Endless Games of Telephone

Set loose by the Supreme Court from an injunction that paused the Trump Administration’s efforts to dismantle the Department of Education (ED), the Administration is barreling ahead to relocate ED’s career and technical education (CTE) and adult education programs to the Department of Labor (DOL). The two agencies published a “fact sheet” of nonsense about their “partnership” last week.

Though the laws that govern federal CTE and adult education programs require the Secretary of Education to carry them out, ED will now pay DOL to “administer” these programs. But, the fact sheet assures, ED will still make the policy decisions and provide “oversight” of what DOL does. It’s not hard to imagine the games of telephone that will ensue as ED’s policy-makers send instructions to DOL’s policy-makers to give to DOL career employees, who, if they have questions about the instructions, will ask DOL policy-makers to ask ED’s policy-makers and…you get the idea.

Efficient? No. Will it make program implementation and federal responses to the needs of the field confusing and slow-moving? You bet.

While the fact sheet insists that CTE and adult education are part of what it calls the “public workforce system,” they remain fundamentally education programs that operate in a context that is foreign to DOL. When Congress wrote the laws that authorize the CTE and adult education programs, it thoroughly integrated them with other ED laws and programs. For example, the CTE law borrows four of its performance indicators from ED’s Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) and cross-references definitions and other provisions from ESEA 45 times. What’s going to happen when a state CTE Director needs help calculating the “four-year adjusted cohort rate,” one of the CTE performance indicators taken from ESEA? Who do they ask? Will anyone at DOL know the answer, or will they need to reach out to their (few remaining) colleagues at ED (or some other agency tasked with implementing ESEA)? How is that an improvement over the status quo?

CTE and adult education programs also continue to be governed by the Education Department General Administrative Regulations, ED regulations that address cross-cutting issues like funding for charter schools and the participation of private school children in ED-funded programs. What’s going to happen when a new charter school complains that it didn’t receive the CTE subgrant to which it thinks it is entitled? Or when an adult education provider appeals the state’s decision against funding its grant application? And what’s going to happen when Secretary McMahon decides she wants to issue guidance on the rights of home-schooled and private school students to access high school CTE programs?

Lots of awkward silences, and lots of scrambling. That’s what’s going to happen.

The fact sheet’s prediction that the ED-DOL partnership will “generate efficiencies” that will reduce administrative costs for states seems unlikely. State education agencies that administer CTE and adult education now have to learn DOL’s grant management and disbursement system, but will continue to use ED’s system for every other education program they administer, a needless inconvenience. And they will need to communicate now with officials from two agencies about the programs, and wonder which ones to believe.

Some of the fact sheet promises do not bode well for the accuracy of the technical assistance that the ED-DOL partnership will provide. For example, we’re told that the partnership will “assist the states with combining the state planning and stakeholder engagement process for both the WIOA [Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act] state plan and the Comprehensive Local Needs Assessment (CLNA) required under Perkins V [the CTE law].” Here the partnership mistakenly conflates two entirely different activities. States develop WIOA state plans, but it’s school districts and community colleges, and not states, that are responsible for the CTE program’s CLNA.

If putting every education and workforce development program under one agency truly yields great efficiencies and improves learner outcomes, Secretaries McMahon and Chavez-DeRemer are moving programs in the wrong direction. ED’s $32 billion Pell Grant program has long been the federal government’s largest education and workforce development program, funding postsecondary education for over 7 million learners last year, many of them in CTE programs. In contrast, the Harvard Project on the Workforce estimates that DOL’s WIOA Title I program funds less than $500 million in education and training for approximately 220,000 adults annually. Now, with the recent enactment of Workforce Pell, which makes very short-term workforce programs eligible for funding under that program, Pell’s preeminence as a source of job training will grow even more. So, if having one agency really is important to running programs more effectively, why not move the comparatively small DOL job training programs to ED?

Previous administrations have explored moving programs from one agency to another with the goal of saving money or improving performance, but they rarely follow through because they quickly discover that the upheaval associated with shuffling programs across agencies is not worth the effort. It’s easier to deepen cross-agency collaboration and strengthen program alignment with regular meetings and conversations at all levels—just as the leaders of ED and DOL did under the Biden Administration, the first Trump Administration, the Obama Administration, the Bush Administration and so on.

But making programs work better for the people they serve is not the purpose of the convoluted ED-DOL partnership. It’s just a tool to help dismantle ED and marginalize programs that are a critical part of public education. The result will be a time-wasting rats’ nest that will undermine the effectiveness of CTE and adult education and their responsiveness to needs of learners, teachers, and program administrators. Congressional leaders are right to call it out for the mess that it will create and demand the partnership’s dissolution.