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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   30093 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 21, 2024

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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.

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