INTERVIEW: Rep. Tim Walberg lays out agenda as new Education and Workforce Committee chair: "We're not giving up on this."
THE LOWDOWN:
Rep. Tim Walberg (R., Mich.) is the new chair of the House’s Education and Workforce Committee, but the Michigan lawmaker has spent years on what he wants to ensure is an “A committee” under his watch.
When asked about how the schools are chosen for probing, Walberg said that “we go to those colleges and universities that are the highest profile and that are making the biggest problems.”
PDE’s Nicki Neily, who joined in the conversation with Walberg, noted that she’s seen sea changes in how universities have acted since President Donald Trump’s reelection.
While Walberg would love to see the department abolished and its functions returned to states and localities, he is busy thinking about ways to “depower” it in the meantime.
Rep. Tim Walberg (R., Mich.) is the new chair of the House’s Education and Workforce Committee, but the Michigan lawmaker has spent years on what he wants to ensure is an “A committee” under his watch, he told the Washington Reporter.
And, now that he’s at the helm, he wants to build off of the viral successes led by then-Chairwoman Virginia Foxx (R., N.C.).
“This is not just for good TV, radio, and newsprint,” Walberg said during an interview with the Reporter at a public event sponsored by advocacy group Parents Defending Education (PDE). “It's actually to accomplish something. Chairwoman Foxx, in her efforts last term, did yeoman’s effort to achieve that to the point that three college presidents left their offices and other schools began to do significant changes.”
Walberg’s committee featured the highest-profile hearings in congressional history last Congress. The blockbuster hearings led to multiple university presidents leaving in disgrace after hundreds of millions of people tuned into clips of the leadership of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology embarrassing themselves under oath.
When asked about how the schools are chosen for probing, Walberg said that “we go to those colleges and universities that are the highest profile and that are making the biggest problems.” Now, university presidents know that he’s in charge — and thus far, he hasn’t been caught napping. In one case, he caught a school red-handed in its attempts to hide its DEI programming.
“I've been receiving calls from college presidents, university presidents who are staying in close contact with me and saying, ‘this is what I've just done. What do you think?’ And I remember recently I texted back to the… president of a major university and said, ‘Well done. This is what we want to see.’ Then my staff walked in and handed me a press clipping about that same university just about three minutes later, that said that the DEI program was not actually abolished. I quickly copied off that press clipping and texted it back to this president I’d just given kudos to, and immediately, within less than two minutes, a text came back: ‘I didn't know about that. Will be checking into it now.’ I think that president will be, but that's what we have to keep doing.”
PDE’s Nicki Neily, who joined in the conversation with Walberg, noted that she’s seen sea changes in how universities have acted since President Donald Trump’s reelection.
“It feels really like this is Morning in America,” she said during the event. “We have the White House. We have a Congress that is committed to actually partnering with families and working with us…we look forward to a very productive two to four to eight to 16 years.”
Neily’s work with Walberg received praise from activists in the education realm. Rebekah Bydlak, the vice president of communications at the American Federation of Children, told the Reporter that she is grateful to Neily for “for convening this event and for her leadership on these important issues.” Bydlak added that she was also “thrilled to hear Chairman Walberg mention the opportunity for a federal tax credit to expand school choice,” which he mentioned during the event.
“The American Federation for Children is extremely grateful for the chairman’s leadership on the Educational Choice for Children Act, which would supercharge school choice in every state and deliver on the President's education agenda,” Bydlak said.
Another area where Walberg wants major reforms is within the Department of Education, which Trump is working to abolish — a move that Walberg said he’s eager to sign up for.
“On any vote that comes up to abolish the Department of Education, I'll be one who puts up the green vote,” Walberg said. “However, reality says that we don't have 60 votes in the Senate. We may get 218 votes in the House to do that, but we don't have 60 votes in the Senate to get that done yet; we also know that unwinding something, and I appreciate what very smart young people with algorithms are doing and winding through the bureaucracy and finding what's waste, what isn't working and what we are being lied to about, that's great, but in the end, there are some things that we put in to the process of education that we're not going to unwind overnight.”
While Walberg would love to see the department abolished and its functions returned to states and localities, he is busy thinking about ways to “depower” it in the meantime.
