Professor Ben Ross Schneider discusses cuts to the Department of Education and USAID
Schneider: “Longer term, USAID is a commitment in a moral sense”
Ben Ross Schneider, Professor of Political Science and Director of the MIT-Chile Program, studies comparative politics, political economy, and Latin America. His recent research has focused on education reform in middle income nations.
On April 2, The Tech sat down with Professor Schneider to discuss the domestic and international implications of the Trump administration’s cuts to governmental agencies, including the Department of Education and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). The transcript has been edited lightly for clarity.
The Tech: How might the Trump administration’s cuts to the Department of Education affect K-12 learning and the broader United States political economy?
Schneider: For the Department of Education, there are two issues that could be separated. There is the bigger political issue of the promise to do away with the Department of Education. This could just rearrange government administration: moving the Department of Education funding for students with disabilities over to Health and Human Services, student loans over to the Treasury. That would not affect the outcomes of these programs much.
The other side of it, though, is the cuts to personnel and funding. Those could have a deeper impact, both in K-12 and university education. Cuts to personnel could delay programs that are supposed to channel resources to poorer students and poorer families, through Pell Grants for university students with lower family income, or Title I funds that go to schools in poor areas.
K-12 education is primarily funded by state and local governments. So about 10% comes from the federal government, but that 10% is going to lower income areas. If you have a poor municipality, then the funding per student is going to be much less.
TT: Are other countries pursuing large cuts of funding or personnel to education?
Schneider: If anything, the trend globally is much more to increase spending on education. In the U.S. and also for other rich countries, you see a continuous increase in spending per student. Developing countries have also been trying to catch up in that sense. A lot of this trend is premised on the idea that you need more educated workers in order to compete in the global economy.
TT: Could other countries gain an advantage over the United States due to changes to education policy?
Schneider: In most countries in Latin America and other middle income countries, the levels of education are well behind the U.S. American education might suffer if there are these large cuts, but I wouldn’t expect that it would affect the overall functioning of the education system. There is an international example of international student assessment that is given across most rich countries and some developing countries. If you calculate the point difference, the middle income countries are about two years of education behind the U.S. That would take quite a while to catch up.
TT: How do teachers’ unions play a role in national politics?
Schneider: Teachers’ unions in the U.S. have been critical of many of the moves of the Trump administration. They tend to be more important and more influential in the Democratic Party than the Republican, so they’re in the opposition now. It doesn’t seem like the federal government will be intervening in union negotiations at the local level. So I think that it will be more business as usual, whether or not teacher unions take the lead in opposing cuts to education or changes in the Department of Education.
TT: How can privatization affect countries’ education systems?
Schneider: The Trump administration has said they want to move in this direction, and certainly the previous Trump government wanted to promote this idea that you could take public funding at the local level and use it to go to a private school. And Latin America, in this case, does have a lot of relevant experience, particularly in Chile, where they moved to a full voucher system 45 years ago.
What that experience shows is that, to get the benefits of a full voucher system, you need very careful regulation. You need to say what students have to learn, how they’ve learned it, what kinds of organizations can offer schooling, can schools be for-profits or nonprofits.
TT: Has Chile effectively accomplished those regulations?
Schneider: Yes, but it took 40 years to do this. They had a lot of problems starting out: the system wasn’t regulated, schools were taking profits, they weren’t competing. It took a lot of political effort afterwards to get the best regulations in place.
TT: How would the administrative needs for a U.S. voucher system compare to the current Department of Education?
Schneider: I think that some people believe that if we have a private system, then that will reduce public or federal state intervention. I believe that it is the opposite, and it would require a great deal more administrative oversight and regulation to work.
TT: Could you expand upon the university system in some of the countries you’ve mentioned?
Schneider: In general, in Latin America, there’s been a huge increase in enrollment in university and higher education, and depending on the country, much or most of it has come in the form of private universities. They’re not funded in the way U.S. universities are on the research front, but rather through student loan programs, which have allowed a lot of private universities to start up, many of them of pretty low quality.
TT: How can student loans affect a country’s workforce and economy?
