Michael Hartney on the Federal Role in Education, Outcomes v. Totems, and Union Clout

>> Bill Whalen: It's Thursday, March 20, 2025. And welcome back to Matters of Policy in Politics, a Hoover Institution podcast examining government, governance, and balance of power here in America and around the globe. I'm Bill Whalen, I'm the Virginia Hobbs Carpenter Distinguished Policy Fellow in Journalism here at the Hoover Institution.

 

I'll be moderating this podcast, but I'm not the only Hoover Fellow who is moderating or taking part in podcast. And on that note, I recommend you go to our website, which is Hoover.org and go to this link in particular, which is Hoover.org and there you'll see the whole lineup of what we have to offer.

 

Thoughts, insights from our brilliant Hoover Fellows, including my guest today on the show. So about today's show. This is an interesting week in history, I think in this regard. This week marks five years since California and many other societies went into lockdown over COVID-19, the pandemic, businesses closed.

 

We had to wear a mask. You might remember if you're a Californian, the three words you learn to dread what you shelter in place. And this had a particularly huge impact on education. Kids could not go to school, so they were reduced to learning by computers at home.

 

This has sparked all kinds of questions. That's a learning gaps, emotional problems from being at home, not being around kids. We have very talented people here at the Hoover Institution who are studying the benefits. I think we'll be studying this outcome from this for decades to come. But there's a lot going on in education that I wanna get in today, not just the COVID anniversary.

 

There's news out of Washington regarding President Trump and the Department of Education and an executive order he signed today. We have the issues of DEI and woke politics floating around schools as well, the ongoing debate over who kind of calls the shots in education, school boards, what role do parents have, how this plays out in politics.

 

And helping me to unpack all this and even more is Michael Hartney. Michael Hartney is the Hoover Institution's Bruni Family Fellow, his expertise lying in American politics and public policy, with a focus on state and local government interest groups in education policy. You can read more about that in a terrific book Michael wrote back in 2022.

 

Its title is How Policies Make Interest Group Governments, Unions and American Education. Michael, thanks so much for coming on the podcast today.

>> Michael Hartney: Thanks, Bill. It's great to be with you.

>> Bill Whalen: So I referenced in the lead into this Trump doing an executive order. The symbolism, this I find fascinating, Michael, in this regard.

 

It's not like it's the first executive order he's been doing almost every day since he took office two months ago. Speaking of anniversaries, today's the two months of his second presidency. But if you look at what he did with his executive order regarding the Department of Education, Michael, he did not abolish DOE.

 

Well, he can't abolish the Department of Education, why? It was approved by a law of Congress, created by a law of Congress in 1979 signed by Jimmy Carter. It would take an act of Congress to undo it. But what Trump's executive order did was it basically said, this is the beginning of the end for the Department of Education.

 

The words from it, it says, he calls on the Education Secretary, Linda Mann, to, quote, take all necessary steps to, and I quote, facilitate the dismantling of the department and, quote, return education authority to states. Wonderfully vague is that, Michael, we could talk about that. But also stands out here is the Trump White House going out of its way to avoid political landmines.

 

They pointed out, for example, that this is not going to affect student loans and Pell grants. It's not gonna continue the Department of Education's role in terms of enforcing anti-discrimination statutes. So, Michael, let's begin with this question for you. So the Department of Education has been around since 1979.

 

It's a very young federal department. As of last September, it had about 4,200 employees. So it's a gargantuan operation, if you will. That's about 0.2% of overall federal employment. And its budget's about $270 billion, give or take a couple billion dollars. What the heck, it's Washington? What's a billion dollars here or there, but about $270 billion.

 

That's not quite 4% of all federal spending each year, Michael. So what is it about the Department of Education that has been deranging conservatives for the better part of 50 years now?

>> Michael Hartney: Well, I think for most of us in the policy world, we approach this question a little bit differently than the average member of the public.

 

So I think among the public, it's very easy to sort of have the debate boil down to what should the role of Washington be? Shouldn't my local school district or maybe my state be making key decisions about education policy issues? And I think that makes a lot of sense to people, and particularly people on the political right.

 

As you say, going back to Ronald Reagan, it had been sort of a plain concern among small government conservatives that department shouldn't exist because the Federal role in education should be very limited. But what you pointed out in the intro here is very important, that symbolically, I think that is true.

 

And the sentiment that education ought to be locally governed is popular with ordinary people. But at the same time, a lot of the programs and things that the department has been involved in, as you point out, civil rights protections, for example. Student loan program, students with disabilities, those are things that, practically speaking, parents and constituents care about.

 

So I think the devil's really gonna be in the details here in that is this really just shifting some of these responsibilities to other governmental agencies? Or will we discover new efficiencies by, say, reforming the Institute for Education Sciences, which is the part of the department that is engaged in gathering statistics and funding education research?

 

So I think there are a lot of opportunities here, but there's also the possibility of really fumbling the football politically. I've heard other people describing what's going on here as a big risk, akin to sort of, the Powell Doctrine, that if you break it, you own it. And if suddenly, we enter the midterms here in a couple of years, and you get Democrats running campaign ads with Elon Musk, Whee.

 

Building his chainsaw, and stories from mothers who say my kids couldn't get the educational services they needed, that may be buyer's remorse there. So I think what's really important here is not just to win symbolically. I think symbolically this is important to Trump and a lot of his supporters because he's been able to sort of slay the dragon that even Ronald Reagan couldn't get rid of.

 

But now the tough work begins, and Secretary McMahon is really the buck is gonna stop with her, and she's gonna have to figure out, how do I preserve a lot of these popular programs and make sure we don't end up in a politically disadvantageous place down the road.

 

 

>> Bill Whalen: Okay, let's go back to 1979 for a minute, Michael. I wish I was in 1979. I was in college in 1979. It'd be nice to be 19, 20 years old once again. But let's go back to 1979, Michael, and let's address two questions here. Number one, should there be a federal Department of Education?

