What Now (Part I, K-12)
Dear friends,
I recently posted elsewhere about the executive orders that aim to dismantle the Department of Education and the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), both of which were a gut punch, even if we knew they were coming.
These EOs connect not only with the work I do for pay, but also with my role as a council member for my district's Community Education Council (NYC's version of a school board), and my identity as a parent of school-age kids. What happens in K-12 has a significant impact on higher ed, too, so I want to share a little bit of my thinking here before jumping into my thoughts on what's happening now in universities.
The rationale being used to defend the dismantling of the federal Department of Education is that it is simply a way to give control to the states—but that is a fallacy. States and cities already determine curriculum, teacher hiring, and most of the structures that affect the day-to-day running of schools. What destroying the federal Department of Education will do is remove protections that serve the most vulnerable kids. At the K-12 level, federal funding supports things like Title I funding (which provides supplemental budget support to schools with high levels of poverty), disability rights, and school improvement programs.
This money doesn't represent a huge proportion of most schools’ budgets (13.6% nationwide), but the loss of that funding would have an outsized impact that would be difficult—if not impossible—for cities and states to compensate for. (As an example, my kids’ school recently lost its Title I status because of changing demographics and new city benchmarks, and while the loss was only 7% of the school's budget, it represented $700,000 that had previously gone towards staffing, enrichments, and other supports.)
A major portion of federal education funding supports the Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act (IDEA), which ensures that ALL students can get the public education they deserve. Even with federal mandates in place, it's often incredibly difficult for families to get their kids the services they are legally entitled to—the services that make it possible for their kids to go to school. Without federal protection and funding, what happens to those kids?
Other federal cuts are affecting schools, too. Subsidized school lunches are funded through the USDA, which is also being gutted, and which recently cut $1 billion in funding for the school meal program. The Coalition for Equitable Education Funding reported that 44% of NYC families with school-age kids had trouble affording food in 2023, so school meals are often a literal lifeline. What happens when that's gone?
If kids are hungry, they can't learn. If kids can't get into a school building because they're in a wheelchair and the school has no ramp, they can't learn. If kids don't receive the supports they need for learning disabilities or neurodivergence, they can't learn. If kids can't learn effectively in K-12, they won't be able to access a college education, which we know is a driver for social mobility and financial stability.
If a huge swathe of students suddenly cannot access a college education, that's already a strong indirect impact on higher education—and that has an impact on our nation's economy, on the level of democratic engagement, on information literacy and critical thinking and creativity. It's not the future I want to see for our country.
In Part II, I'll talk about some of the direct effects that these federal decisions are having on higher ed, and what we can collectively do about it.
More to come,
Katina
