Trump wants to destroy the Department of Education. Can he actually do that?
Technically, yes.
However, “It would take an act of Congress to take it out,” Don Kettl, professor emeritus and former dean of the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland, told Vox. “It would take an act of Congress to radically restructure it. And so the question is whether or not there’d be appetite on the Hill for abolishing the department.”
That’s not such an easy prospect, even though the Republicans look set to take narrow control of the Senate and the House. That’s because abolishing the department “would require 60 votes unless the Republicans abolish the filibuster,” Jal Mehta, professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, told Vox.
So probably not. If it gets to the point that Trump’s whims of all sorts can be implemented, we’ll be so screwed that we’ll be praying for the Canadians to invade. If he did manage to get his wish, I don’t think he’s aware of the consequences.
Closing the department “would wreak havoc across the country,” Valant said. “It would cause terrible pain. It would cause terrible pain in parts of the country represented by congressional Republicans too.”
Much of that pain would likely fall on the country’s most vulnerable students: poor students, students in rural areas, and students with disabilities. That’s because the department’s civil rights powers help it to support state education systems in providing specialized resources to those students.
As usual, the Republican electorate was too stupid to realize that they were hurting themselves. Or maybe they think it was worth it to hurt their citizens who are handicapped, or gay, or trans, because while it is taking money away from them, it’s taking that money specifically from people they hate.
Even if the DOE isn’t abolished, they can worm their way into it and wreck all kinds of policies. For instance…
Trump officials could also attempt changes to the department’s higher education practices. The department is one of several state and nongovernmental institutions involved in college accreditation, for example — and House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA) has threatened to weaponize the accreditation process against universities he believes to be too “woke.”
I’m at a university that I would generally class as “woke,” and that’s a good thing. I have so many students who I wouldn’t get to know if we were anti-woke, which generally involves only supporting straight white Christian men.
Dunno if Trump can do it but sure he’s going to try to do so. He loves the poorly educated – the poorer educated the better far as he’s concerned..
I think the Republicans will want to keep the filibuster and will welcome any initiative to kill the DOE, because they won’t want the consequences, but would love to be able to campaign on the Democrats not allowing them to destroy the evil DOE.
If it gets to the point that Trump’s whims of all sorts can be implemented, we’ll be so screwed that we’ll be praying for the Canadians to invade.
I’ve been praying for the Canadians to invade for decades.
Linda McMahon is a good start to fucking it up completely
Like the Canadians would ever fall for that bait…
@ ^ Erlend Meyer : Fuck nationality, humans are human. All too fucking human and thus flawed as fuck.
Lost so much faith in people this last few weeks. Sigh.
I’m not seeing how this could happen.
Public education is a state and local matter by the constitution and the vast majority of the funding is local.
The Federal part is only 11%.
Yeah, it will hurt.
Education is always low on funds and could use more.
“Wreaking havoc across the country?”
This might be an exaggeration.
DOE “manages all sorts of programs for both public schools and higher education, including Title I funding for K-12 schools serving low-income communities, funding for special education (and enforcement of laws requiring equal access to education for students with disabilities), and on the higher ed side, processing applications for student aid and running the federal student loan program.” More than just funding would be lost.
I don’t get this attack on public education.
It’s by and large has been amazingly successful and brought the USA to where it is.
It’s free for one thing.
Of course it isn’t really free.
It’s paid for by the vast majority of people like me who don’t have young kids in school. The taxpayers. Old people whose kids are grown up. The childless 20% of the USA. Young people without children.
Which means it is essentially free to people who do have school age children.
The alternative?
I just looked up the tuition for the local private xian school which isn’t the worst and you can probably get an average education. It isn’t going to be better than the local public schools which in my area, which are well supported and good schools.
Primary school is $8,000 a year, going up to $10,000 for high school.
Two kids in school and you are talking a new compact car every year.
Good luck MAGAts.
You can add that $20,000 a year to your F150 truck loan payments and your student loans from a decade ago that you will by paying off for the rest of your life.
And wonder why you are in debt and broke despite working full time.
He isn’t going to do jack shit to use the “official” or “legal” way. He’ll donit the same way he destroyed the Supreme Court – sabotage. He’ll appoint loyal incompetents that will ignore the law & do what he says, and when he doesn’t tell them what to do they’ll fuck it up so bad it’ll be the same thing as destroying it.
Here is one goal of the GOP for public funding of schools.
They want to funnel taxpayer money to private segregated white only schools and xian private schools.
Follow the money.
Good, old-fashioned child labour. The poors don’t need no education if they’re just going to be working in the fields, down the mines, in garment factories and in meatpacking plants. And children have nimble little fingers, so they’re idea for working around machinery.