“I think about the Civil Rights Division in the Department of Education; what have they done? Why were the anti-Semitic activities let to go on campuses and nothing really took place until this committee began holding hearings and bringing presidents of universities in and having them fall on their faces in front of us, literally to the point that three of those university presidents are no longer employed by those schools because they could not define any policy that would protect Jewish students or students in general on the campus? This includes non-Jewish students who stood in defense of Jewish students and then were fearful that their grades could be impacted by radical teachers who would not defend the academic process as being open and free and fair for everyone.”
“Why not take the Civil Rights Division in the Department of Education and shift it over to the Department of Justice and let them handle it as they should be handling it,” Walberg continued. “I think we could look, by means of creative thinking, at how we could change it. We could reduce the overhead.”
“We could cut down the size and scope of the Department of Education until ultimately, we saw that really it wasn't needed, because that ought to be back at the state and local districts for K-12, and higher education, maybe we can find a better way of dealing with them through competition and oversight,” he said.
The push for accountability with both the federal government and with universities reminds Walberg of his kids’ 4-H program.
“We had the horses and the pigs and the chickens and sheep,” he said. “When we’d go in the feed room in the morning and would turn the light on, you heard the scurrying of furry things. Why? Because the light went on and the furry scurrying things went away. And I think what we need to do is keep the light on, because the scurrying furry things have now had the light put on them in the educational community.”
“And what we're doing is saving the good feed, the good nutrition, the good education that will come to our students if we're willing to keep the course and keep the light on. This committee will do that,” Walberg added.
Below is a transcript of our interview with Rep. Tim. Walberg, lightly edited for clarity.
Washington Reporter:
Congressman Walberg, what are your priorities as the new Chairman of the House Committee on Education and Workforce?
Rep. Tim Walberg:
I've said often in the past number of weeks, especially while running for chairman of this wonderful committee, which is an A committee in Congress, dealing with education, that if you don't have educated, well-trained students, you don't have a well-trained and educated workforce. If you don't have a well-trained and educated workforce, you don't have a country that can survive. Beyond that, education and training don’t only go in the three most essential categories of reading, writing, and arithmetic; you can add all the rest onto it, but if you can't read, you can't learn, if you can't compute, you can't design, and if you can't communicate in some way, writing or otherwise, you can't share the wealth that ultimately brings people up. So we've been involved with saying, ‘get these three things right in the classroom. Start with the student, the parent, the teacher.’ You focus on those three aspects of education and I think all of a sudden some things start to happen that are right. Sadly, we've seen a lot of indoctrination going on in our higher education, since one author, Richard Mitchell, wrote years ago about the ‘graves of academe,’ and we've seen the graves of academe produce what we're experiencing today, so that Jewish students can't feel safe on campus. There can't be a diversity of thought, and for us as United States citizens, indoctrination that says ‘America is bad,’ that's just wrong, and that leads to a frustration in achieving the things we need to achieve. Sure, we can have all the DEI we want and CRT, but that does not foster an America that's free, that's full of opportunity, that allows every student to learn, every student to agree and disagree, but ultimately in the end, they need to grow off of those opportunities. As I talk about parents, there's only one way that I know of of a person like me becoming a grandparent. It's my kids having kids, and that's what this world needs to have take place. Parents are important, but then parents need to understand that they are the first and foremost educator of their children. And I think you'd agree with me, we never give that up. My wife and I added various ways to the educational experience of our kids. We were still the teachers, and we asked other teachers to supplement that occasionally along the way, and it worked very well for our kids. I'm proud of all three and what they've achieved through the educational process. We had the ability to give them in diverse ways at the right time in their lives what they need. I think about my daughter, for example; we thought she she's a social butterfly. She loves all of that, but she needs some academics as well. But when she found the value in her life of dental assisting, it led to dental hygiene. It led ultimately to a graduate degree. And it all came from finally understanding what education was meant to do: prepare her for the real world experience. And so parents being treated as domestic terrorists, that will not ever be acceptable under my watch, and we will promote an education that starts with the parent, with the home, the guardian. We have to deal with reality of what is in our society today, and some kids don't have the opportunity of having a home life that includes two loving parents, but most do. But then, if it's not that, then the responsibility needs to be given to those adults in the children's lives who are from their home situation, and then encouraging schools and getting educational opportunities to give what's necessary to bring the students along the way.
Washington Reporter:
What is your level of concern about where we're at with the state of K-12 education?
