this post was submitted on 19 Mar 2025
266 points (98.2% liked)

politics

22042 readers
4262 users here now

Welcome to the discussion of US Politics!

Rules:

  1. Post only links to articles, Title must fairly describe link contents. If your title differs from the site’s, it should only be to add context or be more descriptive. Do not post entire articles in the body or in the comments.

Links must be to the original source, not an aggregator like Google Amp, MSN, or Yahoo.

Example:

  1. Articles must be relevant to politics. Links must be to quality and original content. Articles should be worth reading. Clickbait, stub articles, and rehosted or stolen content are not allowed. Check your source for Reliability and Bias here.
  2. Be civil, No violations of TOS. It’s OK to say the subject of an article is behaving like a (pejorative, pejorative). It’s NOT OK to say another USER is (pejorative). Strong language is fine, just not directed at other members. Engage in good-faith and with respect! This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
  3. No memes, trolling, or low-effort comments. Reposts, misinformation, off-topic, trolling, or offensive. Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.
  4. Vote based on comment quality, not agreement. This community aims to foster discussion; please reward people for putting effort into articulating their viewpoint, even if you disagree with it.
  5. No hate speech, slurs, celebrating death, advocating violence, or abusive language. This will result in a ban. Usernames containing racist, or inappropriate slurs will be banned without warning

We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.

All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.

That's all the rules!

Civic Links

Register To Vote

Citizenship Resource Center

Congressional Awards Program

Federal Government Agencies

Library of Congress Legislative Resources

The White House

U.S. House of Representatives

U.S. Senate

Partnered Communities:

News

World News

Business News

Political Discussion

Ask Politics

Military News

Global Politics

Moderate Politics

Progressive Politics

UK Politics

Canadian Politics

Australian Politics

New Zealand Politics

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] MuskyMelon 9 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

Can he just do this with an EO? Can the country ignore the EO until Congress ratifies it?

[–] PeripheralGhost 1 points 9 hours ago

I assume it'll be contested

[–] taiyang 50 points 14 hours ago (2 children)

Too many armchair educators here. I literally teach a lecture on this as part of a class on students with disabilities. Key things about DoE:

  1. It's 4% of the budget and 2/3 of that is to subsidize higher education for middle and lower income families. For K-12, it's about 5% of the budget, as most funding is state (unfortunately usually by property tax, which generally fucks poor folk).

  2. To get that 5%, you need to play by DoE rules. That includes no discrimination, school must be free and accessible, and you need to follow IDEA, the law that gives students with disability access to an education. Without federal DoE, there is no standard requirement to accommodate kids with Autism, learning disabilities, and more. (Technically section 504 can still apply, but it's complicated. Private schools usually have that but not IDEA). Btw, about 100B + 20B for K-12 funds and disability, respectfully.

  3. DoE funds and conducts a ton of research that improves pedagogy, not just the standard NCLB achievement tracking but things like the ELS database that is one of the few sets with data from 10th grade all the way to age 30, to directly analyze effects of high school programs on long term success. My dissertation used that, and yes, those folks are probably super-illegal fired, USAID style. If you're wondering, it's 800M in grants and research, which is chump change.

Understand, this is as idiotic as gutting the IRS. Economics have found that return on investment is tremendous (8x to 60x depending on who you ask) because you reduce crime and expensive prison costs. Simply preventing a murder saves millions of dollars, and education is shown to do this (including the very same ELS data I mentioned!)

There's more that I can say, but if you have questions, I literally have a degree in education policy. Please ask!

[–] ArchmageAzor 5 points 5 hours ago

The problem is that smart people don't vote republican, and the republicans need more brown noses.

[–] PeripheralGhost 17 points 13 hours ago (2 children)

So increase DoE funding and decouple schools from property tax funding?

[–] ZILtoid1991 8 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago) (1 children)

But then how would

  • the private sector profit from education,
  • and the churches ~~indoctrinate the young and massively inflate their numbers~~ do their very important charity of education?
[–] PeripheralGhost 2 points 9 hours ago
[–] taiyang 7 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

Two useful things, but there's no political incentive unfortunately. Education is usually the first thing to defund since you won't deal with ramifications until long after your term ends. Only senetors and judicial last long enough and neither are responsible for budget... you just rarely get anyone trying.

States do even things out on their end, but same issue with terms. California for instance has a budget deficit and are cutting education budgets (albeit mostly with higher ed, iirc). That means more reliance on local funds, which ironically fuck rural voters most, aka Republican districts (funny enough, this distribution of funds to rural schools is a big reason DoE survived Reagan with GOP support).

[–] PeripheralGhost 2 points 12 hours ago (3 children)

Could school vouchers and tax credits work?