Title IX funding is part of the Dept of Ed funding as well. Girls and womens sports are going to just be shutdown entirely as many of these states just can’t afford it at all.
We can be almost certain that he doesn’t know what it will do. We can also be almost certain that if he knew what it will do he would not care.
By the way, abolishing the Department of Education has been a somewhat quiet talking point in Republican circles for decades.
Education isn’t mentioned in the US Constitution. The courts and particularly SCOTUS have made some fuck the Constitution and fuck your little dog stare decisis too decisions. There are no cutesy ‘checks and balances’ happening here.
@raven #7
wut
The chart shows 4-20 %. Dunno what your personal budget’s response was to the monopolies’ massive mercantile price gouging (and telling their pet fake news ‘iT iS infLatIon’) was, but 11 % is non-trivial for most people. Umm… good for you that it’s not?
@Dunc #12:
Those industrial chimneys don’t clean themselves, you know.
Rich@16- And besides, children fit in chimneys much better than adults.
It’s an article of Republican faith that anything “public” (i.e. funded by the government) is intrinsically worse than any alternative private solution. They don’t believe they’re destroying the education system, they believe they’re fixing it.
The fact that all the evidence runs against their beliefs is not an issue for them, since they believe the evidence is manufactured by the liberal elites, and will reject all efforts to get them to look at it.
We have arrived at peak conspiracy theory thinking.
When Trump finishes doing a Josef Stalin on the Defence Department by sacking all the generals Canada would win.
@12
what mines
we listen to this professional prevaricator as if he has beliefs and plans, when we openly declare that he lies all the time.
he personally will do nothing on his own. he will be presented if he has to with some order or other issue the selected command from his toadies and go back to the TV or the golf course. his underlings will do the thing making sure that their “taste” of the perks are grabbed and squirreled away and someone else will suffer from their power it will be just as nasty as it was before just probably quicker
I have wondered how anyone could bankrupt a casino I do not wonder so much now. this is how he did it.
the republicans like to say that the government should be run like a business but they do not seem to elect very many successful business people to public office mostly swindlers and cheats who are looking out for only themselves.
More wondrous is how he could get a casino, bankrupt it, and blithely carry on.
Um.
A business is run to make profit; also, business people who get elected to public office and thereby profit are by definition successful. Not getting elected and profiting, that would indicate a lack of success.
@21. John Morales : “More wondrous is how he could get a casino, bankrupt it, and blithely carry on.”
.. And still have people somehow think he’actually a good businessperson.
After that and so many other failures and bankruptcies
yes swindlers and cheats they make money and exercise influence , business people who get elected to public office and thereby profit are by definition successful. use their power to enrich themselves but do not help the people nor the society that makes up the country’s government helping the government to fail to do the job of government for and by the people. That failure many times echoes on and on in the the economy as what ideas and policies they do implement have long lasting negative effects on everyone else though they sometimes escape themselves.
Yeah, not at all sure what the orange monster, or even the rest of the party, understands “accreditation” means or does. You get some “unaccredited” schools all the damn time, though most of them are religious run BS factories. The function of the system is to allow credits to transfer between institutions, and tell businesses that the people they hire are likely qualified for what they are being hired for, and not just some idiot with a fake diploma, who can’t. Gut the system and what you end up with is just that legit colleges, including possibly many of the ones that they decide are “not too woke”, just set up their own system to determine things, bypassing the idiots that tried to destroy them, and it very quickly (relatively speaking) becomes apparent to companies that they can no longer trust any college that are still deemed “accredited” under what ever the F new rules they make up to define that. It is only some magic bullet, which will destroy colleges, or make them fall in line, unless the colleges f-ing allow it to be. And, any college that does fall in line… well, some will, and some may even surprise their students, but they are likely to find themselves without a whole lot of those students, pretty dang quickly, because, again, these morons all think that because they conned the country into voting for them over “economic issues”, the majority, in direct contradiction to all evidence, also believe in all the other insane shit they do, or will just accept it, without challenge.
@23 unclefrogy Sadly, the way they have rigged things, at this point, with all the secret money, “Citizen’s United”, etc., crap, you kind of have to either be heavily backed by people that are already “successful at business”, or are already successful, and they have been rigging business itself, more and more, for years, to cater to grifters, cheaters, corner cutters, and clever liars, to the extent that being honest, and caring about the country, or your own workers, is almost a complete detriment, which makes you incapable of competing with the grifters.
Tacitus, they don’t really believe they are fixing it either. The only thing they believe is that they need and deserve more power. And they will do anything to get it including turning the education system on its head so the few can maintain power over the many and continue to take money from the many.