Department of Education has turned into a huge grab-bag

A million little pieces

How America’s smallest cabinet department became a mass of unkillable pet projects. A POLITICO investigation.

By Danny Vinik

In 2009, the Saddleback Valley Unified School District in Mission Viejo, California, received nearly half a million dollars from the federal government under the Jacob K. Javits Gifted and Talented Students Education Program, one of nine nationwide to get Javits money. The program supports research and demonstration projects for gifted and talented kids who are disadvantaged.

Sounds great, right? Congress agreed, appropriating at least $7 million to the Javits program every year from 2001 through 2010.

But there’s a small problem: There’s not much evidence the program actually works.

In its 2009 budget, the Obama administration proposed eliminating the program, explaining that it “does little to increase the availability of gifted and talented programs in schools, increase the quality of those programs, or advance the field of gifted and talented education nationally.” In 2011, Congress defunded Javits.

Like most programs, Javits has vociferous defenders: Rene Islas, the executive director for the National Association for Gifted Children, credits Javits with helping find and support low-income, high achieving students, and developing strategies for their teachers. And the program had at least one well-positioned friend: Maryland Sen. Barbara Mikulski, the top Democrat on the powerful Appropriations Committee. She wanted the funding to continue, so in 2014, Congress appropriated $5 million for it. The program lived again.

The Javits program is unusual not because it’s unproven, or because it has come under attack from skeptics. It’s unusual because anyone managed to get it defunded at all. When it comes to the Department of Education, the more typical experience is for a program to fly largely under the radar, never produce a known result, and never go away.

In its 35 years of existence, the Department of Education has turned into a huge grab-bag of earnest but minor ideas, many untested, and bewildering for the local school districts that are supposed to benefit. The vast majority of its $72 billion budget is dedicated to three big national programs: grants to state school systems, funding for special education (both determined by a formula), and Pell Grants for needy students to attend college. Beyond that, the department runs nearly 300 programs—many of them tiny, and some of which, like Independent Living Services for Older Blind Individuals, have at best only a tangential connection to education.

The total funding for these programs is negligible in the grand scheme of federal spending, but there are hidden costs that don’t appear in the department’s financials: the distraction from the agency’s mission, the wasted resources, the lack of accountability, and the unnecessary confusion for states and schools trying to figure out just what federal grants they are supposed to apply for. And all of them are managed by a department of just 4,400, by the far the smallest Cabinet agency in the federal government.

“[The small programs] tend to require an amount of attention that’s out of proportion to the amount of funding, and arguably to their importance,” said Tom Corwin, a former department official who spent more than 30 years working on the agency’s budget. “They cause top policy officials in the department to take their eye off the ball.”

With public schools clamoring for money, and education perpetually struggling for attention as a national priority, you might think it would be useful for the department to streamline its mission, kill programs that seemed duplicative or ineffective, and focus on a few big goals. But you’d be reckoning with the one big force that shapes the department and uses it to promote its own goals.

“Blame Congress, not the department,” said Amy Laitinen, the deputy director of the Education Policy Program at the New America think tank who previously worked as a policy advisor on postsecondary education at the department.

Just as Mikulski has stood up for the Javits program, every other program has its own congressional defender. Individually, these quests for personal legacy have a minor impact on the department. But taken together, they dilute the agency’s mission and stretch its resources, building the Department of Education into something nobody would have planned, and has been impressively resistant to fixing.

NEARLY EVERY EDUCATION expert I asked about Independent Living Services for Older Blind Individuals had never heard of the program. “What is it?” Melissa Tooley, a senior policy expert at New America, said when I asked about it. “And that's one of the department's programs? I'm not familiar with that program.” Congress appropriated $33 million for it in both 2014 and 2015, and the White House requested the same amount in 2016, noting it served 60,000 people with severe visual impairments in the 2013 fiscal year.

But why is it the Department of Education’s job? Corwin said it’s a result of a historical decision in 1979, when the modern-day department was first established, to include programs dealing with rehabilitation and other disability issues in the agency. “They’re not what you think of as education programs,” he added.

The program’s inclusion in the Department of Education exemplifies the randomness of what gets funded by Congress. To be fair, most of them do have something to do with education, and most of them sound worthy. There’s $25 million for Arts in Education; $47 million to award competitive grants to cover the cost of physical education programs; $32.4 million for Education for Native Hawaiians and a separate pot of $31.5 million for Alaska Native Education Equity. There are direct payments every year to Howard University ($222 million) and to Gallaudet University ($120 million); and $25.7 million for something called Ready-To-Learn Television, which supports educational video programming for preschool and elementary school children.

By their names alone, each of those programs sounds appealing. Who doesn’t want to support the arts or education for native Alaskans? But the heartwarming names often obscure the true costs of the program. Competitive grant programs, for instance, are complicated to run. They require significant resources to pick the grant recipients and then oversee them. Accountability is expensive, both in money and in time.

“It is fair to say that these competitive programs tend to be much more manpower intensive, labor intensive than the big formula programs because they are small,” said Michael Petrilli, the president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute who worked in the department from 2001 through 2005. “If you want to be able to do a good job overseeing the grants when they are made, it takes a lot of people.”

