Dana Goldstein
speaker
58 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Dana Goldstein’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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So a draft executive order attempting to dismantle the Federal Department of Education has been circulating in Washington, and we have seen it. And it's no surprise to us that this draft is out there. We've been hearing for many weeks now that President Trump will sign an order like this. In fact, several times we were sort of poised watching video of him sitting at the Resolute Desk,
in the Oval Office with executive orders that he was about to sign, thinking, is this the day? Is one of these pieces of paper the one that will attempt to abolish the agency? And so far, he hasn't done it. But it does seem that this is something that is in very serious consideration for him.
Well, I think it's important to step back and understand not just what it does, but also what it doesn't do. It does not set the curriculum of local public schools or reading lists or decide how many teachers to hire or what teachers are paid or what student discipline policy should be or what standardized tests should be given. All of that is controlled by state and local governments. Right.
They do not do that. In fact, 90% of the funding for local schools comes from local and state governments. And only about 10% comes from Washington and flows through the Federal Department of Education. That 10% is important because it focuses on low-income students and children with disabilities.
And what a lot of people may not realize is that over 70% of what the Department of Education does is administer the student aid program. So grants and loans that help students pay their college tuition. And they also fund education research. So attempts to figure out what are the best ways to teach students how to read better.
They fund efforts to measure how American students are doing academically compared to students around the world. Okay, so we've got loans and research. And finally, the last thing they do is enforce anti-discrimination or civil rights laws.
So these are the laws that attempt to make sure that students are not being discriminated against based on their gender, their race, their ethnicity, their religion. So for instance, if a school is not giving Black or Hispanic students equal access to gifted programs or advanced placement classes, they might be investigated. And that is very inconvenient.
It is a pretty big deal for any school system. And they would essentially be pressured into changing these practices.
Well, not really. I think we have to say, first of all, that only Congress can vote to abolish a cabinet agency. So President Trump, by signing an order like this, does not have the ability to abolish the Department of Education. But even if he somehow was able to abolish the department, it's not like all of these functions I just laid out would suddenly cease to exist.
One way to think of the Department of Education is that it's like a bucket. And inside of it are all these programs and money that are appropriated and created by Congress. So if you do get rid of this bucket, you still have to deal with all the contents of the bucket.
You know, in a lot of ways, Kim, it's symbolic. And like a lot of these executive orders, it's less about their legal force and more about announcing this administration's priorities. This particular order would be a loud and bold way of signaling that this president wants to majorly overhaul education in this country and drastically change the federal government's role.
Well, I think to figure that out, we have to look at what President Trump has actually done so far with the agency because that gives us a lot of insight into how the next four years will go with him in office when it comes to education. Okay, so what has happened? To get a sense of that, we can actually look at what is going on inside the Department of Education building in Washington, D.C.
There are people in there embedded from Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency Group. And what they are doing is really looking to slash budgets to decimate the research efforts of the agency. They are looking to lay off workers, and they have done so. And they are looking to replace some human work with artificial intelligence.
Our reporting showed that they are particularly focused there on the call center that answers students' and parents' questions about federal financial aid, which you can imagine is super complex, gets into some really personal and private information about families. They are interested in handling way more of that with an AI chatbot, and they are actually attempting to build it internally.
So they are very busy inside of the Department of Education right now.
Yeah, that's part of it. But Kevin, it's about a lot more than just that. President Trump has a broader sort of MAGA vision for public education, which is really about battling what he and his allies see as woke ideology that has pervaded the nation's schools around issues like race, gender, sexuality, and American history. And we are already seeing this play out.
And I will give you a couple of examples. Remember that investigative power of the Department of Education that I mentioned, which enforces anti-discrimination laws? They, the Trump administration, are already using that power, but in a very different, really polar opposite way. So, for instance...
They are investigating the Denver public schools because they had transformed a single girl's restroom in one high school into a non-binary restroom. And they are investigating whether this could potentially be considered a violation of girls' civil rights.
They are looking into the Ithaca public schools, investigating a series of conferences that were held there that were for students of color and looking into an allegation that white students were not invited to these conferences, which were about diversity issues and considering whether that could be considered a violation of white students' rights.
And they also, just late last week, President Trump signed an order that would attempt to withhold federal student loan forgiveness for public service careers from workers who are working at nonprofit organizations whose policies around immigration or around transgender issues buck President Trump's ideas on those issues.
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