Schneider: On the workforce side, student loans allow many more students to go to university who would not be able to pay the tuition otherwise, so they greatly expand opportunities. However, the impact for the country and for many of the individuals depends on whether students with these new university degrees find commensurate employment.
And in this, there’s been something of a mismatch, both in Latin America and in the United States. In strict economic terms, people are not getting the payout that they expected from this investment. But on the whole, I think it’s been positive for Latin America and for the U.S. that many more people have gone to university and can then bring that expertise to their jobs.
TT: Transitioning to the USAID cuts, what general impacts do you think these changes could have across the globe?
Schneider: In USAID, the indications are all of the agency’s personnel and programs will be terminated. This is very different from the Department of Education. USAID’s major programs include work on corruption, transparency, democratic governance, humanitarian assistance, which is mostly disaster relief, and global health.
In terms of magnitude, it’s a very small part of the total U.S. government budget, less than 1%. It’s also mostly focused on areas of primary concern to U.S. foreign policy. USAID cannot solve all global problems, and it’s almost a drop in the bucket of the resources that are really needed.
But longer term, USAID is a commitment in a moral sense. It shows that a government like the United States is concerned about global poverty and thinks it can share some of its abundance of resources with countries who lack those resources to tackle these issues of disaster relief or infectious disease and so forth.
There’s also a directly political side, which is to cultivate goodwill towards the United States. In this case, I think it has succeeded in that most people in most developing countries don’t know what USAID is, but the ones that do have a generally positive view of the U.S.
TT: From a democratization standpoint, what does it mean for USAID to be cut?
Schneider: USAID mostly funds civil society organizations in other countries that have an agenda of transparency and democratic governance. There may be some countries where it would be a really significant presence, but otherwise, I don’t think it’ll have a determinative effect. Civil society requires strong domestic support, primarily, and the international support is on the margins.
TT: How might the Trump administration’s protectionist approach to tariffs affect U.S. and international politics and economics in the short and long terms?
Schneider: So far, Trump seems perfectly willing to negotiate with Canada and especially Mexico.. If he just went ahead with straight tariffs, it would have a pretty devastating effect on the economy, mostly for Mexico. 80% or more of the exports from Mexico globally go to the United States. To have those exports severely impacted would ripple through the entire economy.
When it comes to produce, there’s a huge farm sector that’s devoted to exporting to the United States, as well as industrial automobiles, electronics, and the manufacturing sector. If those were disrupted, especially the supply chains and automobiles, that would really impact the Mexican economy.
TT: How might these tariffs affect international relations between the United States and Mexico, as well as other countries?
Schneider: I think in Mexico, like many countries, is saying, “Well, if we can’t count on the U.S. market and we don’t have stable trading rules, then we need to reduce our dependence on the United States and work with other countries.”
Given the structure of the Mexican economy, which is trying to produce goods at a lower cost for companies in rich countries, Mexico would start to look much more at Europe and other rich countries. Integrating with these economies would be complicated by transport and logistical issues. So replacing the United States is not a short term possibility. It would take years to figure that out and involve many different export products.
TT: What other countries in history or the modern day have pursued similarly protectionist policies?
Schneider: It’s been an issue in Latin America. For much of the 20th century, many economies in Latin America were very closed in an effort to say, “We want to develop our own industries and not compete worldwide until they’re sufficiently strong to do so.” So they developed an auto industry and other manufacturing industries.
Then, in the 1990s, there was a very strong push by the U.S. government and by international development agencies, like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, to free up those markets and reduce barriers to trade. Almost all of Latin America decreased their tariffs from 100 or 200% down to less than 10%. Some countries, like Brazil, still have some more protection of particular sectors. In general, it’s now a very open continent for free trade. A lot of them are thinking, “We followed the guidance of the U.S. government and these agencies to open our economies, and now the United States is closing it.”
TT: Are there any bodies that would have strength to compel the United States to open up the economy if it ever became that protectionist?
Schneider: Latin America is far more dependent on these kinds of agencies, and particularly in the 90s, when they had difficulties financing international accounts. I wouldn’t look for pressure from international bodies to have much impact in the United States.