In 2011, the Government Accountability Office reported that 82 distinct programs exist in the federal government to help improve teacher quality, 60 of them in the Education Department. (The rest are scattered over nine other agencies, including the departments of Labor and Health and Human Services.) Republicans seized on the report as a quintessential example of an inefficient, overstretched bureaucracy and demanded congressional action to eliminate duplicative programs. Democrats admitted that redundancies exist but argued that the GAO report vastly overstated them, noting that many of the 82 programs have their own goals and mission. A similar situation played out over a GAO report about redundant workforce programs.

“It wasn’t that they were duplicative,” said Laitinen about the GAO report on workforce programs “They were actually serving different populations and they had different functions. But it sounded good, and sounded easy to try to consolidate and cut.”

Still, if the federal government wants to improve teacher quality, it’s hard to imagine that 82 separate programs are the best way to do it. (The Obama administration proposed consolidating some of them into 11 new authorities within the Department of Education, but the proposal didn’t get far in Congress.) Besides stretching resources in Washington, the profusion of smaller programs is a burden for the people they’re supposed to benefit. How does a local school district even know which of the 60 programs to apply for?

“You talk to the states and they face this all the time where there’s so many different programs and funding streams that they’re contending with,” said Matt Gandal, the president of the Education Strategy Group who worked in the department from 2011 to 2012, “and the dots aren’t always connected within the U.S. Department of Education to make sure that people understand the implications from one [grant] to another.”

Martha Kanter, a professor of higher education at NYU who was undersecretary of education from 2009 to 2013, said she asked 85 Ohio principals in 2011 what the federal government could do to help them. “They all said help us with all these afterschool programs,” she said. “[They said,] ‘We have so many different things and our kids have diverse needs and we just don’t have any way to coordinate half of what’s going on.’”

The department is frustrated as well. “I definitely think it creates fragmentation for states, for districts, [and] for non-profit organizations to have to think separately about applying for teacher grants over here, for principal grants over here, [and] for AP grants here,” said Emma Vadehra, the Department of Education’s chief of staff. “That’s not necessarily the way to think about building a system.”

WHAT MAKES IT so difficult to eliminate ineffective and duplicative programs? Politics, mostly. Creating a program can leave a lasting legacy for a lawmaker, something they won’t give up even in the face of evidence that the program doesn’t work. Often times, Congress can’t defund the program until that lawmaker retires.

For instance, the William F. Goodling Even Start Family Literacy program, enacted in 1988, offered grants to support local family literacy projects. Like many education programs, Even Start sounded useful and continued for years, but demonstrated little in the way of results. In its 2009 budget, the Obama administration even singled it out, explaining that “children and adults participating in Even Start generally made no greater literacy gains than non-participants.” Lawmakers had long known this, but the program was championed by influential former Pennsylvania Rep. William Goodling, who chaired the House Committee on Education and the Workforce for four years in the 1990s. Goodling retired in 2001, and it took another 10 years before Congress finally eliminated it.

Or take the case of the late Sen. Robert Byrd of West Virginia. Byrd, who was the longest serving member of Congress in U.S. history at the time of his death in 2010, championed many education programs, including the Robert C. Byrd Honors Scholarship Program and the Teaching American History Program. “There are so many Byrd things,” Laitinen said. “It's like Byrd has his name on everything.” Both the scholarship and history program were defunded within two years of Byrd’s death.

Each program also has advocates on the ground, as well as advocates in the administration, and a few unhappy constituents can make for messy politics. “You have to argue carefully that if you zero out Arts in Education that you’re not against the arts. Or maybe it's an early childhood program and you're not against early childhood education,” said Corwin. Most legislators may just decide it’s not worth convincing the public about those distinctions.

Despite these political impediments, Congress has had some success in recent years. Since Obama took office, lawmakers have scrapped more than three dozen programs. They eliminated one to promote educational and cultural exchange programs between historic whaling partners, and another to support “real-time writing.”

These changes constitute a real success. But the bigger structural change, the kind that might make a small department more focused and efficient, is far more elusive.

Not that the department doesn’t try. Each year, the administration has proposed a list of programs to consolidate or eliminate in its annual budget and a new consolidated program structure that would allow it more flexibility to fulfill its mission. Sometimes, Congress listens to those suggestions. Often it doesn’t.

Of Congress’s most recent appropriations bill, Vadehra said, “We haven’t seen nearly the level of consolidation or comprehensive looks at these issues that we would like to.”

This past year, the department launched a new office in hopes of at least simplifying the process for its customers: The Office of State Support is supposed to offer a one-stop spot for state officials to get information on grant programs their schools might apply for. It makes sense on paper, but a similar idea failed a few years ago because the agency didn’t have the resources to sustain it.

Education officials had hoped that the rewrite of the roundly disliked No Child Left Behind law would offer an opportunity to eliminate old, ineffective programs. Instead, the process has just confirmed that significant pruning is nearly impossible. The House’s version, which narrowly passed in June, removes a large number of programs from the department—but Democrats unanimously voted against the bill.

The Senate’s bill, on the other hand, was a compromise between Sens. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) and Patty Murray (D-Wash.), the chair and ranking member, respectively, of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. The GOP draft bill consolidated or eliminated 21 different programs. But lawmakers effectively renewed most of them during the amendment process, including Physical Education and Ready-to-Learn Television.

They also brought back the Jacob K. Javits Gifted and Talented Students Education Program—renewed thanks to an amendment offered by Barbara Mikulski. It passed unanimously.