Rep. Tim Walberg:
I'm really concerned. There are a lot of culture wars that we have going on, but ultimately, all of that leads to the outcomes that we're seeing in the NAEP scores that just came out, the report card for our nation's schools was dire. We are continuing to go down. Now stop and think about it: the inception of the Department of Education took place in 1979, so it's really not that old of an agency. And we had the Industrial Revolution, the agricultural revolution, the communications revolution, all really had begun and or had finished before the U.S. Department of Education was created; we spent since 1979 or 1980, when it really began operating, over a trillion dollars, and we've seen our test scores continue to go down. If you're talking public education, charter schools have had some climb recently, but they're relatively new as well, and their climb hasn't been all that great, but at least they're moving up. And so you see that taking place, and you begin to say, ‘maybe we ought to turn back more of our education responsibility opportunity back to the states and local districts where they're originally supposed to be.’ And when I pull this little Constitution out, I continue to look to find if there is any article that talks about how the federal government is responsible for education, and there isn't one. In our state Constitutions, we do have articles and statements where we are responsible for education, primarily there in most states pushes it back to the local district as well. So we have a huge problem if we have seen these test scores that are report cards for our quality of education continue to decline. If that's happening, then what should change? And I think we ought to look back to what did work, which was putting the emphasis on the student, the parent, the teacher. And I believe there are even teachers who have been indoctrinated in our schools of education who still have the right motivations that they want to educate students. And if that be the case, let's work at helping up their skills, their understanding of what true education is about: that one plus one still equals two, three plus three equals six, and that doesn't change. Parents are still the only people capable of producing students for the educational institutions, and kids are the only people who are still capable of being students at the get go, and then bringing them on through the whole process, and they become students for life, learning truth along the way, if we give them that opportunity.
Washington Reporter:
Sticking with you for a second in the wake of these test scores that we've seen from around the country that have dropped, what can be done with traditional public schools? Most students in America are educated in traditional public schools. What do you think needs to be done to ensure that students are graduating with those skills they need to then enter the workforce, the other half of Ed and Workforce Committee.
Rep. Tim Walberg:
It's still educational choice that we want. We want to we want to promote choice as much as possible within the public school setting; that includes charter schools. I recently spent an hour on the phone discussing an issue going on back in Michigan, where the Department of Education of Michigan is literally trying to destroy four charter schools because they have the audacity to want an offer an education in the inner city setting that is equal to or better than what they could get anywhere else in the state. And so I'd say we need to make sure that even in the public school system, that choice and opportunity are there, and then within that opportunity, let's move a little further and give tax credits or voucher opportunities to encourage that. And again, that ought to be a state level, but I think we can give some of that even at the federal level, with tax breaks, tax deductions, for people or corporations or entities contributing in so there's more choice and more opportunity that will produce competition with the public schools and the private schools and the parochial schools and the Christian schools and the home schools. And I think in doing that, we also bump up the standards and opportunities in the public school system as well. An interesting example of all of this is LeBron James' charter school, that isn’t producing any better educational outputs now. It hopefully will. It’s safer at least. But the key thing is that the parents made that choice to put their kids in that school.
Washington Reporter:
Something you've talked a lot about is having local schools rebuild trust with parents. How do you see that shaping up in the second Trump term already?
Rep. Tim Walberg:
Well, first of all, we give control back to the parents. We say that you can question, you can ask for a transparency within the system that you haven't had for some time. ‘Sit down and shut up’ can't be the case. My Protect Kids Act was an example of that. That passed the the House and died over in the Senate, with Chuck Schumer in control at the point, it could be different this time. All that did was say simply, ‘if you're a public school and you're taking federal dollars, then we’re going to require you to notify the parent or the guardian if one of your students in the classroom has a teacher or an administrator who asked that their pronouns be changed, or that they'd like to have counseling for transitioning, you have to report that to the parent.’ As a parent and as a grandparent myself, I don't see that as a problem. I expected them to send a form home for my kids if they were going to take them on a field trip. I had to sign off if they were going to give aspirin to my kids. But here they're saying ‘call me by a different gender pronoun or anything else,’ and as a parent, I'm not allowed to have that? Well that’s just wrong. And that's common sense. President Trump, in his inaugural address, talked about the return of common sense. This is common sense. Let the parents know what's taking place, or else you're going to lose all the federal funding dollars that come your way to your school district, ESSER [Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief] funds, etc., are gone if you're going to do that. So those are the things I think we need to do. 75 percent of the parents in this country, Republican, Democrat, independent, still think that that's common sense. Hopefully we'll see that legislation ultimately get through and be signed by the president, which says that boys can't compete in girls sports, and, oh, by the way, they can't use the girls restrooms or the shower rooms or locker rooms as well. Again, common sense, going back and saying that the overwhelming majority of students in this country, in the K-12 educational setting and university setting, coincide with what is normal, and I would say ideal, in the sense that it works the best. And so those laws are an attempt, if we get them through and the President can sign them, to return that to our schools, and that promotes security and safety. And in the area of schools sports, this also gives Title IX the opportunity to flourish. One of the key reasons Title IX was put in place was so that girls and women could compete against girls and women and set records that were substantiated by girls and women and could be challenged by girls and women in the future, and could not be taken over by a male. I don't use biological male. I hope you forgive me. I think there are male and female, just like our president said, which is the way we ought to be treated as well. Now, with a 60 vote requirement the Senate, we may not get all of those through, but we're still talking about it. We're still talking common sense. And I think the general public has a chance, through media sources and others, to debate that as well, and hopefully with that debate ultimately, and seeing the outcomes in certain cases that go wrong when we don't follow the common sense and when we don't follow science with x's and y's and other things, ultimately, through the course of time, we'll be able to turn it back. But this has been working in the system for quite some time. We won't change everything overnight. But by your voices, the voices in Congress, the bills that we pass, the voices in our educational institutions who call me from the other side of what's being reported as normalcy now, and I'm finding out those people are still in our educational settings, teachers, superintendents, principals, students, parents, who are saying ‘let's get back to what is normal and what functions well and makes this country capable of providing education that’s second to none,’ I think in the end, we'll see see massive changes begin to develop.
Washington Reporter:
You've talked in the past about how parents are getting cut out of vital decisions about their children, not being told that they're socially transitioning even when they're starting to be very young. Are there examples from either your district in Michigan or what you've heard from around the country that have stood out to you that embody the problem that you're talking about?
Rep. Tim Walberg:
I pulled out some statistics on that very question, and they come from a report from an organization that you’ve heard of: Parents Defending Education. There are at least 20,000 schools in 1,100 districts covering nearly 12 million students that have policies that prevent faculty and staff from disclosing a student’s gender identity to his or her parents or without that student's permission. Now, parents started pushing back against gender theology or the academic so-called ‘perfection’ that was being sought by the liberals and the progressive, which I consider regressive, way of thinking. Now, parents are saying to these so-called experts: ‘You have designed this system. You've designed us out of the system, and we don't want to be out anymore. We're not only paying for it, but we've given you our dearest treasure to take care of as a supplement to our family's educational setting. And now you say we can't be involved with it? That’s unacceptable.’ Those are things that go on which really poison the trust between parents and the educator. And like I said earlier on, I still think there are sincere educators out there. Some of them have been indoctrinated, but they're still educators who, if given the opportunity, could see the error of these ways that were put into their teacher and education training, and could revert back to common sense, and be great educators in a system that needs to bump up its game because the rest of the world is bumping up its game, and places like China and Russia and Iran are attempting to educate in such a way they can surpass us. That can't be allowed to happen.
Washington Reporter:
President Trump wants the Department of Education to be abolished. What's your thought on that? Do you think that the Department of Education can or should be eliminated, and what would that look like if so?