 

And then secondly, if Michael Hartney is designing the federal Department of Education, what does it do and what doesn't it do?

>> Michael Hartney: So, historically, one thing that's important to know is, so this was something that Jimmy Carter was lobbied for by the National Education Association, one of the nation's largest teachers unions.

 

There's a little bit of irony here that listeners might find interesting, which is that the American Federation for Teachers, the other union that back then fought with the NEA, actually opposed the creation of a standalone department. So I think that's sort of interesting historically, because today the AFT president, Randy Weingarten, is saying this is the end of the world now that we're doing this.

 

 

>> Bill Whalen: Right.

>> Michael Hartney: Her organization didn't always think that way about this. So I think the argument, the best case argument for why it's useful to have a federal Department of Education, I'll sort of steel man that case, if you will, is that the federal government has a role to play, perhaps.

 

Now in terms of the bully pulpit, presidential agenda setting, rhetorical influence for what should the nation's educational goals be. And we can think of that in terms of like Eisenhower might have, with competition, sort of with foreign powers today, the debate over will our students be able to compete with the Chinese.

 

You can also think of it though as a bulwark for equity. I know that's a sort of difficult word in conservative circles to use, but what we really mean here is things going back to the enforcement of Brown versus Board of Education, all the way up through concerns that low income students are not graduating from high school.

 

And so at its best, I think historically the department has not wielded so many sticks, but it's focused more on the bully pulpit reports like A Nation at Risk that came out and were influential during the Reagan presidency. And financial incentives that it can give to encourage states and localities who retain the actual operational control to make good decisions that are in the best interest of kids and balance the equity agenda versus concern for local control.

 

 

>> Bill Whalen: Right, that's a question that intrigues me, Michael. Look back in the 1990s, I was working for the California governor at the time. Pete Wilson and Bill Clinton and Al Gore were quite involved in education. And especially the very symbolic thing of coming out to California and other states and wiring classrooms with the Internet.

 

It just seemed very cutting edge. On top of that, having the President, vice President, a classroom. Wow, this is interesting. Fast forward to the next President, George W Bush. Where was he on 9/11? Reading to kids in a classroom in Florida. These are symbolic things at the end of the day, maybe the federal government will give some money away for wiring classrooms.

 

The President was talking about reading, which is part of his build up to no Child Left Behind. But this gets back to the question, Michael, of should Washington be driving education policy or should Washington let the states drive education policy? Which is gonna lead to another question to you, which is the idea of money to the states and block rating.

 

 

>> Michael Hartney: Yeah, I mean, I certainly think the best case for gutting the department and pushing for reforms is that there's too much red tape when it comes to. Again, keep in mind this is 10% on average of the commitment to K12 education that the country's various governments make.

 

The feds are only kicking in about 10 cents on every dollar, though I will note that varies a lot by district. So if you're in a place like Detroit or particularly places that have a lot of low income students, that could be 30 or 40 cents on the dollar.

 

So there is variation there, but in general it's a small amount of money. However, one of the problems here is that it's the fact that Congress, and this is true in a lot of policy areas. Hasn't revisited a lot of the legislation here to look at to how it could strip away various rules and red tape that exist that make it difficult for principals and superintendents on the ground to spend dollars in an efficient way that's best for their kids.

 

And obviously they know better how to spend money to address the particular needs of their community. And so currently it's not functioning well, my worry is that we need to have a plan in place. So if we're gonna radically cut the number of employees in the department, there's probably a lot of inefficiency there and there's probably great opportunities for cost saving.

 

My question is, what comes next? Where are we gonna move these programs to? I'm not an expert in higher education, but I'll just give you one example. It's not a crazy idea to move the student loan program to the Department of the Treasury. Some people support that. Maybe that's a reasonable thing to do.

 

It's not a crazy idea to move Office of Civil Rights within Education, maybe to the Department of Justice. So some of these things are not unreasonable but I think it's a little bit unclear where we're going here, and it would be nice to have sort of a theory of action laid out.

 

I think the administration, though, to sort of offer the strongest defense of what they're doing. I think they might say, look, how many people have come into this chair before and promised to sort of lean out government or to make reforms. And then three years later when they're a lame duck in the administration, maybe the courts have looked at a few positions that they eliminated.

 

And so the administration here was a little bit hamstrung with the fact that, for example, civil service rules make it really difficult to just go in and evaluate each employee individually and say, these employees are performing well, these aren't. We're gonna sort of be surgical and eliminate underperforming employees.

 

They can't do that unless they wanna get tied up in litigation. So they, instead, went through with a bulldozer and said, we're just going to eliminate contracts where the language gives us the authority to eliminate the contract with a supplier for education research. Or we're just gonna get rid of whole units within the department, because if we do that, we can get away with It.

 

In some ways, the structures or constraints that they're operating in kinda dictated the extreme approach that they took here.

>> Bill Whalen: 30 years ago at this time, Michael, the federal government and state governments were caught up in welfare reform. And what happened was a Republican Congress came in, Bill Clinton was open to welfare reform.

 

And what you had was block grants for welfare reform, where states would get money to address welfare, states would design their own programs, and then you would have welfare that way. What kept works in California doesn't work in Florida and so forth. So legally designed products but there was a catch here, Michael.

 

It wasn't as if the states could just take the money from Washington and go spend as they wanted to. Washington had to take a look at the program and approve of it first. It had to come back and get approved by the federal Health and Human Services Agency.

 

So I had this thought in looking at education, thinking, okay, this is pretty simple. You take the money out of DOE and you just block granted out to 50 states. But the problem's gonna be where's that money gonna go? And depending on what administrations in Washington, what entity is reviewing the money, A conservative administration may hate what California is doing.

