Trump education order sparks fierce S.C. debate

By Jack O’Toole, Capitol Bureau | A week after President Donald Trump signed an executive order aimed at dismembering the federal Department of Education, S.C. political leaders remain deeply divided over the move.

For some, like Gov. Henry McMaster, it’s a long-overdue effort to return control of education to the states.

“A good education is best shaped by those who know their students and communities—not by Washington bureaucrats,” McMaster spokesman Brandon Charochak told Statehouse Report in a March 27 statement. “Gov. McMaster supports President Trump’s efforts to provide states more control over educational outcomes.”

But others, such as Charleston Democratic Sen. Ed Sutton, see it as a cynical attack on a department that South Carolina residents and school districts rely on for essential funding and expertise.

“When it comes to education, South Carolina is a welfare state,” Sutton said in a March 27 interview. “We can’t get by without federal funding. And without it, the people who are going to suffer are going to be the kids from low income areas and kids with disabilities.”

Sutton says he strongly supports rooting out waste, fraud and abuse in federal education spending. But it’s something he wants done with a scalpel, not gasoline and a box of matches.

“It’s like they’ve got a single rotten board in the house,” Sutton said. “But instead of replacing that board, they’re just burning the whole damn house down.”

Burning down the house?

Founded in 1979, the U.S. Department of Education is the smallest cabinet-level agency in the federal government, with a budget of $238 billion and a narrowly defined set of responsibilities.

Primarily, the department oversees funding for low-income and special-needs students, manages college aid programs and enforces federal civil rights laws in U.S. schools.

Contrary to common misperceptions, it does not set national education standards or impose curricula on local school districts — a job that’s handled by state governors and education officials.

Long a target of GOP budget cutters — President Ronald Reagan tried unsuccessfully to eliminate the agency in the 1980s — the department has been on the chopping block since Trump took office Jan. 20.

Already, roughly half the agency’s workforce has been fired or coaxed into early retirement, with the headcount falling from about 4,400 on Jan. 1 to about 2,400 today.

What’s more, Trump’s March 20 executive order goes much further, directing officials to make preparations for the department’s complete elimination, with its legally mandated duties reassigned to other agencies — though administration officials acknowledge that kind of full dismemberment would require a vote of Congress.

According to current Education Secretary Linda McMahon, downsizing the federal education bureaucracy will improve American schools by redirecting resources into the classroom.

“Today’s reduction in force reflects the Department of Education’s commitment to efficiency, accountability, and ensuring that resources are directed where they matter most: to students, parents, and teachers,” she said in a statement announcing the job cuts.

But many local education officials, such as Somerville, Mass., School Committee Chair Ilana Krepchin, who’s part of a federal lawsuit to overturn the cuts, say Trump’s actions could devastate local schools.

“Dismantling it would cause real harm — not only to our students and schools, but to communities across the country,” Krepchin said in a March 24 news release about the lawsuit.

Meanwhile in South Carolina

S.C. Education Association President Sherry East echoed those concerns in a March 27 interview, noting that the federal Department of Education provides more than 10% of school funding in the Palmetto State.

“Our concern is that a lot of the money coming out of Washington is earmarked for special needs and low income students,” East said. “We need to make sure those communities are protected.”

Moreover, she says she worries about putting a major restructuring of U.S. education in the hands of officials with little or no education experience. McMahon, for example, is the co-founder and former CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment.

“I’m not sure who’s advising them on education policy at this point,” East said. “Anytime you have non-educators in charge of education, it worries me, because they’ve never worked in a school and lived it.”

Those concerns were front and center at a March 19 S.C. House Oversight Committee hearing, where members pressed state Education Superintendent Ellen Weaver on the threat Washington cutbacks could pose to special-needs and poor children here in the Palmetto State.

“Right now, we’re in intensive conversations with our local superintendents and also with the new folks in Washington,” Weaver told the committee. “We have an ironclad commitment to ensure that our low-income students and our special needs students don’t miss a minute of what they are owed.”

Nevertheless, she acknowledged that the road ahead would likely be marked by “bumps and friction” as the administration’s plans became clearer.

“We really don’t know what we’re going to be dealing with,” Weaver said.