A draft decree to eliminate the education department was prepared in early March, but Trump did not sign it last week. Instead, McMahon said on Fox News that she had started to fire employees as a “first step” towards this elimination. The former employees of the department think that McMahon and his team decided which offices to cut. A few weeks before its confirmation, around half a dozen people from the former McMahon reflection group, the Right-Wing America First Policy Institute, were inside the department and examined the bureaucracy, according to a former department of education. The Department of Education did not respond to my requests by e-mail.
Mass layoffs this month was preceded by an attack on February 10, when the Elon Musk government’s Department of Etimony ended a large part of the work that is supervised by these research and statistics on education units. Most of the ministry’s research and data collections are carried out by external entrepreneurs, and nearly 90 of these contracts have been canceled, including vital data collections on students and teachers. The distribution of approximately $ 16 billion in assistance in Aid I for low -income schools cannot be calculated properly without this data. Now, statisticians who know how to manage the complicated formula have also disappeared.
“Fire at five alarms”
Mass layoffs and contract cancellations have amazed a lot. “This is a fire at five alarms, burning statistics that we must understand and improve education,” said Andrew Ho, a psychometrician at Harvard University and president of the National Education Council, on social networks.
The former NCES commissioner, Jack Buckley, who led the education statistics unit from 2010 to 2015, described destruction as “surreal”. “I’m just sad,” said Buckley. “Everyone has the right to their own political ideas, but no one has the right to their own facts. You have to share the truth in order to make any kind of improvement, whatever management you want to go. It does not seem to be the world in which we live now. »»
The deepest cuts
While other units within the education department have lost more employees in absolute number, the IES has lost the highest percentage of employees – around 90% of its workforce. Educational researchers asked why the Trump administration targeted research and statistics. “All of this seems to be part of an attack on universities and sciences,” said a teacher of education in a large research university, who asked not to be identified for fear of reprisals.
This fear is well founded. Earlier this month, the Trump administration canceled $ 400 million in federal contracts and subsidies at Columbia University, blaming the university’s failure to protect Jewish students against anti-Semitism during campus demonstrations last year on Israeli attacks against Gaza. Among them, four research subsidies that had been issued by IES, including an evaluation of the efficiency of the federal labor work program, which costs $ 1 billion in the government. This five -year study was almost finished and now the public will not learn the results. (The Hechinger report is an independent press organization at the Columbia University Columbia University.))
Tom Brock, Executive Director of the Community College Research Center of Teachers Columbia University Columbia, said that he had been carefully optimistic that he could successfully call on the cancellation of his $ 2.8 million in educational research grants. (He planned to argue that the College teachers are an entity distinct from the rest of Columbia with its own president and board of directors and that it was not affected by the demonstrations of students to the same degree.) But now the IS office which issued the subsidies, the National Center for Education Research, has lost its staff. “I’m very discouraged,” said Brock. “Even if we appeal, all the staff were dismissed. Who would reintegrate the grant? Who will we go back to? Who would watch him? They completely eliminated the infrastructure. I could imagine a scenario where we would gain on appeal and it cannot be put into force. »»
Active contracts
Many contracts with external organizations for data collection and research subsidies with university professors remain active. This includes the national evaluation of education progress, which follows the results of students, and the integrated post -secondary education data system (IPEDS), which collects data on colleges and universities. But now there are almost no employees to supervise these efforts, examine them for accuracy or sign future contracts for new collections and data studies.
“My job was to make sure that public dollars limited for education research were spent as best they could be,” said a former education official who issued subsidies for the development of new innovations. “We ensure that there is no fraud, waste and abuse. Now there is no watchdog to supervise it.
The former official asked to remain anonymous, just like more than a dozen other former employees to whom I spoke by bringing this story. Some explained that the conditions for their dismissal, called “reduction of strength” or “rif”, could mean losing their compensation if they were talking to the press. Licensed employees are supposed to work at home until their last day on March 21, and they have described that they have limited access to their work computer systems. These are violation efforts to finish their work with their colleagues and external entrepreneurs in an orderly manner. One described how she had to take a mobile phone photo of her notice of dismissal on her laptop because she could no longer record or send documents on it.
Until now, there has been no signs of protest between the Republicans of the Congress, even if some of the cuts affect the data and the research they have mandated. A spokesperson for senator Bill Cassidy, republican of Louisiana and president of the Senate, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, directed me to the Cassidy Declaration on X. “I spoke to @EDSECMCMAHON and she clearly indicated that this would not have impact on the ability of @EDSECMCMAHON and it would not clearly indicate that impact on @USEDGOV’s ability to execute its statutory obligations. This action aims to achieve the administrator’s objective to fight against the redundancy and ineffectiveness of the federal government. »»
Follow the law
In theory, skeletal staff could be able to fulfill the law, which is often “ambiguous”, said the former commissioner of the ONCS, Buckley. For example, the annual report to the Congress on the State of Education could be as short as a page. The laws mention several data collections, such as those of financial assistance to students and on teachers’ experiences, but often do not specify the frequency to which they must be produced. Technically, they could be interrupted for many years without presenting themselves to the statutes.
The remaining skeletal crew could grant contracts to external organizations to do all the work and make them “supervise,” said Buckley. “I do not recommend that surveillance be pushed to entrepreneurs, but you could do it in theory. It depends on your tolerance for the contraction of work. »»
NAEP anxiety
Many are worried about the future of NAEP, also known as the Bulletin de la Nation. Even before the layoffs, William Bennett, Secretary of Education under President Ronald Reagan, wrote an open letter with the conservative commentator Chester Finn in the 74, urging McMahon to preserve NAEP, calling the “most important activity in the department”.
The governor of Colorado, Jared Polis, a democrat who chairs the National Governors Association, is particularly worried. In an email, the Polis spokesman stressed that Polis believes that “Naep is critical”. He warned that “the undervaluation of data collection and the deletion of this objective measurement stick that helps states to understand and improve performance will only make our efforts more difficult.”
Although a large part of the development and administration of the tests is subcontracted to private organizations and companies, it is not clear how these contracts could be signed and supervised by the Department of Education with such reduced staff. Some officials have suggested that the National Assessment Governing Board (NAGB), which establishes NAEP policy, could resume the administration of the test. But the current advice staff do not have the expertise of tests or psychometry to do this.
In response to the questions, the members of the board of directors refused to comment on the future of NAEP and if someone in the Trump administration had asked them to take it back. A former education official believes that there is “apparently a certain confusion” in the Trump administration about the division of labor between NAGB and NCES and a “misunderstanding of the way in which work is carried out in the implementation” of the evaluation.
Mark Schneider, a former director of the IES who is now a principal researcher at the American Enterprise Institute, said that he hoped that McMahon would reconstruct the NCE in a modern and more efficient statistical agency that could collect data at a lower cost and quickly, and redirect the research division of the IES to stimulate the innovations pierced as the Defense Department. But he conceded that McMahon has also reduced some of the offices that would be necessary to modernize the bureaucracy, as the Centralized Procurement Office.
So far, there is no sign of Trump’s intention or McMahon to rebuild.