 

Conversely, a progressive administration will hate what Texas is doing. So I'm trying to figure, trying to get my head around if you did block grant money for education, how it'd get reviewed in Washington, what entity would handle it. Would you have to then have a Department of Education still reviewing this money?

 

 

>> Michael Hartney: Someone would have to review it. And we're already getting a preview of the difficulty of going down that road, which is, I read a piece in the Hill, I think it was yesterday. Where you already have governors chomping at the bid to get the federal department or the administration to grant it waivers to be able to pursue sort of the education policies that are of interest to them.

 

And maybe there right now, school choice is popular, especially in red states, and maybe the Trump administration is willing to make that exchange. But I think that even if we might say that sounds great, one needs to be mindful of the fact that the other team is going to be empowered one day.

 

And we saw the opposite happen under the Obama administration when they decided to use federal education law to grant waivers to states that were doing things that they like. So I'm not a big fan of kind of policy making via waiver, I don't have a good solution for how we get Congress to be responsible again and actually legislate in a way where they kind of own it.

 

And so that we end up in this world where there's political pressure or political incentives for administrations to do something. And so they end up going off and using executive power, as we saw with Biden, on student loans. And no doubt we're seeing that with President Trump, too.

 

I do wanna back up, though, just for a second, because I think there's important context here. The secretary said today in the brief clip that I saw when saying she was gonna back what Trump's goal here to slim down, eliminate the department eventually. She made a point that's going around a lot, and I want people to think about it a little bit, which is this.

 

The point is, look, the department only came into existence in 1980. And, if you took a look at the National Education Assessment of Educational Progress or the nation's report card recently, American students aren't doing so well. Something like 30 or 40% of students are reading below basic, for example.

 

 

>> Bill Whalen: Right.

>> Michael Hartney: And sort of the what's being insinuated here is that, we've gone one direction, we've had a department, we've had a robust federal government, and results aren't great. And I think there's some missing context there that's important to unpack. And that is this, that we had a moment for 10, 15, maybe more than that, years of bipartisan consensus around the importance of setting high standards and then holding schools accountable for results.

 

That was a consensus that pretty much went from the Clinton administration all the way to the Obama administration. So you had both Republican and Democratic presidents who supported that. And sort of like zenith of that movement, of course, was the no Child Left Behind law. And for all its flaws, the research is really clear.

 

My colleague here at the Hoover Institution, Tom D, has the sort of canonical study on this that shows that actually when you had a federal government incentivizing states via the fact that it provides funding. And says, if you don't do what we want, we're going to take away the funding.

 

It incentivized states to set standards and hold students accountable, and that led to improvements in student achievement. Now, did it solve everything? No, but Congress in 2015, with this sort of strange bedfellows, the strange political coalition of sort of Tea Party, small government, conservatives. And teachers unions ultimately led Congress to abandon this era of accountability in 2015.

 

Well, most of the decline in student achievement that we've seen in recent years since started before the pandemic, only got worse, escalated after we turned back more authority to the states under the law. That came after NCLB, the Every Student Succeeds Act. And I'd also remind folks that they only need to look back a couple of years to what we did during the pandemic.

 

Where the federal government gave almost $200 billion to states and local school districts to address learning loss, to get schools reopened. And we didn't exactly see a lot of bang for the buck when we sort of handed off that helicopter money to states and localities. So I just think that's important context to say, is the department operating at chief efficiency?

 

Is it doing all great things? Absolutely not. It would be great to really do some serious redesign, but the alternative of just sort of sliding everything back to states and localities sounds appealing. I don't think the historical record bears that out as sort of a panacea.

>> Bill Whalen: I'm glad you mentioned No Child Left Behind or NCLB for short.

 

It was passed during the Bush administration. Now, seeing George W Bush comes in office in 2001, he doesn't wanna abolish the Department of Education. He leans into the education establishment, if you will. And the signature move in his first year is to get NCLB through an otherwise hostile Congress.

 

What NCLB did was to call for standardized testing to gauge students in reading and math from the third to eighth grades with the goal of making every student proficient in those subjects by 2014. As you've mentioned, at fell very short of that goal. And then along comes the every student succeeds at 2015.

 

Here's what's interesting, Michael. If you look at the politics back then and the synergy behind going from NCLB to ESSA Every Student Succeeds Act, you had Republicans wanting what more autonomy for states and school districts. And you had Democrats wanting what? Protection for racial minorities and low income families.

 

Well, that's really not a lot different from what we're looking at in 2025, is it? But it seems to me the one big difference is it's Donald Trump, not George W Bush.

>> Michael Hartney: I push back in one sense though, Bill.

>> Bill Whalen: Okay.

>> Michael Hartney: That is that what seems to have really sucked up a lot of oxygen in the last couple of years, the last five years, especially the last three years, are cultural issues.

 

 

>> Bill Whalen: We're getting to that next.

>> Michael Hartney: Yeah, we're getting there. But I just think that's important because when you use the word George W Bush, let's go back to him, used to talk about the soft bigotry of low expectations. For example, when talking about the racial achievement gap between black and Hispanic students and their white counterparts or just low income students and high income students.

 

In many ways though, NCLB fell short of its goals and was obviously had some major flaws. And we could get into those details. But what it was good at doing was in getting states to do one simple thing which is just, I think we should all support, which is transparency.

 

Prior to No Child Left Behind, a lot of states didn't even release honest graduation rates. They didn't release test score data that was broken out by high income kids and low income kids. So you had a lot of states where the powers that be politically could thump their chests and say we're number ten in the nation because you didn't see what was under the onion.

 

And so I do think the best thing that NCLB did was it shined a light on a lot of that. What we never really came up with was a good solution on how to address it at scale.

>> Bill Whalen: Yeah, okay, culture wars. Let's talk about culture wars and education.

