Neetu Arnold How Left-Wing Activism Corrupted America’s Schools Trump was right to slash education contracts. He should keep going.
https://www.city-journal.org/article/trump-department-of-education-contracts-left-activism
On February 10, the Trump administration slashed almost $900 million in U.S. Department of Education research contracts, in an effort to reduce “waste, fraud and abuse.” Education activists attacked the move, claiming that it would stifle important research.
Quality education research certainly matters. But the Institute of Education Sciences, which administers the contracts, has abandoned this mission. The IES has abused what should be a nonpartisan mandate and pushed progressive political agendas through research and training programs.
Consider the IES’s Regional Education Laboratory program. Created by the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act, RELs were charged with studying effective educational practices and disseminating the latest scientific knowledge to local school authorities. Despite this noble-sounding goal, critics have complained that the RELs promote fads, waste resources, and are prone to politicization.
The Department of Education allocates nearly $60 million to run 10 RELs across the country. Each lab oversees a set of states. Within its designated region, each REL works with local schools and state education leaders.
RELs have pushed progressive identity policies in schools. REL Mid-Atlantic collaborated with the New Jersey Department of Education to promote racial preferences in teacher hiring. This laboratory developed six training sessions on “culturally responsive hiring practices” for state leaders to “build an educator workforce that more closely reflects the ethno-racial diversity of the state’s student population.” Another part of the project featured REL staff working with ten local school districts to increase the “hiring of teachers of color.”
REL Midwest worked with Akron Public Schools in Ohio to relax disciplinary policies with the goal of reducing minority-student suspension rates. Beginning in 2022, REL Midwest launched a five-year equity audit partnership to “address inequities in school discipline practices.” This approach has endangered students and staff. A 2023 Akron Beacon Journal report paints a troubling picture: students brawling, wielding knives, and suffering concussions. For the 2022-2023 school year, the district saw more than 1,000 fights, only 112 of them resulting in police reports; the Journal estimated that more than 80 percent of assaults on staff went unreported. School administrators rarely punished student violence harshly, even if it resulted in teachers being hospitalized. The local teachers’ union says that school staff have become too relaxed on student discipline over the years.
REL Pacific produced a teacher’s guide on culturally sustaining pedagogical practices, an identity-based teaching approach that uses disciplines like “ethnomathematics” to make minority students feel like they belong in the classroom. These approaches lack rigor, and their associated standards of implementation often compel educators to hold irrational beliefs. For instance, Pennsylvania’s “Culturally-Relevant and Sustaining” practice standards required teachers to “[b]elieve and acknowledge that microaggressions are real.”
Beyond their own progressive activism, RELs have contributed to the growth of a nonprofit bureaucracy that shares their left-wing priorities. The Department of Ed. enters into multiyear, multimillion-dollar contracts with public and private research consultancy organizations to manage the laboratories. These contracts provide managing organizations with valuable credibility and connections to state and local education authorities. Over time, these connections have led to lucrative opportunities beyond the scope of the REL program itself.
Take research consultancy WestEd, which runs REL West and is a supporting partner for several other RELs. With $260 million in revenue and more than 1,400 employees across 13 offices, the consultancy receives substantial public funding. Financial statements show that a third of WestEd’s revenue comes from federal sources, and almost half from state and local sources. The consultancy’s products include a report promoting the replacement of standardized tests with controversial lottery admissions to ensure “equitable” access to competitive magnet high schools, and a teacher’s guide on “culturally responsive” math education. WestEd even trained teachers on “Critical Race English Education.” Participants learned, for instance, how they could lead lessons which examine the role of the “white savior complex” in Atticus Finch’s character development in To Kill a Mockingbird.
The nonprofit educational bureaucracy has denounced the Trump administration’s cuts. American Institutes for Research, the REL Midwest operator—it has an annual budget in excess of $300 million—claimed that the now-slashed contracts supported analyses that informed the “entire educational system.” Judging by these organizations’ trainings and reports, however, it is more likely that AIR and its sister institutions are misinforming the entire educational system. How hard can it be to predict that relaxing disciplinary policies will result in more school violence?
We need quality education research to improve American schools, as a quick look at nationwide test-score trends makes clear. But the IES and its acolytes are too ideologically compromised to produce this kind of objective data. It’s time to clean house and make way for something better.
Comments are closed.
