Pun Salad

Love or hate the Project 2025 blueprint for the next conservative president, it has done at least one good thing: revive discussion of ending the U.S. Department of Education. That department has no constitutional business existing. But eliminating the programs it administers, many of which predate the department, is just as important.

In the early 1970s, the National Education Association transformed from a professional association to a labor union and offered its endorsement to a presidential candidate who would support a stand-alone education department. Democrat Jimmy Carter made the promise and was elected in 1976.

The idea was controversial, including on the left. Joseph Califano, Carter's secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW), objected to taking education programs from under the broader welfare roof and saw a standalone department as a threat to higher education's independence. Albert Shanker—the president of the other major teachers union, the American Federation of Teachers—opposed a department as likely ineffectual and a threat to state and local K-12 control.

I don't know what Trump means by that and am not sure Trump does, but there is a range of things it might mean:

1. Remove the secretary from the cabinet, relabel things a bit, leaving the power and flow of money essentially the same.

2. Abolish the department, transferring everything it does to other parts of the federal government.

3. Abolish the department, converting all expenditures into grants to state departments of education and removing all federal control over how the money is spent.

4. Abolish the department and all its programs and expenditures.

5. Abolish the department, converting all its expenditures into a federal voucher program, with the money going to whatever form of education the parents prefer, including a public school if they choose to send their child there.

1 and 2 are not significant changes. 3 eliminate federal control over K-12 schooling. 4 is the approach that best fits a strict reading of the constitution, since schooling is not among the enumerated powers. It also saves almost 250 billion from the federal budget.

5 is the most interesting one. There are about fifty million school age kids and the 2024 budget of the department was 238 billion dollars, so if you convert the whole budget to a K-12 voucher it's almost five thousand dollars per child. That is about half what public schools cost but enough to provide an education in less expensive ways.

[…] getting rid of the DOE or at least diminishing its role would only be the first step. The next, much harder step would be voting for politicians and policies that would implement school vouchers for students, merit pay for teachers, expanded school accreditation, and much more standardized testing to hold educational institutions accountable.

Not only would this incentivize schools to compete with one another for enrollment, but it would also incentivize decentralization in American school systems, giving more say to teachers and parents. Instead of massive one-size-fits-all districts, campuses, and classrooms, K-12 schools would be smaller, more specialized, and tailored to specific educational needs. Instead of the bureaucratic bloat, incompetence, and corporate anonymity that characterizes most faculties, there would be far more efficient, talented, and close-knit communities of educators with a shared mission.

All of this will necessarily be part of a process that goes beyond a new DOE appointee making a few changes in federal policy. It will take all Americans to follow Trump’s lead and do their part to bring down the educational leviathan in their states and cities. It may be daunting, but it’s possible and certainly worth doing. 

A loan is a financial product where someone lends money to someone else at interest. When the borrower pays back the loan, the lender makes money for providing the valuable service of financing.

In passing the Affordable Care Act in 2010, the federal government nationalized student loans to help offset the costs of the law. That means that Barack Obama was also familiar with the definition of “loan,” and he said nationalizing student loans would make them more efficient and, therefore, more profitable for the government. “By cutting out the middleman, we’ll save American taxpayers $68 billion in the coming years,” Obama said at the time.

Today, the government expects to lose money on the average student loan. In total, the government’s entire student-loan portfolio lost $205 billion between 2015 and 2024, and it’s expected to continue losing money for the foreseeable future.

These are not loans. They are handouts. Policy-makers need to treat them accordingly.

How did Title IX, the law historically associated with providing women and girls more opportunity to participate in sports, become the cudgel the Biden-Harris administration used to allow biological boys to compete on girls sports teams? The story of how this happened goes a long way to explaining how Donald Trump won a second term as president of the United States this month.

Title IX was passed in 1972 in the spirit of the second-wave feminism that was popular at the time. The idea was to give women equal opportunities in education, particularly in college. Sports wasn’t even mentioned in the law. It was later in the ‘70s that the bureaucrats in Washington got the job of figuring out how to enforce Title IX in sports.

These federal bureaucrats had a conundrum on their hands. Title IX outlaws discrimination on the basis of sex, but enforcing nondiscrimination in sports would do the opposite of what the law intended: Girls and women would lose opportunities, not gain them. If the principle of non-sex discrimination applied in sports—like in does in math and English class, for example—there could be no separate teams for women and men just as there are no separate math and English classes for men and women. If girls and women weren’t guaranteed sports opportunities, there would only be men—especially in high school and college—on most sports teams. The typical boy would out-run, out-lift, and out-throw the typical girl.