 

So we ask how does this play into politics? I point you to the Commonwealth of Virginia, which holds governor's races in odd years 2021, they have one coming up this year in 2025. Back in 2021, Michael, the controversy of Virginia was what? A father in Loudon county was wrongfully prosecuted and convicted for standing up for his daughter at a school board meeting in Loudon county after she was allegedly sexually assaulted at the school.

 

And now the issue of education exploded, and it exploded in terms of parents rights versus school board rights, and it got a Republican, Glenn Youngkin, elected that year. We see cultural issues standing on education these days just go back to Trump's executive orders, for example. So, yes, he does the Department of Education executive order on day 60 of his presidency.

 

He wastes no time coming to office and doing executive order on what? Men, biological men and women's sports, an education issue. Just as he has wasted very little time going after universities not K12, but still education related on issues like antisemitism as well. This is the culture wars, if you will.

 

So is this here to stay the culture wars is an element of the education reform debate?

>> Michael Hartney: I mean, I think so. These issues are somewhat cyclical, but I think someone like me who came of age studying these things during the aforementioned bipartisan era that was focused on testing and accountability.

 

Folks of that era, I think a lot of us were lulled into complacency and thinking that was kind of the normal politics of education. But if you go back before that, to the 80s, of course, there was a whole debate over how the Christian right getting involved in school board elections, abstinence only education versus sex education.

 

So these issues have existed for a very long time. I think, though, that they're particularly challenging in the education space right now. Because I would argue that in the aftermath of the pandemic, given poor policy choices that were made in states that kept schools closed for a very long time.

 

That it's sort of a triage situation on the learning loss issue, and yet kind of what came out of that pandemic moment when a lot of parents tuned in. Or went to school board meetings for the first time, kind of sort of spent a lot of time marinating in local education politics.

 

That what really sort of drove people to get engaged was not sort of rectifying Johnny's learning loss in reading, but was rather taking sides in the culture war issue. Because, of course, we had a presidential election. The famous ad that Trump ran that the folks think was very affected, that she's for they them, he's for us.

 

It's good politics for the Republicans in many ways certainly the sports issue is good politics for them. But the unfortunate reality is it then sucks up a lot of oxygen and minimizes the willingness. I think, for the two parties to work together on areas where I think there is some agreement if we can get back to talking about that, the core issues.

 

But part of the argument on the culture war piece is integrated with the issues about student achievement. And that is the point to be made that. Look, I think I saw Governor DeSantis's op ed in the Wall Street Journal praising the Trump administration's decision here to go all in and trying to get rid of DOE.

 

And Desantis made the point that, like, look, one of the things we're doing here in Florida is we're actually asking schools to go back and put their focus on mathematics and reading and science instruction and not all these other politically laden topics. So, I think you have to totally sever the two.

 

But I sure do wish we could get back to some of that bipartisan focus on learning outcomes, because we're going to pay a price for it if we don't.

>> Bill Whalen: Well, this seems to me to be a fundamental challenge when we talk about education. You should have a very serious debate about outcomes.

 

You can look at a city like Los Angeles and California where what's happening to kids in public schools there is just a modern day tragedy. But media being what it is today, social media being what it is, we tend to go for kind of the quick headline. And that gets us into boys playing women's sports and that gets us into school prayer and all kinds of hot button cultural topics.

 

So how do we propel our heads at think tanks, get the public to look at outcomes?

>> Michael Hartney: Well, I think one of the most important things that people in the research community and the think tank community can be doing is, we need to get beyond sort of dunking, if you will, on social media or putting out the press release.

 

We don't do this here at Hoover, we're a serious scholarly enterprise, Bill. We don't chase the headlines, as our director, Dr. Rice likes to say. But I think that a lot of think tanks out there, a lot of people in the policy space, they're really excited about sending out that press release, that we got the votes, we got the win.

 

And I think, I think the best example of where this falls short is school choice, because I think it's an exciting time in the world of school choice. And if you're a fan of customization, let's go even broader than school choice in education. One of the positive things of the pandemic is that it unleashed micro schools, learning pods, all sorts of new models of education.

 

Not to mention some old models like Catholic schools getting a lot of attention for punching above their weight during the pandemic. But I think that with the choice thing, for example, it's easy to get caught up and say, look at all these red states that passed choice bills, victory.

 

We did it. The serious work begins when we then go in and we look at how different choice laws were structured differently. Some states went with education savings accounts, some states went with universal vouchers, and they structured these programs differently. What we can do as researchers is now dive in and see what worked and what didn't work and then engage with people in the policymaking community and legislators.

 

And have serious conversations with them about how can we sort of modulate things to make sure we build on the momentum. Because my worry is that if we get all caught up in cheer and sort of partisan cheerleading here, when some of these laws don't work out and they flop, it's actually gonna hurt the school choice movement in the long run.

 

So I think it's really imperative that we get this stuff right and going to be diving into that sort of stuff. My colleague here at Hoover, Paul Peterson, and I are gonna be hosting a research conference at the Kennedy School this spring. With some of the most prominent education economists and researchers in the country who are coming in to report on their findings on what's been working and what hasn't been working in this new choice landscape.

 

 

>> Bill Whalen: Yeah, Paul, by the way, is a Harvard professor, and I would refer our listeners to an excellent podcast he did not too long ago at Checker Finn, where he talked about what it is to teach at Harvard. And the idea that Harvard has, in essence, remedial classes for kids coming in, learning about history, for example, example, which is this kind of most prominent college in America, has remedial learning.

 

Good Lord, what's going on here? But is anybody in Congress talking about school choice, Michael? I remember again, going back to the 90s, 30 years ago, it was a hot potato, it was a hot topic. But even back then they were talking about it in such tiny little terms like a demonstration project in Washington, DC public schools and things like that.

