WASHINGTON — Abolishing the U.S. Department of Education in the name of saving taxpayer dollars is just a “shell game” that would not save any money but hurt millions of students who rely on federal student aid, an opponent of a proposed measure to get rid of the agency by the end of next year said Wednesday.
“I get that it would score points for Republicans,” said Catherine Brown, vice president of education policy at the left-leaning Center for American Progress.
However, as a practical matter, Brown said, scrapping the department would harm the 7.5 million students who rely on federal Pell Grants — which are disbursed by the department — and “who could not get to college otherwise.”
“They would have no access to college and we’ve never had another time in our history, our world, when we’ve seen a better return on education,” Brown said. “It really is a ticket to the middle class.”
Brown also said that the Department of Education serves an important function when it comes to protecting the civil rights of vulnerable minority groups.
But proponents of getting rid of the Department of Education — including a Republican lawmaker from Kentucky who has introduced a bill that would abolish the Department of Education by the end of 2018 — say disbursement of federal student aid and other functions of the department could be delegated to other federal agencies or to states.
Pell Grants, for instance, could be issued by the Treasury Department. Teacher training grants could be administered by the Department of Labor and the Office of Civil Rights in the Department of Education could be moved to the Department of Justice, they say.