[–] qantravon 10 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

School vouchers are actually terrible. They take funding from already struggling schools and give it to private institutions which already don't have to follow many of the policies outlined above (they can discriminate in a lot of ways that public schools can't). They also mostly end up being a subsidy for the wealthy.

[–] PeripheralGhost 4 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago)

I assumed. That's just the argument I always hear. If the IRS gets gutted it seems like the revenue wouldn't be there to fund them anyway.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 hours ago (2 children)

You should be extra cautious around any suggestion of voucher programs. We've heard them proposed for schools and we've heard them proposed for healthcare expenses. One fundamental problem with vouchers is that they are set to a fixed amount of money, but what happens if quality service requires more than that? Well, people just don't get quality service, right?... And that's the intentional gimmick. That's the goal. In the past the government might provide a service using tax dollars, then it switches to vouchers, but then when the vouchers don't provide enough cash now the service itself gets cut. And somehow it's supposed to be inevitable.

I was reading a study about education reform over the last 20 years and essentially the push for rewarding teachers based on student performance and voucher systems and the idea to make schools compete highly against each other, that's all totally failed to improve the quality of education in multiple countries. If you remember when Bush was pushing NCLB, one of the ideas was the notion that we should make teachers and schools compete just like businesses. But that actually doesn't make sense on a national policy level intuitively, because you don't want one school to be better than another, you want all schools to be better. (Or rather, I want all schools to be better, but some people have really f***** up values.) And then now there's solid data from large international groups that show our intuitions were accurate.

[–] taiyang 2 points 10 hours ago

NCLB at face value isn't bad, and I wouldn't characterize it as a competition, but it had a few fundamental flaws. The biggest was punishing underperforming schools, which is just... really stupid, like how exactly is that going to make the schools better? The second was teach to the test, since we quantified (poorly) what education is. That enforced rote memory over critical thinking and reasoning skills.

My more personal gripe is statistical, though. Using cutoff scores without actually accounting for covariates (like previous scores) has also gotta be the worst possible way to track success. If a student is reading at a 4th grade level while in 10th grade, a school is punished if they read at an 8th grade level in 11th grade (a four year improvement!). Like, Jesus Christ, I'm so glad Obama admin at least fixed most glaring problems in 2015, cause yikes.

[–] PeripheralGhost 1 points 10 hours ago

I'm with you. Education, in my opinion, is one of those things that's too important to leave up to private. I don't get the plan here, so really just trying to understand.

[–] taiyang 3 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

Others already cut to the chase, but yeah. The long short of it is that's just another move to siphon funds to the wealthy at the cost of the needy. I won't say it could never work, but it would likely be less efficient if you managed the same coverage as public school.

You could draw analogies to healthcare. When healthcare is privatized, not only does everyone pay more, it also leaves a ton of people without coverage. Same for education, as every child has to be covered. The voucher system works similar to subsidized healthcare (e.g. Medicare) which kinda works but why convert a perfectly acceptable universal option with a more expensive, more complicated, and more unequal system? You just inflate costs and certain people make money while everyone else suffers... without even improving quality, no less.

That all said, I'm generally open minded. It's frustrating knowing how much better private schools are vs public.... when I attended UCLA, I was frequently surrounded by private school alumns because they had connections. They had counselors, AP courses, tutors, and here I was, a first generation who only got in because of community college. It's very unfair as it is, and I fully understand the wishful thinking some (few) might have in a voucher system. But the research just isn't behind it.

[–] PeripheralGhost 3 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago) (1 children)

Yeah, I agree. Just trying to explore all viewpoints because I truly don’t get how people think defunding the DoE will fix things. The system has clear issues, but breaking it up and making it more expensive doesn’t seem like the answer either.

[–] taiyang 1 points 4 hours ago

It's probably mostly propaganda that gets most people, same with USAID. People have a poor grasp of what they do and higher ups know but they likely have an interest in it, like ties to the industry or are anti-science/pro-religion or simply hate a group they want to discriminate against. DoE protects and improves the social mobility of black and brown folk and that was good enough reason in the 80s for GOP to target it, after all.

[–] [email protected] 74 points 17 hours ago (4 children)

Absolutely no sarcasm here, I suggest everyone look into PragerU to know exactly what’s to come for publicly funded schooling. It is terrifying, deeply disturbing, and harmful.

Just hear it straight from the horses mouth and peruse their YouTube channel. (Don’t forget to check out PragerU Kids)

https://youtube.com/@prageru

[–] 13igTyme 22 points 16 hours ago

The most annoying part is being called an alarmist for years, just for it all to become true.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

Those guys are what got me to finally start using adblocker, when they were running their videos as every other youtube ad (unless they still do that)

[–] [email protected] 5 points 16 hours ago (2 children)

I mean, in honesty it might not be the best to use an adblocker for it. Honestly we need like the opposite... an ad mass player or something. does something like that exist (IE something to try and hit the ad budgets of the guys).

