Do we really need the Dept. of Education?

KERA's Think

KERA

Society & Culture, 071003, Kera, Think, Krysboyd

4.8 • 861 Ratings

🗓️ 27 February 2025

⏱️ 46 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The Trump White House has its sights set on reducing the size of government, including a proposal to dismantle the Department of Education. Rick Seltzer writes the Daily Briefing newsletter at The Chronicle of Higher Education. He joins host Krys Boyd to discuss what the Department of Education does on a daily basis, which services might lapse in its absence, and the response from educators across the country over the possibility of shuttering the department.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	When national testing shows public school students either gaining or losing ground on knowledge and skills compared with previous years, educators take notice.
0:19.0	Declines in performance can spur school districts to seek improvement.
0:22.8	For years, those tests were the responsibility of the Department of Education's Institute of
0:27.4	Education Sciences. Now that Elon Musk has stripped $900 million from the institute's budget,
0:33.7	it is not clear whether it can continue to exist, and that may be just the beginning.
0:38.9	If President Trump gets his way, the entire Department of Education will be shut down.
0:44.1	From KERA in Dallas, this is think. I'm Chris Boyd.
0:48.5	Shuttering the Federal Education Department would not mean your neighborhood school has to close.
0:53.2	The funding and control of public schools
0:55.2	happens mostly at the state and local levels. But there could be huge implications for students at
1:00.5	every level, including those who need to borrow money to go to college. Journalist Rick Seltser
1:06.0	writes the Daily Briefing Newsletter for the Chronicle of Higher Education, where he is a senior writer.
1:10.8	And he's been keeping tabs on the Trump administration's moves toward dismantling daily briefing newsletter for The Chronicle of Higher Education, where he is a senior writer.
1:15.8	And he's been keeping tabs on the Trump administration's moves toward dismantling the Department of Education. Rick, welcome to think.
1:18.6	Thank you so much for having me.
1:20.2	For listeners who may not keep up with the exact functions of federal agencies,
1:25.4	we start by reminding us of what the primary responsibilities
1:29.0	of the federal Department of Education are. So the Department of Education does a substantial
1:36.4	amount of funding. It sends out a substantial amount of funding. It tracks statistics so we know
1:42.2	what is happening across various levels of the education system.
1:47.0	And then there are also enforce, it has an enforcement arm or enforcement arms that are very important for
1:53.0	pursuing cases such as sexual misconduct or sexual discrimination cases, race-based discrimination cases, etc., etc.
	...

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