Donald Trump’s move to dismantle the Department of Education is often cast as the culmination of a five-decade-old fever dream among conservatives.
Not all conservatives, Margaret Spellings notes with a chuckle.
As Education secretary under President George W. Bush from 2005 to 2009, Spellings was a lead player in a Republican administration that saw a more muscular role for the Education Department as a way to pursue conservative policy goals.
Now the president of the non-profit Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington, the Texan and longtime Bush loyalist worries that Trump’s focus on gutting and reorganizing the bureaucracy — shifting the student loan portfolio to the Small Business Administration, shuttering remaining Bush-era accountability programs, laying off thousands — risks distracting policymakers’ attention from tanking student performance in reading and math, which accelerated during the Covid pandemic.
“We ought to just be on fire about it, but instead we’re going to see: Does the SBA know how to run a student loan portfolio?” Spellings told me in her downtown office, mementos of congressional passage of Bush’s signature “No Child Left Behind” law on the wall. “I’m not hearing a lot about that student performance issue.”
No Child Left Behind — supported not just by conservatives but liberals eager to close achievement gaps for poor and minority students — intensified student testing and sanctioned schools that didn’t meet stringent federal standards. It ultimately proved unpopular across the political spectrum, and considerable authority was sent back to the state and local level in 2015, even before post-Covid cries for more parental control of schools.
That’s why taking aim at the federal Education Department now “is a red herring in a lot of ways.” Spellings said.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Republicans have been on and off — and we’ll get to the “off” part — calling for eliminating the Department of Education for years.
“Off” in the Bush administration — he was the only Republican who did not call for the abolishment of the Education Department.
The Trump administration is trying to actually do it. Are you surprised that they’re at this point? Do you think it’ll actually work out the way they want it to?
I worked for Bush a long time, and he used to say on the campaign trail — remember, we were a “compassionate conservative” operation and had a lot of policy stuff that supported that thesis — but he used to say that when people heard “abolish the Department of Education” they heard “abolish education.” And nobody wants to abolish education. People believe it’s the route to the American dream.
No Child Left Behind, the whole thesis around it — nurtured in Texas and North Carolina and others, but those two were leading the way — had this philosophy around “care enough to find out.” Test, and use resources around basic skills like reading and math. That was the kernel of what became federal policy, which I believe is still sound. Which is: If we’re going to spend money, we ought to get something for it.
I’m going to go get my math chart and show you the results.
All right!
[Spellings comes back with a chart showing fourth-grade math scores increasing over the past 20 years and then declining more recently.]
Bush plus Obama gave us results that looked like that, going in the right direction. And then of course, Covid. But the decline started really before Covid, because we took our foot off the gas and had less muscular accountability and more local control. There’s tons of local control. It’s a red herring in a lot of ways.
Do I think they’re going to do it [dismantle the Department of Education]? Well, the Congress obviously is going to have the final word on that. Can they do these layoffs? Yes. Will people notice? I bet, especially when we’re in admission season. Can half the people do all the work in the high season? Remains to be seen, about to find out. So maybe so, maybe no.
You worked for a president who advocated for, as you said, a more muscular role for the federal government in education — what has changed since then?
Well, it was much more muscular around getting value for our federal investments. No Child Left Behind said: Test every kid in two subjects — reading and math — every year, and report that data to the public. [Grades] three through eight, one time in high school. And states like Texas, because it’s not an unsound view, added social studies and science, and annual [testing] and kind of built it out. That kind of started this “too much testing” narrative.
And then in the Obama administration, through “Race to the Top,” they started making it personal to the grown-ups — teachers — and said, “Well, let’s reward the teachers that are doing the job with the kids.” Not an unsound deal, but all of a sudden, [teachers said] “Wait a minute, we didn’t think you were talking about me!” I guess it went a little bit “killed the goose that laid the golden egg.”
We’ve wiped out a lot of gains. It’s sad.
The Department of Education was — the federal role was established by LBJ, Great Society —Jimmy Carter [created a] free-standing department. But the whole point of the federal role is that we had a shared thesis that we believe in leveling the playing field, that zip code or geography shouldn’t determine opportunity, and that the federal government had a stake in that.