 

But why doesn't Donald Trump, who likes to go big, why doesn't he go big on school choice? Or does this get back to our question of does the federal government really have a role in school choice?

>> Michael Hartney: Well, I think you're gonna hear about it rhetorically down the road.

 

I think in one respect, something that the administration did that so far, anyway, they could change their mind. But something that they've done so far that sort of hints that they're going to be serious advocates of charters and choice is that they so far have decided to keep the office on charter schools in the Department of Education.

 

This is not a big office, it's fairly new. But it didn't have support from the Biden administration, who turned very hostile away from the Obama agenda of supporting charter schools to becoming hostile toward them. So I think that sort of is a bit of a tell, if you will, because it suggests that the administration realizes that when it comes to its priorities, having some sort of institutional capacity at the federal level.

 

If for nothing more to act as a bully pulpit or sort of a signposting place for folks in the charter or the choice community out in the field, has some value to it. In terms of, if we go back and look at No Child Left Behind, it was the dream of the Bush administration and conservatives to have one of the consequences for schools failing to be that you would voucherize money that would go to kids.

 

There weren't the votes for that in Congress. I don't know that there would be the votes for such a thing today, although I would say the problem there is, again, because the amount of federal dollars is so small. The amount of money is not enough to really spur some sort of great stimulus of new schools, if you will, in a choice.

 

So you're gonna have to rely on state laws there.

>> Bill Whalen: Yeah, well, he could, for example, if he wants to take away taxing on tips, he could allow tax credits for sending your kid to a private school.

>> Michael Hartney: Yes, there are.

>> Bill Whalen: But now this will get complicated.

 

Boy, they'd have to be an income limit and things like that because now you're giving tax breaks to millionaires.

>> Michael Hartney: Yeah, I mean, again, I think that most of the action is going to be focused more on this rhetoric about giving it back to the states. I mean, how many times have we heard Trump say that already?

 

I think that's gonna be, in some ways it's attractive thing to do, right? Because politically it divests you of responsibility. I said earlier in our conversation, once you break it, you're gonna own it. Well, maybe the way around that is to say, well, it was in much the way that Trump talked about Roe versus Wade.

 

We sent it back to the states, everybody wanted it back to the states. I wouldn't be surprised if he leans into language on that here, too.

>> Bill Whalen: But, Michael, do you send it back to the state in terms of the state government, or do you send it back directly to school districts?

 

Because let's use California as an example. There's a world of difference between setting money to Sacramento versus sending money to a conservative school district in the big empty in the northern part of the state.

>> Michael Hartney: Well, I think they're gonna have to involve the state education agencies and one of the serious questions there is, not all state education agencies.

 

One of our policy fellows here at the Hoover Institution used to head up the state agency. This is Steve Bowen I'm talking about is to head up the state agency in Maine. And I think Maine has about five people working in that building. I'm being a little facetious, but it's not this great amount of capacity in a lot of the states.

 

And so one of the things that could be interesting is if some of the functions get returned to states or you send dollars back, and those states end up needing to build out more of their own capacity, well, who's gonna pay for that? Presumably then the state governments are gonna have to come up with money for that.

 

So, I mean, I do think at the end of the day some of these things are going to involve real trade, and there's not a tight linkage here between the politics of what works politically. And maybe the policy of what is most effect for driving good decision making around the allocation of federal dollars, research, protecting civil rights, so on and so forth.

 

 

>> Bill Whalen: Let's tap into your excellent book, Michael. How Policies Make Interest Groups, Governments, Unions and American Education. That's the title and the word that sticks out there to me is unions. You wrote this as it came out in the fall of 2022, here we are in the spring of 2025.

 

Has it been a good run or a bad run the past couple years for unions? Cuz I am leaning very heavily on the bad run side.

>> Michael Hartney: Well, the best thing for them is the fact that the reform movement decided to cannibalize itself. So in some ways the only thing.

 

Thing that's helped them is that the reform community is very divided.

>> Bill Whalen: Explain that a little bit.

>> Michael Hartney: One of the things people don't appreciate very well. Rick Hess at the American Enterprise Institute has done some great work on this, diving into sort of like, who are the people in the education reform movement?

 

The unions, of course, we always talk about them. They're the education blob. And we know the people that are in the education blobs or the establishment associations, the unions, these people are all committed on the political left. They're sort of part and parcels in the Democratic party. But I think a lot of people assume that because of the reform movement, people driving for incentives, accountability, more school choice, at least in the charter sector.

 

They assume that because they oppose the unions, that that was a really blue, I'm sorry, that was a really red movement. But in reality, these people who created organizations like Teach for America, a lot of the charter school incubators, a lot of the best, no excuses charter schools, these are not Republicans.

 

They're folks who are blue too. And so I'll just say that when the culture wars come to dominate the education issue, one thing that's interesting is it really makes it awkward for a lot of those ed reform groups. Who on the cultural issues are still quite progressive, but they were also doing work against the teachers unions with conservatives who like school choice and merit pay and those things.

 

So the politics are very complicated. So going back to your question about the unions, the thing that they do have going for them right now is the public absolutely bought into the narrative that we were doing too much testing. That accountability was becoming mean, especially they leaned into it during the pandemic.

 

We need to have a pause on test scores. I think some of the sanity is coming back there. But look, Massachusetts, which, yes, it's a blue state, but remember, this is a state that has very high ranking public schools, a lot of affluent communities that care about their public schools.

 

They just went to the ballot in the last election and decided to get rid of their crown jewel assessment in the MCAS test. They didn't get rid of the test, students will still take it. But you used to have to pass that test to graduate from high school in Massachusetts and that went down and the unions were pushing that.

 

So I think the one thing the unions are winning on still is that the reform movement cannot get it together when it comes to focusing on student achievement. Where they're very obviously losing is on what I said earlier referred to as educational customization. And obviously the centerpiece of that are all these school choice laws being passed across the states.

