John King
Appearances
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What happens if the Education Department is abolished?
Thanks so much. Thank you.
Consider This from NPR
What happens if the Education Department is abolished?
I would agree with Margaret. I'd say the funding that the department provides is crucial. There's the Title I program that helps schools serving low-income students. There's IDA funding, which is the funding for services for students with disabilities. There's the Pell Grant program that makes higher education accessible for low-income students.
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What happens if the Education Department is abolished?
That's the way the government acts on the belief in the role of education that Margaret described.
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What happens if the Education Department is abolished?
Well, remember that the department also plays a critical civil rights enforcement role. It's the place where you go if you're experiencing discrimination, whether it's based on race or gender. It's the place that is protecting the rights of students. That would not be easy for another agency to do. And you want the leadership of the department to focus a national conversation on the urgency of
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What happens if the Education Department is abolished?
of good educational outcomes in K-12 and in higher education.
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What happens if the Education Department is abolished?
You worry about confusion. It's very hard to understand what exactly is meant by the phrase DEI when it's used by the current administration. And you see schools doing things that are deeply troubling, removing books from the library about subjects like slavery or the civil rights movement, taking down a poster of Harriet Tubman.
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What happens if the Education Department is abolished?
You see schools questioning whether or not they can continue to teach African American history. That is deeply worrisome. We are better off if we are teaching students the whole truth about our history and engaging with the hard parts of our history as well as the wonderful parts.
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What happens if the Education Department is abolished?
Look, we need to do a lot better, and my fear is that this debate about the future of the department is actually distracting from the national conversation we should be having about how we urgently improve outcomes. The NAEP results, the National Assessment results, show that a third of eighth graders are below basic in reading.
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What happens if the Education Department is abolished?
That means those students are on a path that will lead to not graduating from high school, not being able to get a decent job, We should have our hair on fire about that, and we should be looking to national leaders to talk about what we do next to improve reading and math and high school graduation. Instead, we're just debating whether or not the department should exist.