Find smoking guns when Elon Musk's budget cutter begins searching for waste in the US education sector.
The agency's approximately $240 billion a year is not a slash fund for whimsical bureaucrats. This is primarily conveyor belts, delivering dollars faithfully to the programmes that Congress has already celebrated.
Is Title I $18 billion for poor children? It is mandatory. $15 billion for Idea's special education? Same transaction. Is Pell over $30 billion? It is the higher education law, not the hobby hose of fraudulent education.
Critics seeking to dismantle the department often imagine it being overflowing with frivolous spending, but the truth is even more mediocre. It is primarily an intermediary.
Actual waste is not on the budget line – it is in the mail room.
Please enter a letter from “Dear Colleague” Billet Dows To the schools and districts.
These Missives don't use taxpayer dollars directly, but are stunning to loosen them from state and local sources.
They are close to a shakedown, as thinly covered as “guidance”: follow our enlightened vision or endanger civil rights investigations that could potentially sacrifice your federal funds.
And when that vision distorts ideology – as often did in the Obama and Biden era, the result is a cascade of spending and confusion for educators to scramble and make taxpayers poor.
Without a single line item pointing to the federal ledger, there are far fewer measurable benefits for students.
Take the April 2011 Title IX letter on sexual violence. The noble purpose – protecting students from harassment – has transformed into a bureaucratic sledgehammer.
Schools and universities have been told to adopt a lower “estecast prevailing” standard to avoid legal protections such as cross-examination of witnesses and accusers to rule out alleged cases of rape and sexual assault on campus.
The result is an explosion of the number of Title IX coordinators hired, each making more than $150,000 a year. Compliance costs rose at least $2 million a year at some universities.
Increase it with thousands of institutions, and you stare at hundreds of millions of dollars and local dollars each year, not Sam's uncle until the 2017 withdrawal of the letter.
The students who were condemned sue a large group claiming that their rights were trampled and critics like the foundation of individual rights in education were trampled on. Condemnation A system of “indifference to guilt.”
The school, caught up in Crossfire, spent money on compliance and lawyers that should have been spent teaching students.
The Biden administration likewise tried to warp in favor of Title IX. The 2021 executive order, “Gender Identity,” has become a subsidiary of Title IX.
The education department faithfully tracked the “Interpretation Notice” a few weeks later, either connecting a line to the school to take charge of costs or putting federal funds at risk.
Then there was a letter of discipline in January 2014. This is a joint production with the Department of Justice, which addressed racial disparities in K-12 school suspensions.
The intent is undoubtedly admirable – who wants bias in the principal's office? – But the execution was an over-master class.
The district was suddenly wary of “different impacts” on racial minorities, and either embraced trendy revisions like recovery justice or simply stopped disciplining unruly children completely.
Teachers received implicit bias training of $2,000-$10,000 per session, but there was no guarantee that it would work. Facilitators were hired or redirected, and new data systems tracked timeouts for every classroom per race.
Conservative estimates of compliance costs are between $100 million and $200 million over several years in urban school districts that are desperate to avoid civil rights investigations.
But Mispent Dollar is not the worst. As student suspensions fell to appease federal monitors, teachers complained that relaxed student discipline was creating disruption in the classroom. Compliance surpassed learning and stopped.
These letters do not appear in the education sector's budget, but are financial vampires, draining local resources under the threat of enforcement, distracting staff time and attention from the major businesses of school education and learning.
The Obama-era version was particularly brave and leaned hard in progressive pre-existing. Title IX as a manifesto for gender justice, student discipline as a racial calculation – leaving Washington's cultural whims bills to schools and districts.
Efforts to trim unnecessary spending in the education sector and pay attention to student outcomes are required on expiration.
But it's not just about digging into that budget – start with stationery.
Robert Pondiscio is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a former public school teacher.
