Do you want facts or rhetoric? Or: Why would anyone want to eliminate the U.S. Department of Education?

Once the hype and hysteria about “woke agendas” clears, it’s important to ask what the USDOE has done to warrant its closure because of this alleged agenda.  It’s interesting to me that this is happening at a moment when people really don’t know what the department does.  Is it really a clique of leftist agitators who use the department to further their socialist agenda?  Has it really been a government agency that espouses values that are contrary to the nation’s? 

Let’s start with what department isn’t:

• It doesn’t have curriculum that’s required to be taught in schools.  That’s done by states and local schools.
• It doesn’t establish standards for who’s qualified to be a teacher.  That’s done by states.
• It doesn’t mandate what materials are used by teachers.  That’s done by states and schools.

Its job is actually pretty straightforward.  USDOE is responsible to manage the funds and programs mandated by Congress and the President.  As such, it can’t go off and do what it wants to do.  If you don’t like what it does, go tell Congress and the President because they set the USDOE agenda. 

 

The best way to know whether the claims of a “woke agenda” are true is to take a few moments and review its budget – you know, follow the money.  Remember:  It can only do what Congress and the President give it money and a mandate to do.  At the time this essay is written, you can get the budget proposed for 2025 by the past administration online at:

 

https://www.ed.gov/sites/ed/files/about/overview/budget/budget25/summary/25summary.pdf

 

If the department removes that link, e-mail me, and I’ll send the document to you.  The past administration’s budget is instructive because it shows the priorities that Congress and the President gave to the department historically.  To show that history, the budget provides a comparison of the two prior years.  As with any government agency, understanding what an agency does is best accomplished by seeing how it spends its money.  The current administration has yet to propose a new budget. 

 

How to read a budget:  Start at the budget summaries on page 71.  There’s a lot on the pages which follow that specifies exactly what the USDOE does.  Those summaries are where you have to look to find if there’s “woke agenda” money being spent.  Like everything else in life, how the money gets spent determine what gets done.  The pages before page 71 give details on each item in the summary.  After you see the summaries, go back through the entire document.  Read through the document and find where the “woke agenda” gets implemented.  If you can’t find it, forward the link and ask your friends and relatives who fear the “woke agenda” to find it for you.  If their answer is that the “woke agenda” is hidden, have them ask the experts they follow to show exactly where it's hidden.

 

It's one thing to make a claim, and it’s another thing to support the claim with facts.  The USDOE is being used as a red herring to support an evil versus good story.  Additionally, some commentors find a specific issue they have in the budget and then overgeneralize that to the whole organization.  Overgeneralizations and red herrings are well-established rhetorical tricks to get folks to believe a point of view.  Looking at facts shows there’s no evidence of a “woke agenda.”  The money in that budget goes to goals like supporting special education students or underwriting loans for college students.  If you believe the “woke agenda” story, you’re accepting what someone else told you instead of looking for the truth. 

 

Here are the categories of key initiatives that this budget would have supported.  For detailed explanations of these categories, read the budget document, beginning on page 7. 

 

The proposed budget for K-12:

• EXPANDS ACCESS TO HIGH-Q UALITY PRESCHOOL FOR UNDERSERVED CHILDREN

• PRIORITIZES THE HEALTH AND WELL-BEING OF STUDENTS

• INCREASES SUPPORT FOR CHILDREN WITH DISABILITIES 

• EXPANDS SUPPORT FOR FULL-SERVICE COMMUNITY SCHOOLS

• INVESTS IN EDUCATOR RECRUITMENT AND RETENTION 

• SUPPORTS MULTILINGUAL LEARNERS 

• FOSTERS DIVERSE SCHOOLS 

• REIMAGINES THE HIGH SCHOOL TO POSTSECONDARY TRANSITION

For education beyond high school, the budget:

• PROPOSES HISTORIC I NVESTMENTS IN COLLEGE AFFORDABILITY

• MAKES SIGNIFICANT COMMITMENTS TO POSTSECONDARY STUDENT SUCCESS, COMPLETION, AND SUPPORT

• INCREASES EQUITABLE FUNDING FOR HBCUS , TCCUS, MSIS, AND COMMUNITY COLLEGES

• BOLSTERS OUR NATION’ S SKILLED WORKFORCE WITH EXPANSIONS TO CAREER AND TECHNICAL TRAINING AND ADULT EDUCATION 

• INCREASES SUPPORT FOR CIVIL RIGHTS ENFORCEMENT

I put the categories in all caps because I copied and pasted them directly from the document so that I could be most accurate.  So which of these “woke” items should be eliminated?  Please do read the document that describes each item before responding to that question. 

 

People who demonize the Department of Education are either misguided or misguiding others.  If you believe what right-wing media sources and agenda-driven demagogues tell you, you’re misguided.  If you’ve actually seen what the Department of Education does and are telling others of its evils, you’re intentionally misguiding people.  The other term for that is “lying.”  Using a lie to get people to focus on something other than what you’re doing is yet another rhetorical device.  It’s called a stalking horse strategy.  The people who use these rhetorical devices to lie about the USDOE want you to see it as evil and, thus, further their narrative that the nation needs them to rescue us from such evil organizations. 

 

If we want to have discussions about a particular program or use of funds, that’s always good.  Let’s talk about whether the $400 million proposed for charter schools is the best use of resources (see page 20).  Or whether Comprehensive Centers are worth the $50 million proposed (a reduction of $5 million from the prior year – see page 26).  But avoiding such conversations by using rhetorical sleight of hand to vilify anything or anyone is always a bad idea.  It’s actually a signal to me of a weak argument when I see people using rhetoric instead of making a fact-based case for their ideas.  In this case, it’s a blatant attempt to further an agenda of fear. 

 

The folks who are lying about the USDOE want to show us that this agency is further proof of an out-of-control leftist plot to erode freedoms through a “woke” agenda.    Actually, you should read the budget with an understanding of the political environment of the past 50 years that the agency has navigated.  You’ll see funds for the support of testing and assessment, funds for charter schools, and funds for research into innovation – all topics that have been pushed into the budget in the past by conservatives.  If I focused on those, I could make a claim that the USDOE is rampantly conservative.  But that would be using rhetorical trickery.  The truth is that the USDOE reflects the full spectrum of political thought over the past 50 years as different Congresses and administrations shaped it. 

 

I’ll illustrate from a personal experience.  I was hired to be the external evaluator on a five-year grant funded by the USDOE during the current president’s first term.  By the way, when I do that kind of work, I also look at whether the funded organization is spending its funds as they were approved to spend them.  I’m an independent contractor whose reputation is on the line if I fail to report malfeasance.  Having an independent contractor write an external report that’s sent to USDOE provides an additional layer of protection against fraud.  This specific award was to a community college which proposed to look at how it was retaining and graduating students.  The project established a set of activities and goals to determine whether the college met its aims.  In order to be funded, however, the USDOE required the college to add an additional activity for all new students to complete training in financial literacy. 

 

Teaching people about check book balancing and how best to borrow money is never a bad idea.  However, there is no evidence in the research which shows that offering financial literacy supported the college’s aims in that project.  The requirement was one made by the administration at the time, based on that administration’s interests – even if it wasn’t something that met the aims of the project.  Nonetheless, the college included that component and successfully met its goals in meeting the requirement.  And that’s how the USDOE works.  I’ve evaluated many grants as well as managed them over the years where there was a mandated activity that reflected Congress or the President’s priorities.  USDOE is an agency that follows what it’s asked to do. 

 

So let me reiterate the challenge:  Go read the budget and find the pervasive leftist agenda that the current administration wants to convince us exists.  Then write your own essay that explains where the “wokeness” lives.  Make certain, as I’ve done, to include specifics and references.  And if that seems daunting, send a note to the people who have previously convinced you about the USDOE and ask them to do that.  Ask for facts, not rhetoric.  Then compare with what you’ve read in the budget.