Centralizaton and its consequences

 Back in 1960, during the first presidential election that I could really follow closely, I saw candidate Richard Nixon interviewed on Face the Nation or Meet the Press.  He was asked about federal aid to education, a major campaign issue, fueled both by the competition with the USSR and the failure of school capacity to keep up with the baby boom, resulting in double sessions in many parts of the country.  Democrats favored federal aid both for school construction and to pay higher teachers' salaries.  Republicans opposed at least the latter step, arguing that federal aid would  lead to federal control.  One of the interviewers, as I remember, asked Nixon why it would necessarily lead to federal control.  He replied that "if you look at the history" of such programs, that was what you would find.  I think I asked my father--an exact contemporary of Nixon's--whether that was true, and he assured me that it was not.

It turns out that Nixon was right.

President Kennedy couldn't pass an aid to education bill in his term, because a Catholic Democrat from New York on the House Rules Committee refused to accept it if it didn't include aid for parochial schools.  Lyndon Johnson did pass such a bill in 1965, the year of the Great Society.  It included a provision allowing the government to withhold aid from any district that practiced racial segregation.  Federal spending on both K-12 and higher education has grown enormously in subsequent decades, reaching $174.9 billion on higher education and about $110 billion on K-12.  A great deal of the $174.9 billion that goes to higher ed apparently goes to a relatively small number of research universities, which cannot survive without it in their current form.  The federal government also finances student loans, which reached $83 billion in the last fiscal year, and keep higher education alive.  

Before turning to the impact of the Trump administration, I want to suggest that these funds have appear to have made both K-12 and higher education in this country worse, not better.  Even in 1965, when I entered college and the great society began, faculty at elite universities were taught to value research over teaching, and that trend has gotten much worse since research can bring in large amounts of money. I taught at Carnegie Mellon, where the administration taught faculty that grant proposals were the most important part of their job, in the 1980s, and I saw how the availability of federal research funds corrupted the institution.  Federal money--much of which goes for overhead, meaning that it can in effect be spent on anything--allowed faculties to expand and specialize, while administrations grew exponentially, to the point where they now outnumber faculty members at major institutions.  Almost every college and university in the nation has given up the idea of offering a distinct educational product.   A recent article by an undergraduate at Harvard in the Crimson reveals that the General Education program--the centerpiece of a Harvard education in my time--totally lacks the kind of fundamental course that dominated it sixty  years ago. Grade inflation has made performance in class almost irrelevant.  On the K-12 front, the bipartisan experiment that began under the Bush II administration, No Child Left Behind, has failed.  Test scores in basic skills have been falling in all demographic groups--a trend worsened (but not started) by the disastrous decision to close schools during the pandemic.  Meanwhile, as I believe I have pointed out before, the evidence that more money will improve public K-12 education is dubious.  Here in Massachusetts the Cambridge and Boston school systems--two of the largest and poorest--spend far more money per pupil than many of the wealthy suburbs, yet do worse on test performance.  I have not had the time to research other parts of the country.

The Trump administration regards the K-12 and higher ed educational systems as strongholds of leftist ideology--and it is far from wrong.  It wants to punish them by denying them funds, with potentially devastating effects.  To cite one well-publicized example, Columbia University has about $1.3 billion in federal grants and contracts annually, about 20 percent of its total $6.6 billion budget.  The loss of that money would put an end to Columbia as it now exists.  The same is true, almost certainly, of Harvard.  In the 1960s the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, as it then was, withheld federal funds from some southern school districts to force them to desegregate.  Now the Trump administration is apparently gong to withhold funds to force them to drop DEI programs, deal differently with demonstrations, and even change their curriculums.

How can these institutions respond to a loss of all these funds?

Those of us who have felt for a long time that American education was on the wrong track can fairly view this as an opportunity.  Harvard and Columbia and other similar institutions,. public and private, could do themselves a great favor by laying off more than half of their administrative staff.  DEI offices are only one part of this problem and by no means the biggest one.  Harvard now has ten vice presidents.  Their titles and salaries are Vice President for Alumni Affairs and Development ($884,000), Vice President and General Counsel ($740,917), Vice President and Chief Information Officer ($554,000), Vice President for Human Resources ($497,000), Vice President and Secretary of the University ($498,000), Vice President for the Harvard Library ($415,000--the only vice president concerned in any way with academic affairs), Executive Vice President ($625,000), Vice President for Public Affairs and Communications ($543,000), Vice President for Campus Services ($287,000), and Vice President for Finance ($680,000).  None of those positions existed 60 years ago, when I and my classmates began our far superior undergraduate education.  All of them presumably have staffs.  Harvard also has more varsity teams competing in  NCAA sports--about 45--than any other college in the country, and clearly spends much more money on athletics than it used to.  These are areas--along with research--that could be cut.  The faculty could once again be required to spend more time teaching and the humanities and social science faculty could be required to teach broader, more general courses of the kind that set the tone of the university in decades past.  That would be the hardest change to make, however, since generations of faculty have now been taught either that such courses are beneath them or that they served as instruments of white male supremacy.

In K-12 the solution to our problems has been found.  Certain urban charter school networks such as Achievement First, where my son worked for about fifteen years, have shown that uniforms, long hours, discipline, and academic demands upon their pupils can generate astounding results. Some hoped that charter schools would provide models for public education, but instead, school systems and teachers unions have treated them as enemies and fought their expansion.  In my opinion, had either higher education institutions or school systems done their jobs better in recent decades, they would not be in the vulnerable position that they are in now.  

Meanwhile, as Richard Nixon warned in 1960, our educational systems now find themselves at the mercy of the federal government because of its role as a huge source of funds.  Both party establishments cooperated with this situation for a long time, but now the Republicans reject it, and under Trump are determined to do something about it.  Local school systems and colleges and universities--some of whom probably will not survive--will have to rededicate themselves to their educational function and look for ways to fulfill it more effectively.  They need leadership that will make budget cuts where they most need to be made.  I hope such men and women can step forward.