You mentioned a shared thesis.
[Spellings turns around and points at a frame holding the official vote tally sheet from when the Senate approved the 2002 No Child Left Behind law.]
Let me just show you — 87-10. I’d say that’s a shared thesis.
No Child Left Behind was a deal with Democrats like the late Sen. Ted Kennedy, former Rep. George Miller. Can you envision anything like that today?
In states, yeah, possibly. State legislatures work like that, because there’s more comity, there’s time to work on things. State legislatures, there’s just more closeness to the administrative executive branch than here. I know for sure it’s not going to happen without leadership.
We’ve got to keep the main thing the main thing. This is the main thing: Student achievement, not what agency is going to do this or that. But that’s where we are right now, talking about the administrative niceties of the bureaucracy.
Do you talk to Education Secretary Linda McMahon?
I have met her.
What’s your advice, or insight, for her?
Well, I think she has her marching orders from the president, but she also recognizes that the Congress is a major party to this discussion. And I commend them for — I’m not hearing them say, “We’re going to cut funding.” So that’s encouraging, because God knows we have plenty to do. And I think she has an appreciation for educators and teachers. But she’s new to the enterprise, so she’s learning a lot, I’m sure.
You mentioned this briefly, but what do you see as the risks, both policy wise and potentially politically, of what they’re doing now?
Well, a couple of things.
This is all just theorizing, because no one knows, but when I hear discussions of, “We’re going to move it to the states,” well, education is in the states. Ninety cents on the dollar comes from the state and local districts.
When we say we’re going to send it to the states, does that mean that the big block grant goes to [Texas] Governor [Greg] Abbott, to augment universal school choice programs or whatever he might prioritize, as opposed to whatever the prerogatives of the urban district are — in the name of local control, by the way? We can get whiplash on some of the orthodoxy here. But that’s a potential battle brewing, state versus urban locals.
The other thing is I worry about taking our eye off the ball. I think they — the Trump administration — also needs a “for” agenda, not a “We’re tearing it down” [agenda].We have to be about student achievement.
And the other thing that I’m very worried about is accountability and transparency. When I see [the Trump administration proposing to eliminate] the Institute of Education Sciences and the National Education report card and the What Works Clearinghouse that we established in the Bush administration —the federal government is the one that is best positioned to take that broad view of the data. We just had the National Education report card. We learned that Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana are killing it in reading. What can we learn from that?
Obviously, since the time you were in office, there was a huge moment in education: the pandemic. How did that shape what’s happening now?
I think we’re starting to see some evidence again that states who stayed open, those kids did better than states who closed down. But it’s been dramatic declines and a lack of urgency now about doing something about it.
We ought to just be on fire about it, but instead we’re going to see: Does the SBA know how to run a student loan portfolio? Not that we can’t do both, but I’m not hearing a lot about that student performance issue. Maybe I’m just not aware of it.
On higher ed: The Trump administration is obviously taking aim at the Ivy League and other major research universities. You have your own experience of heading a major university system at the University of North Carolina at a time when there were also tricky political and cultural currents.
Transgender bathrooms, Confederate monuments and academic cheating, that was my remit.
What are those pressures like for a university president? Do you feel for them?
Absolutely. I had an obviously very conservative state legislature and was getting sued by the Obama administration over the bathroom stuff — you’re sort of with the bluest of the blue in the university community and faculty senate, and the reddest of the red in the legislature. And there you are in the middle. So, yeah, it’s an interesting hand to play.
With some of universities now taking steps to basically compromise with the Trump administration, do you think they are they going too far? Are they not going far enough? What does that calculation look like to you?
Well, if I were — and I’m not, happily — a university president today, I think destroying or really harming the research seed corn for our nation is existential sort of stuff. I certainly understand that. I don’t know, obviously, the particulars of the agreements they’ve reached, but it is a huge a part of why we have a successful country.
And the other thing is the magnitude of these things — states cannot make up that kind of money overnight. And these people who do this kind of work are the leaders in your community, the brainiacs of your research triangle. They’re not the people you want to run out of Dodge.
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