STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Here's a campaign promise by President-elect Trump.
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DONALD TRUMP: We're going to take the Department of Education - close it. I'm going to close it.
INSKEEP: Closing the Department of Education. So what would that mean? To understand that, we have to get our brains around what the department does. You can guess from the title that the Department of Education has something to do with education, but state and local governments operate public schools and universities. Your neighborhood school would still exist without the DOE. What the federal department has done since 1979 is oversee everything from college student loans to aid for public school special education. From the beginning, Republicans have called for its elimination. And Jon Valant says this effort comes at a time of skepticism about public education since the pandemic. Valant studies inequities in schools from his perch at the Brookings Institution - a Washington think tank - and he says the Department of Education does a lot to make education more equal.
JON VALANT: The U.S. Constitution doesn't say anything about schools or about education, and it kicks all of that work to the states. But over time, the federal government has come to play some really important roles, things like protecting students' civil rights, providing some compensatory funding to students in poverty and students with disabilities who would very likely be underserved if we relied entirely on state and local funding. So it is not an agency that is telling schools what to do. They're not defining curriculum. They're not telling schools which teachers they can hire or which books to use. They're really administering these programs that have been established through law over the last several decades.
INSKEEP: What is the substantive issue that makes this real for people who dislike the Department of Education? Are they saying I really don't like the way the DOE is enforcing civil rights in my communities? I really don't like the way the DOE is making my district spend money on poor people.
VALANT: So some of the hot-button issues that come up over time are really about civil rights enforcement. For example, the Biden administration put in some new regulations around Title IX that expanded the prohibition of sex-based discrimination to also include sexual orientation and gender identity. One of the more likely moves from the Trump administration will be getting rid of those regulations and changing the way that civil rights enforcement happens within the Department of Education.
INSKEEP: Aside from the social issues, is the Department of Education just a vehicle for a lot of money going to certain schools?
VALANT: That's a big part of what it does. Particularly when we're talking about K-12 education, it is sending resources to schools that would otherwise be severely underfunded. We have a system in place in the U.S. where we fund schools through a combination of local, state and federal sources. And local funding sources tend to be tilted in the direction of schools in higher-wealth areas. And so you get that sort of inequality that is baked in. So part of what the federal government's role in this is, is to offset some of those advantages and disadvantages would come from a local and state system like that.
INSKEEP: Another way to describe it is that wealthy, more liberal, blue areas are subsidizing more conservative, more rural, poorer, redder areas of the country in terms of education. Am I right?
VALANT: So the politics of this are really fascinating. So programs like Title I, which again, provides these resources for students who need it most, they go not just to politically blue areas or big cities. They really go to all parts of the country. And in fact, if you look at the states that rely the most on Title I funding as a share of their per-pupil education spending, it's actually a bunch of red kind of rural states that get the largest share of funding from Title I. And so when you start to talk about shutting down the department or scaling back these programs, you run into opposition, not just from Democrats who across the board oppose that kind of move, but actually a lot of congressional Republicans see the threat that it poses to their own constituents.
INSKEEP: Jon Valant of the Brown Center on Education Policy at Brookings. Thanks so much.
VALANT: Thank you, Steve. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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