Iowa Republicans espoused their support for the closure of the U.S. Department of Education, or DOE, after President Donald Trump signed an executive order in late March starting the process of closing the agency.
In interviews with The Daily Iowan, several members of Iowa’s federal delegation echoed their support for closing the department and finding another way to administer the programs under the department’s direction.
Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds has led the charge to create a block grant to the states to administer programs currently under the direction of the DOE.
“It’s an outstanding opportunity to do right by Iowa’s students, teachers, families, local school districts, and taxpayers,” Reynolds, a Republican, wrote in an op-ed that appeared in The Hill on March 19. “I sincerely hope the department takes us up on it. If it does so, the decision will have significant implications beyond Iowa’s borders.”
The DOE administers the federal student aid and loan program, funding for special needs students, research on education, funding for schools in low-income areas, and other education-related federal spending.
President Joshua Brown of the Iowa State Education Association, the state’s largest teacher union, said in a March 20 statement that the DOE is critical for Iowa students’ success.
“The U.S. Department of Education is a critical advocate for enforcing federal statutes prohibiting discrimination and ensuring every student has access to an education that will help them succeed,” Brown said in the news release. “It was created for this purpose. The potential dismantling of programs would put our most vulnerable students and all students at risk, and we must act urgently to prevent this.”
U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, is the only member of Congress who voted against the formation of the agency when it was created in 1979. He still opposes the department today and said the Constitution does not give the federal government the power to regulate education and that it should be a state power.
He also said most of the programs under the DOE were created before the department and were run efficiently before and would be without it.
“We don’t want anything but state and local government setting that policy,” Grassley said in an interview with the DI. “All of those programs were set up before the Department of Education was set up, so they were administered properly before the Department of Education was set up, and they’re going to be administered the same way — properly — without the Department of Education.”
U.S. Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, said Iowa has declined in education rankings ever since the DOE’s inception and that states know how to run the programs better.
“Minnesota and Iowa always vied to be number one in the nation when it came to education,’ Ernst said in an interview with the DI. “After the Department of Education was put into place, Iowa continued to fall, and now we are middle of the road when it comes to education. Instead of us pushing to achieve more, we were held back and had to adhere to standards that were set by the federal government.”
Iowa Democratic Party Chair Rita Hart said Republicans’ focus on improving education fails to focus on the problems affecting education.
“It’s all about tearing it down,” Hart said. “There’s no talk about how to build it back up. There is a real concern with education, and it should be focused around student performance and around the ability of college students to be successful — to have a brighter future because of a strong education program — and that conversation just doesn’t seem to be taking place.”
Iowa has submitted a waiver to the U.S. Department of Education to waive some of the state’s requirements on federal spending to essentially make the state a test case, according to a report from the Associated Press.
Ernst said Iowa would make a good test case for administering programs under the DOE through a block grant and that she appreciates Reynolds’s leadership on the issue.
“Gov. Kim Reynolds is extraordinary when it comes to the issue of education,” Ernst said. “We believe that parents, school administrators, our teachers, should be deciding the way our children learn, not the federal government.”
U.S. Rep. Ashley Hinson, R-Iowa, said she cares about making sure the programs under the DOE are still available and funded, but they do not need to be under the DOE and should be distributed in another way.
“What I care about is making sure the programs that are currently housed in our department of education are still utilized and accessible to people who need them,” Hinson said in an interview with the DI. “I don’t care what the name of the agency is at the top, as long as they are still able to provide those important services to students and to taxpayers.”
Hinson said she also supports efforts to return funding to the states and Iowa.
“So, I applaud efforts to get it back to the states, because I do think that Iowa has a great ability to lead on education,” Hinson said. “They’re trying some innovative things … I think some of those things are best served at the state level, and we can prove why Iowa can be number one again in education.”