 

The fact that you are slowly but surely giving more parents, more families, becoming constituents who have now not a policy, but they're able to use state laws to change the type of education their kids getting. And so to the extent that they like that, they then become a political constituency, much like the left is particularly good at getting with.

 

When you look at something like Social Security or other programs that then became very hard to dislodge. I think that's where the unions are in for a surprise here is if these programs prove popular and the union's position is we don't like customization. We have to go back to standardization, where all the dollars flow into a traditional district school where you only have unionized teachers and you can't sort of hire out of alternative certification programs.

 

The unions, I think that's the thing that's hurt them the most. And I think if that choice and customization movement sticks around, then they're going to continue to lose influence.

>> Bill Whalen: Two things about unions, Michael. One is I think their messaging and their PR has been terrible for several years now.

 

This is from, I think it was the union member from Chicago who decided that she would do a zoom call. And I believe she was in Puerto Rico at the time, so. Well, that's a brilliant idea to just things as simple as I remember during the pandemic, just watching local TV here and just the teachers who'd come out and talk about being afraid of going in the classroom.

 

They were just kind of the scariest versions of teachers you could see, which is strangely colored hair and piercings and things like that. And just now, maybe I'm an old man and I'm kind of showing my age here, but just not kind of an apple pie mom kind of teacher you're used to.

 

Just you kind of think, my goodness, this is who's teaching in our school. But you look at Washington right now, Michael, and the unions do have powerful friends in America. You can point to Gavin Newsom in Sacramento, a lot of Democratic governors around the country, but boy, in the federal government, would they rather have Kamala Harris or Donald Trump in power?

 

Would they rather have Kamala? Would they rather have Hakeem Jeffries running the House? Would they rather have Chuck Schumer running the Senate? You bet, they don't have friends in Washington right now. I mean, when I see Randy Weingartner doing events in Washington, she's standing outside of Congress, and she does look kind of isolated in that regard.

 

So, that's why I think the unions have had kind of a rough ride here late.

>> Michael Hartney: Well, sure. I mean, we can all remember among the first guests in the Biden White House that first week were Becky Pringle, the head of the National Education association, and Randy Weingarten.

 

And so, they've sort of gone from the penthouse to the outhouse here, both in terms of optics, in terms of influence in Washington. And it will be interesting to see what sort of strategy they use going forward because a lot of their locals in large cities, like in LA or like a Chicago, have really doubled down on this idea of trying to ensconce themselves in kind of the progressive political elites of those cities.

 

To not so much focus on education issues, but to sort of say we wanna drive the bus here on much larger policy visions on issues like affordable housing and Medicare for all. And they don't really fancy themselves as education first organizations in many cases anymore. They're trying in blue communities to really play up their progressive bona feeds.

 

And that works to an extent in blue areas. But my goodness, if the Chicago Teachers Union decides to go on strike yet again, I mean, one can think that there's only so much tolerance. Especially in a city where the mayor there of course is tied at the hip coming out of the Chicago Teachers Union and has what, an 8% approval rating.

 

So I don't know that it'll play so well this time around.

>> Bill Whalen: So, let's look at a red state and a blue state, Michael. Red state Utah. There, there is a ballot measure. The unions want a ballot measure to reverse laws banning collective bargaining for public employees. We've had this debate in California before introduced in blue state California, the California Teachers Association, the all-powerful teachers lobby here in California.

 

In February it launched collective barGaining campaign in 32 school districts across the state to demand more state funding, higher pay and more generous benefits. By the way, there's a budget coming up in June, so it's not a coincidence. So what does that activity in the red state where they want to ban collective bargaining for public employees or want to do that, I should say.

 

But then in California, where the CTA is pushing for more benefits for teachers, what does that say about the great education debate?

>> Michael Hartney: Well, I think in Utah, of course, it's always hard to go against the status quo, and now, is that you've had reform. But even in a red state like Ohio, remember a couple of years ago when Scott Walker was so successful in reforming state labor laws there and really constraining what unions could bargain for.

 

Ohio under John Kasich tried the same thing, and the voters there repealed that and restored collective bargaining rights to public employees. So anything politically, sometimes that is a tough one. A lot of voters just see that as an issue of, that sounds like it's pro employee. I'm for that.

 

So, I wouldn't wanna place a wager just yet on predicted or one of the markets for that in Utah. I mean, California sounds like California every year, right? And every year, what happens? 75% of the union endorsed candidates win their school board elections going into office, pledging to increase teacher salaries, usually to the teachers at the top of the pay scale.

 

I don't know how much we'll see labor strife, but it's effective. Look, I mean, in my home state of Massachusetts, where teacher strikes are illegal, the union there has been effective nonetheless in going out and engaging in illegal strikes and bringing the school board to their knees. So I think we could see some of that in California here, too.

 

So these battles aren't going away.

>> Bill Whalen: So actually, that was going on in California right before COVID, remember LAUST, Los Angeles school teachers went on strike during the school year. This was a generation ago, two generations ago, something teachers would not dare do. The idea was you do not strike during the school year.

 

But now they're more than happy to strike during the school years. You've seen in California multiple strikes during school years across the state.

>> Michael Hartney: And what's interesting is the laws don't even seem that effective in warding that off.

>> Bill Whalen: Well, and also, the Governor never gets involved and tries to call them in and settle it or tell them to go back to school or anything like that.

 

They just let it drift on and so there you are. And the only people losing this, I hate to say, the kids.

>> Michael Hartney: Absolutely.

>> Bill Whalen: Yeah, well, when in doubt, Michael, go to the Simpsons for all sources of wisdom. And there's a wonderful episode years ago where Homer Simpson's accused of sexual harassment, and he goes on a talk show to try to clear his name.

