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“The Department of Education: Budgetary Wastes and Administrative Woes”

Long time no post, I know. The end of the semester has been jam packed with fun things I've had to get done. Expect weekly posts again. Next week should be a good one on what the Republican party needs to do to come back into power...

Until then, get comfortable - this is a long one...

The Department of Education (ED) is a Cabinet-level department under the executive branch of federal government. The Department itself has undergone many major changes since its conception in 1867, but its main duties have remained relatively constant throughout history. Among these are administering financial aid for education, overseeing and publicizing research on America’s schools, calling attention to major educational issues, and prohibiting discrimination in the education system (Drexel). The history of the department began under Andrew Jackson’s Presidency in 1867; Jackson signed legislation creating the first Department of Education as a non-Cabinet level agency that was dissolved in less than a year. During its brief lifespan, the Department’s main accomplishment was the collection of many statistics about the nation’s schools – student achievement, course curriculum, etc. Due to the fear that the Department would exercise too much control over local schools, it was downsized to the Office of Education.

In 1890 the passage of the “Second Morrill Act” authorized the then-named Office of Education for administering support for land-grant colleges and universities. The 1917 “Smith-Hughes Act” and the 1946 “George-Barden Act” focused on aid for agricultural, industrial, and home economics training for high school students.

World War II resulted in a considerable expansion of Federal funding for education. The “Lanham Act” of 1941 and the “Impact Aid Laws” of 1950 eased the financial strain of military and other Federal institutions on communities by supplementing the funds of school districts. And in 1944, the "GI Bill" authorized higher education financial assistance that would provide nearly 8 million World War II veterans the opportunity to attend college (Drexel).

By the 1950’s, political and social changes converged to sway political opinions on the federal role in the education system. The Cold War spawned the first comprehensive Federal education legislation with the 1958 passing of the “National Defense Education Act” (NDEA) in response to the Soviet launch of Sputnik. The NDEA provided several supplementary programs to the US education system including: support for loans to college students; the improvement of science, mathematics, and foreign language instruction in elementary and secondary schools; graduate fellowships; foreign language and area studies; and vocational-technical training. More federal aid began to be dedicated to education in order to elevate the education quality in the United States to that of other Westernized nations. The United States’ and the Soviet Union’s competition of scientific discovery and space exploration led to vastly improved education in the sciences (Drexel).

Under President Lyndon B. Johnson in the 1960’s, the “War on Poverty” led to improvements in education quality and access for the poor. In the 1970's many educational improvements were targeted towards racial minorities, the disabled, women, and people of non-Anglican backgrounds. It was during this decade of continued reform, in October 1979, that Congress passed “The Department of Education Organization Act” which recreated the present Department of Education. This Act split the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare into the Department of Education and the Department of Health and Human Services. The Department of Education was elevated to a cabinet-level agency under President Jimmy Carter in 1981. After President Reagan’s victory with a political platform including the removal of the Department of Education, the Department of Education waffled with two secretaries of Education, but no substantial lasting changes were made (Drexel).

The US Department of Education is headed by the Secretary of Education – currently Arne Duncan under the Obama administration. The ED is comprised of several offices that carry out the components of the Department's mission. The structure of the administration of the ED is one of classical hierarchy. The secretary operates as the head of the Department and acts as a leader in setting the national dialogue on how to improve our education system. This involves activities such as raising awareness of education challenges, providing data on the latest research on what works in teaching and learning, and helping to work out solutions for difficult issues. Beneath the secretary, power is divided between the Deputy Secretary and the Under Secretary who deals with internal management of the department and provides policy advice to the Secretary, respectively. Beneath these offices, power is distributed to several administrative offices; dealing with finances, investigations, legal work, postsecondary schooling, multiple offices dealing with special needs education, vocational legislation, civil rights protection, research and improvement, Congressional affairs, interagency affairs, and human resources. All of these agency divisions are headquartered in Washington, DC and are made up of 4,225 employees occupying several buildings (ED.gov).

Education is Constitutionally a State and local responsibility. States, communities, and private organizations establish schools and colleges, develop curricula, and determine enrollment and graduation requirements. Examining the structure of education finance in America illuminates the predominant State and local role. Of a nationwide estimated $1 trillion budget across all levels for school year 2008-2009, a large majority came from non-Federal sources. The majority is even more substantial at the elementary and secondary level, where over 92 percent of the funds came from non-Federal sources. That means the Federal contribution to elementary and secondary education is a little less than 8 percent, including funds from the Department of Education and also from interagency programs like “Head Start”. The ED describes the Federal role in education as an "emergency response system" – a means to patch holes in State and local support for education when critical needs come about.

Considering the ever-expanding budget of the Department of Education, it appears that the Federal government is taking on more and more responsibility and authority over the education system. With the implementation of the “No Child Left Behind” Act of 2001, the Federal government took a further step onto the toes of State sovereignty by forcing regulations onto States’ and community schools. The growing Federal role in education is Constitutionally questionable. Education is not mentioned as a Federal power in the Constitution, and consequently falls under the authority of the States and the people as reserved powers as penned in the 10^th Amendment. Conservative politicians such as Ronald Reagan – and more recently – Ron Paul, have had legitimate standing in their campaign promises to abolish the US Department of Education. However, their arguments can be countered by the fact that the Department of Education has little or nothing to do with the actual teaching of students, or the administration of schools – rather it maintains itself as an entity meant to simply “fill in the gaps”.

