Why We Should Spare the Education Department — for Now

By the standards of the Trump administration, the proposal to merge the Education and Labor Departments is surprisingly pedestrian. Republican presidents and legislators have been attempting to eliminate the Education Department since its creation by Congress, with the support of President Jimmy Carter, in 1979. In 1982, during the Reagan administration, the department was already described in The New York Times as being on “death row,” yet still it survives, nearly four decades later, unloved but unbowed.

A more Trumpian move would have been to propose merging Education with the Environmental Protection Agency, the Federal Trade Commission’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, and the National Endowments for the Arts and for the Humanities, and banishing them all to the Island of Misfit Toys, perhaps under the direction of Secretary Kardashian (any one of them would do). But this? It’s shopworn enough to have come from the administration of a President Romney or Rubio.

The proposal will, of course, go nowhere, since its next stop is Congress, where most proposals, good and bad, go to die. Still, it is worth considering whether the idea has any merit.

Certainly the notion of eliminating any agency under the direction of Betsy DeVos has an immediate, visceral appeal. And this particular agency has never fulfilled Carter’s hope that it would “allow the federal government to meet its responsibilities in education more effectively, more efficiently, and more responsively.” Few people inside higher education, in particular, would characterize the department under this or any previous administration as effective, efficient, or responsive.

I have been a college president for 15 years and have yet to say, to myself or anyone else, “Thank goodness for those folks in the Department of Education!” A “Dear Colleague” letter from the department is typically neither friendly nor collegial.

I am no expert on elementary and secondary education, but I do know that “No Child Left Behind” and “Race to the Top” prove that the department’s poor policy recommendations are not confined to any one political party.

Nonetheless, merging the Departments of Education and Labor is a powerfully bad idea that would solve none of the department’s current problems and would exacerbate some of its most glaring weaknesses. Chief among those weaknesses, at least with respect to higher education, has been a refusal or an inability to appreciate and understand both the wide variety of types of institutions that make up postsecondary education in the United States and the multiple goals of education within a democracy.

In truth, the Department of Education has invited a proposal that it be merged with the Department of Labor because it has so often acted like a Department of Labor. Consider the two most visible work products of the department over the past 15 years. In 2006 the education secretary, Margaret Spellings, issued “A Test of Leadership: Charting the Future of U.S. Higher Education,” popularly known as the Spellings Commission report.

The focus of the report is accurately reflected in the first lines of its opening summary: “In an era when intellectual capital is increasingly prized, both for individuals and for the nation, postsecondary education has never been more important. Ninety percent of the fastest-growing jobs in the new knowledge-driven economy will require some postsecondary education.” The three references related to labor — “capital,” “jobs,” and “economy” — outnumber appearances of the word “faculty” in the entire voluminous report on the future of higher education. The phrase “liberal arts” does not appear at all.

In 2013, under the direction of the education secretary, Arne Duncan, the department launched a much-publicized College Scorecard, intended to show students “what to look for when choosing a college.” The three top-line items are average cost of attendance, graduation rate, and “salary after attending,” defined as “the median earnings of former students who received federal financial aid, at 10 years after entering the school.” While none of those things is unimportant, the third, at least, suggests that the value of college correlates directly with one’s future income.

The department has also been consistently uninterested in serious collaboration with actual educators. The College Scorecard, for instance, was criticized, to little effect, by the American Council on Education, the Association of American Colleges and Universities, and the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities. According to Molly Corbett Broad, then president of ACE, the scorecard was developed “without any external review.” This has been pretty typical of the way the department has operated.

A merger with Labor would, in all likelihood, take the worst aspects of the current Education Department — a purely utilitarian view of education and a lack of interest in meaningful collaboration — and worsen them. Pure elimination would be preferable and would do less harm to the understanding and oversight of education in America.

Yet I cannot shake the feeling that it would be better, even after all this time, to try to fix the department than to kill it. That will not, of course, happen under the current administration, when cabinet secretaries seem to be chosen on the basis of how strongly they detest or how little they understand the agencies they are appointed to head. As Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, has said, a proposal to merge that might under normal circumstances be worth debating must be viewed at the moment with suspicion, since “there is nothing normal about this administration.”

Some future administration, however, might actually take seriously Carter’s well-intentioned goals — effectiveness, efficiency, responsiveness — and use the Department of Education to deal with some of the glaring weaknesses in our educational system, including unequal access to quality instruction, an unsustainable economic model, and, at the postsecondary level, inexcusably low rates of graduation. It might use the department to reinforce the essential truth — made clearer, it seems, every day — that absent a robust and equitable system of education, a democracy cannot long be sustained. If there is even a small chance that this might happen, it is worth allowing the Education Department to outlive the current chaotic moment.

Brian Rosenberg is president of Macalester College.