Blocked
Last week I wrote about a bunch of conservative education policy proposals. I thought I’d do a follow up post, since over the last few days, the idea that the Trump II administration might dissolve the federal Department of Education (DOE) has gotten a lot of attention across social media.
This week I wanted to point out something that’s swirling around that dissolution proposal, and which I think might be more dangerous than getting rid of the DOE itself. Like everything in school finance it has an innocuous sounding name, but has potent implications: block grants.
Category vs. block
If we follow Project 2025’ proposal for getting rid of the DOE—which, again, is highly unlikely and difficult to do, but since the incoming administration doesn’t appear to give much of a shit about precedent or protocol, we should take seriously—involves moving the DOE’s programs to other departments. One thing the DOE does is oversee federal spending on K-12 education, namely through the Title 1 grants of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act passed in the 1960s under Johnson.
Certainly, getting rid of the DOE would impact the quantity and quality of coordination around calculating and then distributing these grants, the largest of which go to school districts who educate lots of poor students. If the Department of Health and Human Services administered the grants for special education, for instance, while the Department of Commerce disbursed the grants for poor students, there’d be all kinds of ways for things to get messed up.
But the right wing proposals for federal education go beyond just weakening coordination of getting money to districts with a lot of poor kids. They also want to change the very structure of the grants themselves. This particular idea is actually older than getting rid of the DOE, and more pernicious, which is why I wanted to tell you about it.
How Title 1 works
Right now, federal Title 1 education spending, specifically Title 1A, comes in the form of categorical grants. That is, there are four formulas that calculate the specific amount of funds that get sent to every Local Education Agency (LEA). There’s the basic grant, concentration grant, targeted grant, and education finance grant. The federal government uses algorithims to calculate how much each LEA should get according to each grant’s formula. That money then gets sent to states with clear guidelines about which LEA gets how much.
A block grant, on the other hand, would consolidate these four grants into one. Then this big grant would get passed on to the state itself to disburse however it wanted, rather than the federal government saying who should get what.
Flattening as a weapon
By changing federal education spending from categorical grants to block grants, it becomes more difficult to account for nuances in what it means for the federal government to provide money for poor students. For instance, there’s a big difference in saying that your district serves a lot of poor students relatively to saying that your district serves of a poor students absolutely.
A district of ten students, where three are poor, has a 30% poverty rate. But a district of 100,000 students where 10,000 are poor only has a 10% poverty rate. The current categorical structure for Title 1A accounts for this by looking at concentrations of poverty, targeting specific poverty rates, and providing grants for particular aspects of poverty.
A block grant wouldn’t do any of that. On the front end, it’d take out any subtle criteria for appropriating and authorizing the grants by state, probably doing it by student head counts. (It’d also be much easier to decrease and zero out the grants in general, which they want to do, by the way.) The block grant flattens out the categorical nuances.
On the back end, block grants would leave it up to the state to dole out to school districts however it wants. What if rightwingers in the state capitol disdain their diverse working class town and city-dwellers? They could systematically underfund the school districts even more.
I think there’s a fair socialist critique of the four Title 1A formulas, which I’ve written about elsewhere. I think they could be more generous and more efficient at the same time. And I’m actually not entirely opposed to block grants. But block grants in the hands of far rightwingers who want a techno-authoritarian/free market education system are a dangerous weapon that we should be working against vehemently.