The Constitutional argument against Federal involvement in education is not easily won, but examining the budget breakdown of the Department reveals the growing amount of Federal funding that goes towards education. Although the 2009 ED budget of almost $63 billion only makes up around 2 percent of the total US budget of $3.1 trillion, one wonders how this discretionary spending is used, and what the education system has to show for it. In addition to this budget, over $96 billion has been allotted to the ED through the 2009 Recovery Act. About $7.5 billion will be carried over to the 2010 budget, leaving the ED a discretionary budget of $151.5 billion for the 2009 fiscal year (ED.gov). The numbers are staggering, especially considering that the Federal government is not entitled for a large role in education.

It is unclear if there is a positive correlation between the amount of money spent on the education system and improvements in education quality. Judging by the rankings of the United States against other countries, our billions are doing little to improve the quality of curriculum. The US comes in at number 29 in science, number 35 in math, and number 14 in reading. Finnish students ranked No. 1 in science scores, and No. 2 in both math and reading. In Finland, children begin studying algebra, geometry and statistics in the first grade. By high school, they speak multiple languages. A team of US educators traveled to Helsinki to observe the Finnish system of education and remarked on the liberties that individual teachers had in the classroom. Teachers had total freedom to educate as they saw fit (CNN.com).

The US system is blatantly over-bureaucratized. Despite such a large education budget coming from both Federal and State sources, funds are not funneled into effective channels. Lack of funding for supplies, teacher pay, and school improvements are clear indications that money for education is misplaced. In many instances, teachers are forced to pay for necessary school supplies out-of-pocket. The system would be much more effective if more autonomy and discretion was allotted to teachers and school administrators. “No Child Left Behind” is perhaps the most horrific example of failed bureaucratic efforts in controlling the education system – excessive paperwork, overemphasis on standardized testing, generic evaluations, etc. The forced “top-down” administration that plagues the United States education system prevents instructors from being able to tailor lesson plans for the needs of their students. Over-standardization is the cause of a widening rift between student achievement scores. In addition to the deficits in American achievement scores, there is a lack of emphasis in the importance of fine arts and physical education in public schools; these are always the first programs to be cut when budgets shrink. Creative and physical outlets are often a means for children to develop and expand psychologically beyond the classroom. This loss of important educational functions often cues private education institutions, who also struggle with budgeting in a weak economy, to curtail spending in these areas. This administrative “trickle-over” results in private schools mirroring the same problems present in public institutions – problems that private schools were designed to avoid.

In order to make better use of the monetary resources put towards education, the United States’ system should function much more like Finland’s. The key to a successful education system is ensuring that quality teachers have the resources and autonomy to effectively teach students. Most of the bureaucracy of the Department of Education could be done away with. In fact, with more discretionary power at the ground level of education, the ED could limit its function to prescribing subject matter for effective education, and setting universal policy for State administrations to follow in the insurance of fair and effective education.

Disregarding the Constitutional nuances that we so often fail to observe – if the Department of Education kept the same burgeoning budget, it could be much more effectively allocated if it was injected into the lowest levels of bureaucratic administration with fairly loose guidelines on spending. Perhaps if the education infrastructure was reorganized to allow individual school administrations near complete autonomy in most educational and administrative matters, we would find that our system would be a much more effective one. This system of quasi-bottom-up authority would only prove effective if parents had a choice on where to send their children – districting laws should be done away with in the public school system. If a particular school administration was doing an inadequate job of enabling effective teachers with adequate resources, parents could make the decision to send their children to another, better school. In such a scenario, bussing would also have to be administered by individual schools in order to ensure students have access to their desired place of education. Furthermore, schools that attract more students could possibly be allotted a bigger division of State and/or Federal funds as a sort of incentive to improve education quality. The most effective way for school administrations to be able to ensure quality education is to do away with some of the constraints brought on by teachers’ unions – particularly the concept of tenure. Ineffective educators should readily be replaced by more capable people whenever necessary. The whole operation should be modeled after typical private schools – administered like businesses, with the purpose of pleasing the “consumer” citizen.

The discussion of budgeting and administrative organization in the Kettl and Fesler text tends to focus on exclusive theories in the administrative functions rather than comprehensive methods of application to the real-world budgetary process. In actual budget scenarios, it is difficult to maintain a specific theory as a plan of action. Rather than trying to determine a standard budgetary theory, a Charles Lindblom approach of Darwinian-like successive approximations in budgetary policy would be much more applicable to actual cases. This cyclical process is not nearly as fast as the “all at once” nature of a Rational-Comprehensive approach, but is much more effective at molding appropriate policy via incremental changes. This form of policy natural selection ultimately results in the “survival of the fittest” public policy (Shafritz & Hyde 165-171).

The "one-size-fits-all" blanket approach to the administration and budgeting of the education system is increasingly ineffective and – quite frankly – failing. Theory alone can be extremely unhelpful with policy-making because of its utter incongruence with the irregularity that occurs in public administration. It is clear that the Department of Education must devolve more administrative power to the ground level of State administration in order to better serve the students. There is still an imperative need for Federal guidelines and State oversight in order to ensure fairness, equal opportunity, and uniformity in the national education system, but autonomy must be given to individual school administrations. Bureaucratic overcomplications must be slashed in order to allow educators to have freedom in the classroom to teach in a way that they determine to be most effective.