Amid aftershocks of the Trump victory, education policy experts are picking through his campaign promises and proposals looking for ideas they can work with, and wondering what they can expect. Streamlining the Department of Education? Likely. Hacking off the tentacles of its undue influence? Here’s hoping.
Fierce anti-Common Core fervor might have foretold Trump’s victory. Trump seized on this source of populist rage to fuel his supporters’ already roaring fire. And come September—pencil-sharpening season—he rolled out an ambitious school choice policy at a rally in Cleveland: 20 billion dollars in grants for poor children to attend the school of their choice. (He didn’t offer a budget offset.)
Indiana congressman Luke Messer, a strong school-choice advocate in Congress whose former staffer crafted the Trump proposal, is confident Trump will follow through.
“On the campaign trail, Donald Trump repeatedly championed school choice as an answer for kids locked in poorly performing schools,” Rep. Messer said. “It won’t be easy, but with Republican majorities in both the House and Senate, there is every reason to believe we can get it done.”
Meanwhile, Manhattan Institute’s Max Eden points out just how many questions hang in the balance. While it’s likely Trump’s school choice plan, if it is in fact the department’s first priority, would find its way into the first budget submission, whether he will “make a federal department of school choice and aggressively push state policy” or, preferably, “give states the option to opt-in to a fairer system where money follows students” falls to mere speculation, Eden said.
At the time of Trump’s school choice speech, the American Enterprise Institute’s Frederick Hess doubted the seriousness of the proposal, telling the New York Times, “These are easy ways for him to signal solidarity with mainstream Republican thought.” And, on Thursday morning, at an AEI panel on education policy under the coming administration, Hess said, “I don’t think Trump has ever thought about this stuff in a day in this life,” in reference to the nitty-gritty nuances of Obama administration’s overreaching policies.
Even if President Trump follows Reagan’s example in trying to do away with the Department of Education entirely (Trump mentioned he might last year), and even if he succeeds, states and districts will stick with the Common Core standards they’ve got, the panelists agreed. Demanding states and districts do otherwise would itself be a federal overreach, and not exactly an unprecedented one.
If they study strategies laid out in the Obama playbook, the president-elect’s administration will find quite a lot to work with—and per recent precedent, they’ll have a tremendous amount of power. “The people who are going to take jobs in the Department of Education are no longer confident that there is mutual understanding on both sides that restraint will be exercised,” Hess said.
Under new direction, the department could choose to follow the Obama administration’s lead to advance Trump’s agenda, whatever that may be, dictating by funding incentive to states, districts, and schools—not to mention colleges and universities.
The Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights decreed via the 2011 Dear Colleague Letter—a “guidance” backed by a threat to cut off the noncompliant—that all colleges must investigate and adjudicate gender discrimination claims, however slight or specious. OCR bound colleges to its broad, extra-legal interpretation of the Higher Ed Act’s Title IX; schools that fell short risked federal funding lost and public disgrace piled on.
Although they will probably employ them to different ends, President Trump’s education department will have these same tactics in its quiver. Citing an eight-year-long lesson in administrative overreach, Andy Smarick, also at AEI (and a WEEKLY STANDARD contributor), warned, “[The Obama admin.] playbook could be used in a way that folks who were happy over the last eight years won’t be happy in the next four or eight.”
Whether a Trump administration will take up these tried and tested power abuses remains to be seen. But, elsewhere in overreaching regulations, a more predictable but far less precedented defense awaits a Republican president and Republican congress: the 1996 Congressional Review Act, a defense against federal agencies’ authority.
AEI’s Jason Delisle presaged a coming era of the CRA, which “allows Congress to do a fast track, filibuster-proof up or down vote on any new regulations” and requires a presidential signature. For the first time since Bush’s 2001 overturn of burdensome Department of Labor rules instituted late in Clinton’s last term, a CRA resolution will easily overturn broad and reckless uses of federal law—like ED’s recently finalized student debt relief rule.
As rulemaking and review advanced, and it seemed the costly and vague student debt relief rule (yet another way to weaponize the department in service to a partisan agenda) would proceed unchecked, THE WEEKLY STANDARD
wrote: “A clear path to block the rule will open only in the case of a President Trump getting to sign off on a Congressional Review Act action overturning it.” With Trump elected, the way forward is clear.
