The Delta Issue #68

If You Wanted Chaos, This Is Exactly How You’d Do It

Last week, the Trump Administration announced that a number of education programs will move out of the Department of Education and into the Departments of Labor, HHS, Interior, and State.

They’re calling it “breaking up federal bureaucracy,” and billing it as part of their plan to return education to the states. But let’s be honest. If you were trying to make it harder for states to use federal money to execute on a vision for kids, this is exactly what you would do.

Nothing about this helps kids. Not one thing.

A state chief put it perfectly to us yesterday: “Right now, I’m having trouble getting my money from one federal agency. I’m not sure how I’m supposed to get money from four.”

We have a serious education problem in America right now. The headlines in K–12 are almost uniformly devastating: kids who can’t read, districts staring down funding cliffs, and classrooms full of hungry students.

And yet, at a moment when schools need stability and support as much as ever, the federal focus on education is producing nothing but a bureaucratic mess that makes it harder to get the resources kids actually need.

I don’t know what this reshuffling is supposed to accomplish, but I know what it won’t do. It won’t help students learn to read, or build pathways to upwardly-mobile jobs.

How to make federal dollars even harder to use.

There is a world in which federal dollars become easier to access. This is not that world.

We’ve argued for years that the field needs a single, coherent system — a Super App — that makes it easier for states and districts to navigate federal programs in one place. This move takes that idea and sprints in the opposite direction.

Yes, there is too much federal bureaucracy, and yes, states could benefit from more flexibility. But this just multiplies the number of doors states have to walk through. Instead of dealing with siloed programs inside one department, they’ll be dealing with siloed programs across several.

The only way this makes sense is if you promised to “get rid of the Department of Education” and needed a way to start making good on that promise.

With no intent of fear mongering, I want to be realistic: under this structure, the list of programs likely to survive gets very short. Title I and IDEA may very well be the only ones left standing.

Extra gratitude to the leaders doing the work in the middle of all this.

State chiefs will absorb this fallout. The people who will now have to untangle all of this are the same leaders who are trying to keep districts funded and advance instruction.

While agencies get rearranged, state teams are already trying to figure out the next move.

We’re especially grateful to the chiefs and deputies who are navigating yet another round of federal churn while keeping their eyes on what actually matters: kids getting what they need to learn.

Let’s get muddy

• If you want to see how others in the field are making sense of this, Mike Petrilli rounded up a sharp set of reactions.
• Chad Aldeman has a great piece that explains what’s going on candidly: the Administration can’t legally dismantle the Department of Education, so they’re shuffling its work to Labor instead, 0.6 miles away, in a way that creates maximum chaos and solves nothing.
• Education Week ‘s program-by-program chart breaks down each program’s destination, and it’s incredibly helpful for seeing the full scope of the reshuffling.