[–] [email protected] 6 points 15 hours ago

I heard of a forefox extension rceently calm AdNauseum that's sorta like that. Haven't tried it yet though

[–] Arbiter 4 points 15 hours ago

I’m sure Google is already doing that to pad their budgets.

[–] PeripheralGhost 15 points 17 hours ago

While I'm not against homeschooling, it seems more like a privilege that I would say most families in the U.S. cannot have one parent drop out of the workforce to pursue.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

There has to be a too long dont watch version..

[–] [email protected] 8 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

Big Joel has done a number of videos critiquing PragerU: PragerU PragerU Kids

He's got more videos critiquing specific PragerU content as well, all from a couple of years ago.

[–] Lasherz12 4 points 12 hours ago

Zoe Bee as well, she's a teacher who speaks largely in lecture video essay format. Here are the 4 videos I've seen of hers https://youtu.be/cLKMW1LII7c https://youtu.be/4NAiPYaogCw https://youtu.be/ZhWxDgJv7PI https://youtu.be/ZUz1nCRJJBg

All highly recommended, Joel too

[–] PattyMcB 63 points 18 hours ago

Interesting. Really leaning into that "uneducated people are easier to control"

"The proles are our only hope"

[–] Dasus 37 points 17 hours ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 11 points 16 hours ago (4 children)

And Americans will hand it over without firing a shot.

Very disappointed in Americans, Luigi is only respectable one.

load more comments (4 replies)
[–] CosmicCleric 35 points 17 hours ago (5 children)

It feels like the whole reason for this is so that Christians can have their own schools not controlled by fed rules/laws. Self-segregation.

~This~ ~comment~ ~is~ ~licensed~ ~under~ ~CC~ ~BY-NC-SA~ ~4.0~

[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

It's not that. They already can have their own schools. It's just they want to take our money to pay for them, and they want to push their values on to us.

If you've been reading the newspapers over the last year or two, you've seen various States try to pass various rules about the Bible or the Ten Commandments. They weren't doing that in private schools; private schools already could do that, right? So partly we have people who are trying to force Christianity on to others, but I think more importantly we have people who want money and power, and they will weaponize religion in order to get it, as people have always done throughout the course of human history. It's not like these people pushing to get Christian religious texts in schools actually care what's in the Bible. They will pretend otherwise, but don't believe their lies. It's 100% greed.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 9 points 15 hours ago

No. They absolutely want to push the bullshit onto the rest of us.

[–] PeripheralGhost 8 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

It does seem that way with the tax credit and school choice push. Is the DoE the answer or could it be handled better at the state or regional level?

[–] CosmicCleric 9 points 17 hours ago* (last edited 17 hours ago) (5 children)

Is the DoE the answer or could it be handled better at the state or regional level?

My belief is that if we are to be a single nation, then it had to be handled at the federal level by the DoE, and not at the various states level.

At the states level its just an easy prelim/prep for a future civil war.

~This~ ~comment~ ~is~ ~licensed~ ~under~ ~CC~ ~BY-NC-SA~ ~4.0~

[–] abigscaryhobo 3 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

I'm sorry but what is that tag at the bottom of your post? I tried reading through the link but I couldn't gather. It's free use but they can't assume ownership or endorsement?

[–] CosmicCleric 3 points 15 hours ago

I’m sorry but what is that tag at the bottom of your post?

Some info about that ...

https://lemmy.world/post/26711096/15639879

~This~ ~comment~ ~is~ ~licensed~ ~under~ ~CC~ ~BY-NC-SA~ ~4.0~

load more comments (4 replies)
load more comments (2 replies)
[–] PeripheralGhost 9 points 18 hours ago (2 children)

Interestingly, I was just trying to have a conversation about this at https://lemmy.world/post/27067695

Curious what people think is the right way to address education in the U.S.

[–] TropicalDingdong 15 points 17 hours ago (11 children)

I just want to make two points about the decline in education. One is Reagan, and the attachment of funding dollars for education to property taxes (Prop 13? California?), and the other the emphasis on standardized testing that came under Bush in Florida, and was nationalized under Bush the president.

I think these two Republican (led, Democrats later adopted them) policies were some of the most destructive to our education system.

load more comments (11 replies)
[–] [email protected] 4 points 17 hours ago

Just replace all education with pragerU workbooks and videos obv.

https://youtu.be/4NAiPYaogCw

load more comments
view more: next ›