 

And they go to the audience for questions and comments. And this very aggrieved woman stands up, she goes, I just wanna say, I wanna see less of Homer Simpson and more money for public schools. And everybody applauds wildly.

>> Michael Hartney: I think that's the sitcom that also has the famous line, anything for the children, though.

 

 

>> Bill Whalen: Anything for the children. And we could talk about lawyers on that show, too. But let's wrap up the podcast this way, Michael. So here we have Trump's executive order today. And now the conversation begins about what exactly is gonna happen on the part of education. You and I are having this conversation a year from now.

 

What do you think DOE will look like any different?

>> Michael Hartney: Well, I do have some hope that they are going to get the Institute for Educational Sciences, right? Remember, that's the arm that sort of does the research, collects basic statistics, helps tell us how many teachers are there.

 

It helps administer the NAEP exam as well, which we need to know how bad things are in recent years. I think they already know that they got out ahead of their skis a little bit on that one by canceling some of the contracts that are necessary to make those programs run.

 

So I think we'll see that come back in. I think we're most likely to see essentially the department not being eliminated. I don't think the votes are there. If they wanna do that, they're gonna need to do it soon, cuz the votes are definitely not gonna be there after the midterms, I would say.

 

And I don't think they're there now. Which means that what I would predict is you're gonna see a lot of programs being moved into other agencies and the President declaring victory and saying, I did what no other Republican president had done. I slimmed down the Department of Ed.

 

And in some sense he'll be able to say that, they will have slimmed down the number of FTEs there. Whether it means the service delivery gets any better or worse, I don't know. I think that for a lot of the sort of functions, we won't see things show up right away.

 

Certainly research isn't gonna show up right away. But I think on the other stuff that we talked about, whether it's the student loan program, that's the one that could really go sideways, or the IDEA law for students with disabilities. I think that could be a real wake up point that keeps things from going too far in terms of getting rid of the department entirely.

 

But we'll have to see.

>> Bill Whalen: We'll have to see. DOGE is a fascinating thing to look at in its many forms. On the one hand, it causes awkward situations for Democrats when you're arguing about, for example, USAID and some of the symbolic money they spend, which really seems pretty silly on its face value.

 

But then that's a larger, more serious conversation about what money we're spending in terms of economic development in other countries, if you will. And the Education Department conversations' very much the same. We can talk about money that DOE spends, but the question is whether or not DOE has to be here in this business or not.

 

I guess in this regard, what seems smart about today's action was that, yeah, rather than try to abolish it, either sign something which he cannot do, clearly, which is dumb on its face value. And it looks like he is trying to at least protect incumbents, if you will, because this would be a difficult issue to come up if you did vote against DOA.

 

You could probably make a fiscal argument about it. You could make the states' rights argument, but boy, it's easy campaign shorthand that Michael Hartney or Bill Whalen just voted to abolish the Department of Education. What a savage you are?

>> Michael Hartney: Yeah, I mean, the other thing just zooming out here that I think is so interesting is that, to your point, it's easy to go out after a lot of these sort of programs.

 

You could go into IES and find a study that's like, are you kidding me? We're doing an ethnography on left handed students in this school. To its credit, though, I will say that IES got a really good start under the Bush administration and really tried to bring education research into the world of serious research where we did randomized controlled trials.

 

I would say, what's the alternative, to leave it to the schools of education? So in some sense, having a disciplined IES that's driving research isn't necessarily a bad thing. But I'll just say this, zooming out, that, look, a lot of this stuff is going after totems. And same is true for those folks who tuned into the President's address to the Joint Session of Congress recently where nobody's gonna defend those programs that are listed in those sorts of speeches.

 

And the same here for certain stuff at Ed. But we need to keep in mind that this is, then, a symbolic feel good thing. It's not an actual thing where in the case of the larger budget, we're actually addressing deficits, because nobody's touching entitlements or the stuff that makes up most of it.

 

In some sense, I feel like it's a bit like when Democrats say we could really close the budget deficit if we just tax billionaires more. It's sort of the conservative equivalent of that. We'll go get rid of the waste, fraud and abuse. So I do think that that's an important thing to keep in mind here with the Department of Education reforms, that this is a drop in the bucket.

 

 

>> Bill Whalen: The other thing, we have a president who just loves foils, he loves getting into social media force, he loves finding people, entities, individuals to pick on and go after. In terms of education, Michael, there might be a bigger fish to fry for him than K through 12, and that's universities.

 

 

>> Michael Hartney: Yeah, I mean, I absolutely think that's true. And you've seen it already in terms of testing the waters with Columbia University, where you've had significant amounts of grants pulled, but it can't go so fast.

>> Bill Whalen: And he's going after Penn on women's sports, so.

>> Michael Hartney: Exactly, but what's so fascinating here is that in all of that sort of high level or sort of eye catching stuff, the issue of NIH grants or grants that take large amounts of overhead, if you go back 10, 15 years, this is a bipartisan area of concern.

 

People have said for a very long time that there is way too much overhead in a lot of these grants and President Obama thought we should streamline that. But I think the difference here is there's a sort of sloppiness to the way that Elon Musk and his cadre of 20-something year olds on Twitter have gone about it with the bulldozer, where you say overnight we're gonna go to 15%, right?

 

So I think there's responsible stuff to be done. Again, as I led off the program and saying their best argument is, look, if we went the responsible route, we weren't gonna get anything done. So that's their strongest case for taking the axe to it.

>> Bill Whalen: Right, but Trump is very smart in this regard, Michael.

 

He is very masterful at taking so called 80, 20 issues where 80% of the public sees one way and 20% the other, and he manages to get his opponents on the 20% side of the argument. And you see that for example, with the women's sports issue, you see that with the issue of anti Semitism on campus.

 

And maybe that's the way to tie this into the K12 debate and the question of unions. Will the unions at all times take Donald Trump's bait? And will they, when he does the executive order, will they go out full force crazy on him about this or they just let the process play out?

