Giving Compass' Take:

· The Hechinger Report discusses the Trump administration's proposal to merge the Education and Labor Departments and the negative effects it would have on youth development, equity, and the future workforce.

· How would this merge affect education? Would it encourage labor over education for children? Why is it important to keep both departments separate?

· Read more about Trump's bid to merge the Education and Labor Departments. 

While the world was focused on the horrific Trump administration policy of family separation, they were pushing other awful proposals through. While we rubbernecked at the “zero tolerance” immigration policies that have undoubtedly caused trauma to children separated from their families, last week, the White House released a 132-page proposalto restructure the federal government. It calls into question “how well the current organizational constructs of Government are aligned to meet Americans’ needs in the digital age.” Headlining this proposal is a plan to merge the Departments of Education and Labor into a single federal agency, the Department of Education and the Workforce.

The notion of a governmental reboot seems fair enough. Government bureaucracies that grow over time can be anathema to innovation and efficiency. Technology has challenged the way we engage with all institutions, and the federal government could certainly improve its use of technology to better deliver services.

However, the chief problem in this country has been our nefarious desire to link education and labor — at times with chains. We don’t need a federal agency to concretize the connection.

Some parts of the plan seem reasonable enough. For instance, splitting the responsibilities of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers — Civil Works, which does water resource and flood risk management, and moving it out of the Department of Defense and into the Departments of Transportation and the Interior But education deserves more attention than this plan would allow. In addition, there are many agencies that intersect and interact with education, such as Health and Human Services, which manages the federal Head Start pre-school program, part of the DOE’s push for quality early learning, and Housing and Urban Development, which coordinates with HHS and the DOE to help homeless children get those early learning services.

Read the full article about the Department of Education by Andre Perry at The Hechinger Report.