Education belongs to the states …but who’s going to foot the bill?
Author illustration using Photoshop 2025, from initially AI-generated image (DALL-E), using the prompt: “A young child reading at a desk in a classroom setting”
I’ve written previously about states’ reliance on federal funding for education (see Gut the Dept of Ed?), and now we have a wrestling entertainment executive in charge of dismantling the federal agency that has three primary responsibilities:
1) administering the federal student loan program;
2) protecting students’ civil rights; and,
3) allocating educational funds to states (typically in the form of block grants) to assist with programs like interventions for students with disabilities, CTE (Career & Technical Education), and data collection/research.
Especially since this seems to be a topic chockful of misinformation, it’s worth reminding readers that the Department of Education does not dabble in curriculum. It requires states to conduct assessments but leaves the setting of standards up to each state. What it can do is make recommendations for reform and connect such benchmarks to grant funding opportunities (remember President George W. Bush’s pet project, “No Child Left Behind”?).
What makes no sense to me is how the states that rely most heavily on federal education funds are Red-hatter states. The same states whose voters want to throw the Department of Education in the garbage disposal also tend to be the ones with the lowest K-12 educational performance rankings and the ones who provide the least amount of per-pupil funding at the state level.
Case in point, when it comes to educational rankings:
· 16 of 25 in the lower half were red states
· 4 of the lowest 5 were red states
· Every Bible belt state in the South ranked #25 or lower
· The top 5 were all blue states
· Among the top 12, only 3 were red states
When we consider per-pupil funding at the state & local level for elementary & secondary students, data from the U.S. Census Bureau Annual Survey of State & Local Government Finances (reported by the Urban Institute – this and other sources are noted below) divided the expenditures into four quadrants, with #1 being the lowest and #4 being the highest amount of state & local funding toward K-12 education.
Does it surprise you to discover that not a single blue state was in the lowest quadrant, and not a single red state was in the highest quadrant? In fact, if you were to average red and blue states on a scale of 1-4, red states came in at a paltry 2.16, while blue states hit 3.20.
To summarize, red states rely on federal education funding more so than their blue neighbors; red states perform more poorly, on average; and, red states contribute less toward education at the state & local level than blue states do.
Chief Cheeto and his WWE ringleader are actively disabling the Department of Education, under the guise of empowering states with the willy-nilly responsibility to manage the schooling of future generations. To what end? In order that the most-needy, worst-performing, least-budgeted states can celebrate “owning the libs”? Apparently so.
