustrating affliction most men would love to eradicate for good. The other is erectile dysfunction.

ED—especially when primed by a discussion on education-related administration, bureaucracy, and government transfers—more reminds me of those with "Doctorates" in Education (although Eating Disorder gets a nod). It's like Stolen Valor: They're trying to co-opt the prestige of PhDs, especially STEM PhDs, to lend themselves some notion of being sophisticated Experts on the right side of Science. This has not gone un-Noticed even among the general normie population, hence the "Excuse me! It's 'Doctor'!" versus "Call me Bob" meme.

I don't think anyone would conflate the Department of Education with Erectile Dysfunction as you imply.

One is an irritating and frustrating affliction most men would love to eradicate for good. The other is erectile dysfunction.

Just an aside, but is there a name or term for this particular variety of joke?

I’d call it a switcheroo joke, a species of paraprosdokian phrase. There may be a more precise technical term, but even Bing’s GPT-4 believes it to be the latter, citing a stand-up comedy site.

EDIT: Found it. It’s a bait-and-switch joke. Cognitohazard: here’s a list of them on TVTropes: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BaitAndSwitchComparison

As with other deep southern states, geographic income variation is not the right way to measure economic inequality/inequality of opportunity- the racial income gap is.

I know you're trying to steelman (and I've upvoted accordingly) but the floor ain't working. Places like Chicago and Baltimore are graduating huge numbers of illiterate and innumerate kids. I wouldn't be surprised if black reading levels are actually worse today in Chicago than in 1950s Alabama.

And of course Chicago spends like 24k per year per student, among the most of any city.

Unfortunately, educating students isn't as simple as spending money. In fact, there's little correlation between money spent and results. Cutting budgets probably wouldn't effect student outcomes at all. Certainly, raising budgets hasn't increased standards.

It’s an interesting question. This suggests a 6.2% illiteracy rate in Alabama in 1950. Even assuming that was completely segregated, which was certainly not true, that would get us 132 out of 979 thousand, or 13.5%.

Meanwhile, searching Chicago gets breathless results about 25% “functional” illiteracy…and 20% for the whole state! That’s ridiculous unless the standard of illiteracy in 1950 was much lower. But exceeding Alabama’s 6% or even 13% seems completely plausible.

As for the floor—it’s not actually the cities I was thinking of. It’s the small rural districts across the South and Midwest. I think taking the federal funding from, say, Mississippi shutters a lot of schools. I’m not sure if the budgets back this up, though. If cutting all of the DoEd only cuts marginal state budgets by 10 or 20%, it might be worth it.

It’s an interesting question. This suggests a 6.2% illiteracy rate in Alabama in 1950. Even assuming that was completely segregated, which was certainly not true, that would get us 132 out of 979 thousand, or 13.5%.

Meanwhile, searching Chicago gets breathless results about 25% “functional” illiteracy…and 20% for the whole state! That’s ridiculous unless the standard of illiteracy in 1950 was much lower. But exceeding Alabama’s 6% or even 13% seems completely plausible.

It's entirely possible that Chicago is just uniquely bad, as well.

A major challenge for comparing literacy (or illiteracy) rates across time or different countries is that the measurements are very different. In US, "functionally illiterate" means you can cipher and sound it out, but if it's a sufficiently complex sentence you can't understand it. (For example, some instructions on tax forms.) In developing countries, "illiterate" means you cannot cipher the alphabet (or kanji, as the case may be).

A while back, a student in my Liberal Arts Math class did a deep dive comparing the literacy statistics for US vs. Bangladesh, because some statistics she found suggested that US was doing worse. Turned out that the US stats were for "functional illiteracy" while the study in Bangladesh asked its participants to sound out a few written words.

Not the same thing.

The way it is explained in the UK context is that "functional literacy" is the ability to read a story in a "quality" newspaper like The Times or The Guardian and understand it well enough to answer questions about what happened. That is a much higher standard than just being able to read.

Back in the day, literacy was assessed by self-report. The census taker would ask you "Can you read?" and write down the answer.

What if we literally just removed it?

Presumably there would be much wailing and gnashing of teeth at the sudden loss of ~billions of dollars in grants, student loans, and subsidies handed out by the Department of Education to schools and individuals. Having said that, if the Department were phased out gradually and/or its money spigots moved into other arms of the federal government, I don’t think anyone would notice much difference. As it is, control over K-12 education is almost entirely at the state and local level in the US.

For what it’s worth, Canada has never had a federal Department of Education, but seems to have done just fine given its heritage and demographics.

...

I actually cannot. Most of the functions it could serve are best handled at the state level anyway.

The university 'systems' were functioning well for decades before DoE was even created.

There don't seem to be any collective action problems or market failures that it exists to solve.

Maybe it could be the department in charge of gathering and publishing various metrics on a national level, but that could be spun off to some other agency. Likewise I'd say it could be in charge of testing student aptitude, but the SAT existed for 50 years before DoE was created.

I'm at a loss. I despise agencies like the ATF and the FDA more than the DoE, but I can manage to justify the existence of those on some tangible grounds.

I don't know the answer to your question, but I did visit their website and I noticed that one of their menu options is labeled "Birth to Grade 12 Education", which strikes me as some creepy NWO-style language ("the education of a diverse global citizen begins at birth").

They use the same rhetoric where they want to educate homogenous nationalistic citizens, if that makes you feel better.

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