The high cost of education compliance
Robert Pondiscio of the American Enterprise Institute has a great op-ed in the New York Post about the real cost of the U.S. Department of Education is found in its mandates.
Through memos and guidance letters, it pressures schools to comply with costly regulations under threat of losing federal funding. He focuses much of his piece on the discipline reforms that created classroom chaos, and how the cost of Title IX stresses state and local budgets.
Here’s just a snippet of some of his findings:
- Teachers got implicit bias training costing $2,000 to $10,000 per session, with no guarantee that it works; facilitators were hired or redirected, and new data systems tracked every classroom time-out by race.
- A conservative estimate of the cost of compliance would be $100 million to $200 million over several years, mostly in urban school districts desperate to avoid a civil rights investigation.
- But misspent dollars aren’t even the worst of it: As student suspensions dropped to appease federal monitors, teachers complained that relaxed student discipline was creating classroom chaos. Compliance trumped learning, which ground to a halt.
- These letters don’t show up in the Education Department budget, but they’re fiscal vampires, draining local resources under threat of enforcement, and diverting staff time and attention from schools’ primary business of teaching and learning.
— The Federalism Beat