The Education Department under Secretary Linda McMahon plans to reduce staff by 50%. She said the department will continue to offer programs required by statute: student loans, formula funding, Pell Grants and a couple of others. In the meantime, some 600 employees accepted the earlier governmentwide offer of deferred resignation. What might be next? Peter Cunningham, former assistant secretary for communications and outreach at the Education Department, joined the Federal Drive with Tom Temin to discuss.
Interview transcript:
Tom Temin: And give us a sense of how much of education is actually operational. That is, they have the student loan program where you have a transaction and it’s a banking function. There’s a grant-making kind of function and versus how much is policy and thinking about what the department should do.
Peter Cunningham: Well, I think a lot of it is, as you said, formula funding. It was set up largely over the last, really 70 or 80 years since Eisenhower, when he created Health, Education, and Welfare. And then it wasn’t until 79, the actual Department of Education was created. And it was a recognition. It grew out of a recognition that education was a matter of national interest. You can even go back to Lincoln, who created land-grant colleges. But Eisenhower understood that with the Space Race and the push for STEM education, Johnson and Kennedy understood it. And they passed Title I funding and First Education Act. And then even in the 70s, Republican presidents Nixon, Ford did IDEA and Pell, Reagan did the Nation at Risk. But Bush I started a very important conversation about standards, recognizing that setting standards wasn’t a federal rule, but he convened them on Charlottesville and then to push to a course with No Child Left Behind. So every Republican president before Trump recognized that education was a matter of national interest, while honoring the fundamental belief that it was mostly a state and local responsibility, and that’s still true that we still believe in that. But we think we have a role. Now, what’s going on today, as I can tell, is that there, on one hand, claiming to shrink the federal footprint. Let’s just get out of the business. Let’s just send block grants to states and let them do what they want with the money, without a lot of accountability. On the other hand, the president is doing things like threatening the state of Maine if they fund anything related to DEI or whatever. So on one hand, they say they want to shrink the federal footprint. On the other hand, they’re being a little heavy handed about things. All that said, we just really want to keep these programs in place because they serve vulnerable kids and keep in place the people who understand how the programs work so that states and districts looking for guidance can get it.
Tom Temin: Right. And to what extent did you know in your time working for Secretary at the time was Arne Duncan during the Obama administration. Were programs reviewed? I mean, I’ve heard from some former agency heads that, yes, there’s a lot of things you can change when parties change and it’s routine to go through them, but they would take some months to go through them bit by bit and decide what do we want to boost more, what do we want to cut back on and that both parties do that. And that was a Republican head, by the way, that said that. Was that the case? Is that how things happened when you came in? Was there some sort of review?
Peter Cunningham: Well, what happened was we came in on the heels of the financial crisis, the collapse of 2008. And the first thing we had to do was distribute ARRA money, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, I think it stood for. And we had a $100 billion to distribute to states, which were facing enormous reductions in tax revenues and the likelihood of 3 or 400,000 teacher layoffs, 10% of teachers in the country. And we saved roughly 325,000 jobs. So the first thing we had to do was put up money. The vast majority of that money just went straight up by formula. But we managed to set aside about 5 billion to try and drive some reforms, which we did through a program called Race to the Top and another one called (i3) Investing in Innovation. And the goal there was to try and do things differently or at least push states and districts to try and do things differently. And in some ways, it prompted a lot of them to raise standards. It prompted some of them to develop public school choice programs. Eventually, it prompted some of them to think about teacher evaluation. But like all things, we encountered some backlash as well. So I would say that there wasn’t as much focus on reforming the existing formula programs as perhaps there could have been if some people felt that was a need. And I was not there for the second term, so I can’t tell you.
Tom Temin: Sure.
Peter Cunningham: How much that happened.
Tom Temin: We’re speaking with Peter Cunningham. He’s former assistant secretary for communications and outreach at the Education Department. And did you find the employee’s education? And we find this in many, many agencies that have very specific focuses that the people there, in fact, do have a sense of mission about it. It’s not just a job. I’ve found the people at HUD. Whether you love or hate HUD, they do have a commitment to housing for everyone and this kind of thing. Was that the case at Education?
Peter Cunningham: Unquestionably. They were super dedicated to their task. They explained that they took an oath to the Constitution and that those of us who came in the policymaking positions needed to recognize that. They needed to know that they were here regardless of whether they were Republicans in the White House or Democrats, and that they were 100% committed to honoring the laws as they were passed. So ADDA, for example, serving students with disabilities, they believed that it was just really important that even though the federal government was just 10 or 12% of funding, that 10 or 12% should go to what Congress intended and should meet the goals that Congress had outlined. So if it was to equalize funding for low-income kids, Title I, then that’s it. If it was to deal with bilingual students, it has to go to bilingual programs. And again, what I think there’s concern about now is that if you just block grant all this stuff and you don’t have a department of, let’s face it, is the smallest department in the government, but it’s 4,000 people who actually knew how the laws worked, could advise 100,000 schools around the country, 13,000 school districts, 50 states that what this money was intended for and how it should be used. And now without a lot of that knowledge and experience being laid off, I think that states and districts are just not going to quite know what to do. And if the message coming from Washington is now, do whatever you want, that’s really worrisome. I mean, they’re very explicit that what they want to do is they want to encourage states to take those block grants and set up voucher programs. And that should be concerning to everybody in Congress. But so far, I’m not hearing much in the way of pushback, at least from Republicans in Congress.
Tom Temin: Right. Well, Congress has been kind of paralyzed now for as long as almost anyone can remember in having any ability to do fundamental, I don’t know, statutory change in any of these programs or review. And so you get this seesaw of administration to administration, and it seems to whip further and further back and forth each time. That’s got to be tough on the employees anyway.
Peter Cunningham: It seems awful. And I’ve talked to some of them and they’re really struggling in their careers. They see their careers being interrupted if not destroyed. They’re seeing their aspirations and goals being dismissed and or devalued. So it’s really terrible what’s going on. And it’s early now. We don’t know what’s going to happen with all these firings. Are they going to last or are they going to be reversed? We don’t know whether Congress will start to push back. Both people across the political spectrum, we know Democrats are pushing back. There are red state governors that we have to wonder if they’re going to start pushing back once they start to realize the consequences. I can tell you that this push for vouchers is not popular in a lot of red areas of the country that voted for President Trump, Kentucky and Nebraska both rejected voucher referendums last fall, as did Colorado. They don’t have private schools in some of these rural areas and most rural areas. So it’s a meaningless thing. They want the dollars to help deal with rising costs, limited property tax base and the need to elevate the quality of education they provide. That should be the standard for everything. Are you helping kids learn to read? Because if you’re not helping kids learn to read, if you’re not helping kids do better, more of them in college. And by the way, I would point out that the department was started in 1979. Since then, the percentage of Americans with a college degree has doubled and the high school graduation rate is up about 30 points. So some people like to say, ‘Ah, gee, $1 trillion. And it’s not much to show.’ But we have plenty to show. A whole lot more people with advanced degrees, a whole lot more people with post-secondary training, a whole lot more people completing high school. And the Department of Education has been a central touch point for that.
The post A former Education Department executive on what’s going on now first appeared on Federal News Network.