 

Cuz that to me is what's wrong with universities right now as well. They just, when Trump says he's gonna take away money, they go crazy, they plead poverty, we're gonna have to make cuts and things like that. But they don't defend the practice necessarily. So that's what I'm curious about in terms of Trump and universities moving forward.

 

 

>> Michael Hartney: Yeah, I mean, I was honestly stunned at how sort of flat footed a lot of these university presidents seem to have been caught off guard. It's not as if a lot of the people who are now advising Trump or being brought into the administration weren't sort of laying out their cards for what their plans were when they took office.

 

But it seems like a lot of these university leaders weren't ready for it or didn't take it seriously, I'm not sure which.

>> Bill Whalen: Well, that, and also they're arguing in some regards above people's heads. For example, you take a school like Stanford or an Ivy League school that has massive endowments 10, 20, 30, $40 billion and you're gonna plead poverty if you take away federal government.

 

The average person looking at that maybe doesn't understand the intricacies of endowment, what's touchable and what's not. But this response is gonna be when Harvard says, well, if you take away our money, we're gonna have to lay people off. Well, wait a second, you have $40 billion in your endowment.

 

What are you doing with it? So again, it's just, it's very smart politics by Trump.

>> Michael Hartney: Yeah, and it also underscores the fact that, as everyone now knows, the shift in support for the parties is the center of gravity moving into the Republican Party are folks without college degrees.

 

So, we're in a whole new world where we no longer have the folks without college degrees allied with the left wing professors as it used to be.

>> Bill Whalen: Okay, let's close out, Michael, what are you working on these days?

>> Michael Hartney: Well, I am working on a book, Trying To Wrestle With The Fallout Of The Pandemic On Education.

 

It's pretty well established now, that kids who spent more time not in a classroom that their learning doesn't look so hot. But I think there's another story there, which is the danger of what we in my field of research, and that's government politics, call follow the leader. Which is that most responsible adults knew that kids needed to be in school.

 

The American Academy of Pediatrics, most epidemiologists, most experts and most Democrats all said that we should have the kids back in the schools back in May of 2020. But then, when Donald Trump came out, and you talk about one of these 80 20 issues and Donald Trump said the kids all have to be back in school, you saw this partisan split, and we've been paying a price for that for five years.

 

So, I'm doing a lot of research trying to understand how did that happen? What could we do about that going forward? Whether it's because of another pandemic or another big education issue that is threatened to be broken along partisan lines.

>> Bill Whalen: That is my last question. In your conversations in writing this book, has anybody given you reason to believe that things are gonna be better improved with regarding education come the time of the next pandemic?

 

Or are we going to go through more shelter in place, more learning from home, more confusion over when schools can reopen?

>> Michael Hartney: Well, I certainly hope that the decisions are made based on the facts about whatever particular novel virus it might be. But I think that we don't have good reason, unfortunately, to believe that if we get evidence, as we did last time from Europe, from the private school sector here in the United States, that schools were not a major source of spread.

 

That we could protect vulnerable adults and still have children back in school by the fall and certainly by the time the vaccines are out. We haven't done anything institutionally to ensure that decisions are made in a way that elevates the interest of children over the interests of adults and stakeholder politics.

 

 

>> Bill Whalen: So, what you're telling me is when it comes to learning in public schools, that it has not necessarily been a learning experience for the good folks who run our public schools.

>> Michael Hartney: Yeah, that's the case. And to tie it back to this thing about, should the feds be involved, should the states, should the localities, I will just say, if you look across the world, a lot of the countries that had more centralized education systems, and look, I get that we're unique.

 

300 plus million Americans, 100,000 public schools, we're massive. But one of the prices you pay by not having some elements of centralization is that you let all of the local districts decide whether to open or not. And they pretty much did it based on whether they were red or blue.

 

And if we had some more serious leadership in governor's offices and in Washington that had some more strings and authority. I wonder if we would have looked a lot more like some of those other countries that got kids back to school more quickly.

>> Bill Whalen: That's a great point, because here in California, so much power was given to local public health officials.

 

County officials decide when to open and when not. And I remember the one here in Santa Clara County where you, and I are at Stanford. She would just drive you crazy. San Mateo county, which is next door, would have a different set of standards. You could literally walk in the same county and take your mask off, have to put it back on in Santa Clara County.

 

Businesses would be open to San Mateo, close to Santa Clara County, just because the health officials were looking at different numbers and reach different conclusions. So, yes, I think it calls for tougher leadership higher up in the pyramid.

>> Michael Hartney: Absolutely.

>> Bill Whalen: Okay, Michael, enjoyed the conversation. Thanks for joining me today.

 

 

>> Michael Hartney: Fun as always, Bill, good to be with you.

>> Bill Whalen: You've been listening to Matters of Policy and Politics, a Hoover Institution podcast devoted to governance, and balance of power here in America and around the world. If you've been enjoying this podcast, please don't forget to rate, review and subscribe to our show.

 

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That's delivered your inbox weekday afternoons, Michael's book, by the way, I'm gonna plug it yet again. Go get it, folks. It's titled How Policies Make Interest Groups, Governments, Unions, and American Education, when's the next book coming out, Michael?

>> Michael Hartney: Goodness, it better be by next year.

>> Bill Whalen: Before the next pandemic.

 

 

>> Michael Hartney: Yeah.

>> Bill Whalen: Hurry right fast, my friend.

>> Michael Hartney: Absolutely.

>> Bill Whalen: For the Hoover Institution, this is Bill Whalen, we'll be back soon with a new conversation. We'll be talking California with my colleagues Lee Ohanian, and Jonathan Lovrotis. Until then, take care, thanks for joining us today.

>> Presenter: This podcast is a production of the Hoover Institution, where we generate and promote ideas, advancing freedom.

 

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