CounterCurrent: Week of 02/10/25
The National Association of Scholars has just released a new report, Waste Land—The Department of Education’s Profligacy, Mediocrity, and Radicalism, authored by David Randall, Teresa R. Manning, Neetu Arnold, Mason Goad, and Nathaniel Urban, exposing the Department of Education’s (ED) long history of bureaucratic overreach, bloat, and failures in serving the American education system.
Waste Land has been a long time coming. Much research—and blood, sweat, and tears—has gone into the making of the report, and the timing of its publication comes at a crucial moment when the question of “What is to be done about ED?” is being tossed around by the new administration. This question is usually preceded by another one which many cannot give a concise or concrete answer to—“What exactly does ED actually do?”
Our new report aims to answer both of these questions and more, along with offering solutions to the problems within ED.
To first orient the reader, Waste Land chronicles the branches of ED and its history. The Department of Education began its functions in 1980, along with its associated cabinet position, the secretary of education. It is worth noting that some programs within the ED date back to the 1960s and 1970s—like the Secondary Education Act of 1965 which disburses Title I aid to states and local educational agencies (LEAs), or the Equal Educational Opportunities Act of 1974 which prohibited discrimination and segregation in schools, to give just two examples. ED has four core functions, disbursing Title I aid to disadvantaged schools and school districts, overseeing special education, giving out Pell Grants, and handling federal student loans.
However, over the years, it has become weaponized by activists and bureaucrats alike to encapsulate a much larger reach and promote ideological agenda over prioritizing excellence in education.
The soul of Waste Land is in the central audit, and its heart is the real life case studies which chronicle the effects of ED policy on several—vastly different—school districts. I won’t take the time here to delve into detail as the work done by the report’s researchers can more than speak for itself.
We have covered many of ED’s past failures, including the late-2023 to 2024 disaster regarding the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA), which prevented students from completing the application process due to technical glitches. Chief Operating Officer of Federal Student Aid, Richard Cordray, resigned last spring, with many pinning the blame on him. However ED, which oversees the FAFSA program, also bears responsibility for the fiasco, even if Cordray took the public fall. Student Financial Aid is the largest ED department, making up 31.9 percent of total ED employees—yet incompetence prevailed. The failed FAFSA redesign is just one of many examples of ED’s bloat—bloat which prevents proper functioning. The report explains, “ED’s labyrinthine complexity makes it impossible for the Department to perform well any of its multitudinous tasks. ED is a jack of too many trades and a master of none.”
Another major issue within ED addressed by the report is the gross overreach of civil rights and Title IX law that has been perpetrated by the department over the years.
ED, precisely, can exert financial, administrative, and legal pressure on institutions that are deemed to have discriminated illegally on grounds of race and sex, as spelled out in the complex of authorizing civil rights and Title IX legislation within its purview. ED’s abuse of its regulatory power ultimately derives from attempts to redefine progressive policy goals as remediations of violations of civil rights and Title IX law.
This has been done largely through the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) which “has steadily redefined the nature of Title IX and civil rights law, so that states and LEAs must either impose progressive political goals and create bureaucracies to implement them or be found to have violated Title IX or civil rights law.” OCR distributes case resolutions and “Dear Colleague Letters” (DCLs) to funding recipients, effectively sidestepping the Administrative Procedure Act.
[F]uzzily worded DCLs, and the clear hint of case resolutions, intimidate states and LEAs to take a variety of ‘voluntary’ actions that they believe will bring them into compliance with ED mandates. ED imposes its progressive agenda by means of a range of local actions that are never uniform, and never universal, but that are ultimately sufficient to change the nature of American education.
Perhaps the most controversial aspect of the Waste Land report is its conclusion—namely, we do not recommend the immediate dismantling of ED, but rather present reform and consolidation of extraneous departments and offices, and the eventual dissolution.
First, the Trump administration and the 119th United States Congress would do well to heed the recommendations of the report to slim down on unnecessary programs, departments, and administrative spending within ED. Second, ED should return its focus to its four core functions. ED should be accountable to “provide quantitative, objective, and precise assessments of its programs’ effectiveness” to the American people and policymakers. Additionally, ED should take to heart the recommendations which concern policy—including, but not limited to, ceasing discriminatory policies, gender ideology imposition, unlawful Title IX expansion, and reducing scope of accrediting organizations’ power over secondary education through ED. (The department already oversees accrediting organizations through its National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity).
This assessment is just a small scratch on the surface compared to the vast details of Waste Land, for that reason, we encourage you to read the full report. The Department of Education is an inefficient behemoth, a “Waste Land of fractured incoherence,” about which something must be done—and likely, something will be done soon. But hopefully the current administration looks first to the wisdom contained in the pages of this report. To conclude, I will leave you with words from Peter Wood: “Think of ED as a gigantic iceberg. A frozen Waste Land. It cannot be torpedoed. It can never sink. But it can indeed be made to melt. This report points to where the heat should be directed.”
Until next week.
P.S. If you missed it, you can watch the report launch event on the NAS YouTube channel, featuring Peter Wood, David Randall, and Teresa R. Manning. Click here.
CounterCurrent is the National Association of Scholars’ weekly newsletter, written by the NAS Staff. To subscribe, update your email preferences here.
Photo by Andy Feliciotti on Unsplash