Rep. Tim Walberg:
On any vote that comes up to abolish Department of Education, I'll be one who puts up the green vote. However, reality says that we don't have 60 votes in the Senate. We may get 218 votes in the House to do that, but we don't have 60 votes in the Senate to get that done yet; we also know that unwinding something, and I appreciate what very smart young people with algorithms are doing and winding through the bureaucracy and finding what's waste, what isn't working and what we are being lied to about, that's great, but in the end, there are some things that we put in to the process of education that we're not going to unwind overnight. So how can we depower the Department of Education in an appropriate way? How can we reinvent a better way of doing it and offer solutions? I think about the Civil Rights Division in the Department of Education; what have they done? Why were the anti-Semitic activities let to go on campuses and nothing really took place until this committee began holding hearings and bringing presidents of universities in and having them fall on their faces in front of us, literally to the point that three of those university presidents are no longer employed by those schools because they could not define any policy that would protect Jewish students or students in general on the campus? This includes non-Jewish students who stood in defense of Jewish students and then were fearful that their grades could be impacted by radical teachers who would not defend the academic process as being open and free and fair for everyone. Why not take the Civil Rights Division in the Department of Education and shift it over to the Department of Justice and let them handle it as they should be handling it. I also look at IDEA Grants, and the funding problems there. There's less than 40 percent of the funding that we promised, I think there's about 18 percent going to schools right now of that 40 percent that we appropriated, of what we 100 percent should have put in place. Maybe that should be over at the Department of Health and Human Services dealing with the health issues, the mental health issues that go on in our schools and the disability issues that take place. So I think we could look, by means of creative thinking, at how we could change it. We could reduce the overhead. We could cut down the size and scope of the Department of Education until ultimately, we saw that really it wasn't needed, because that ought to be back at the state and local districts for K-12, and higher education, maybe we can find a better way of dealing with them through competition and oversight that says, the bottom line is what we need in our world today is a workforce that's trained, that's educated and capable of doing it, and maybe it doesn't take as many schools of higher education in the sense of four year ones, maybe we do better with apprenticeship programs and internship programs and you name it to provide the education that's necessary. As we've seen with the last four years, executive orders only go to the end of their presidency. We need laws that change that, and right now, it comes down to numbers. So what can we get across? And I think oversight and putting the light of day on what's going on will give us the punch that begins to allow us to get to both Republicans and Democrats to say those are areas we need to, in a bipartisan way, change and get them done for best interest or of our schools. I think that's the only way. And in our in our Education and Workforce Committee, we're going to spend a lot of time putting that light on what is failing in our educational framework, in this country right now, as well as putting a light on what could work if we gave purchase power and opportunity for those settings to be in place in our educational settings. And that includes getting back to parents, having transparency that allows them to say, ‘no, that's not what I want. This is what I want. I want my government, elected officials superintendent of schools, to do what I expect. That's what I want. Find a way to achieve it for me, or we'll look to another source.’
Washington Reporter:
A topic close to your heart is protecting Jewish students from discrimination and harassment. What’s coming next on this front?
Rep. Tim Walberg:
I would tell you, as I told the president of Columbia just the other day, we're not giving up this. I’ve told other presidents as well, including in my own state, that we are not backing down on this. If necessary, we will have full-blown committee hearings on the campuses allowing the light of day to get there.
Washington Reporter:
You were mentioning holding potentially more hearings about either K-12 schools or colleges. My own public school district, Montgomery County Public Schools, was grilled by your committee. From the Ed and Workforce Committee standpoint, how do you figure out which schools to grill and where do you see that leading under your chairmanship?
Rep. Tim Walberg:
We go to those colleges and universities that are the highest profile and that are making the biggest problems. This is not just for good TV, radio, and newsprint. It's actually to accomplish something. Chairwoman Foxx, in her efforts last term, did yeoman’s effort to achieve that to the point that three college presidents left their offices and other schools began to do significant changes. I've been receiving calls from college presidents, university presidents who are staying in close contact with me and saying, ‘this is what I've just done. What do you think?’ And I remember recently I texted back to the university president of a major university, and said ‘well done. This is what we want to see.’ Then my staff walked in and handed me a press clipping about that same university just about three minutes later, that said that the DEI program was not actually abolished. I quickly copied off that press clipping and texted it back to this president I’d just given kudos to, and immediately, within less than two minutes, a text came back: ‘I didn't know about that. Will be checking into it now.’ I think that president will be, but that's what we have to keep doing. And these hearings will bring to place the right personnel sitting at the table that will be broadcast to the point that the other presidents, the other administrators, and the other institutions will see that we're serious about it. We're not backing away. The Columbia students who were in my office discouraged me with the fact that it's building towards springtime again, with some major reoccurrences. We want to head that off if at all possible, so we'll make our decisions based upon those type of things developing, whether our committee could go and hold a roundtable on the campus or a full blown hearing, to highlight what isn't changing, and some schools won't change until they take enough heat that they know it's in their best interest to find that change.
Washington Reporter:
In the course of my reporting, I was talking with some MIT students about how their school itself, not the student groups, is funding pro-Palestinian events out of proportion with pro-Israel events. How do you, from a congressional, lawmaker standpoint, think about the balance between the importance of academic freedom and the First Amendment in the education realm, while also making sure that students are not being taught inaccurate things?
Rep. Tim Walberg:
Other than the inaccuracy, the rest of it we want to see on college campus. We want a full-throated debate, but a full-throated that doesn’t have a hammer hanging over it that says ‘you can't say that, or else you will pay the consequences.’ No. We want debate within the confines of of propriety, decency and order, but that is still full-throated, just like what I want to have on our Education Committee, without personality, without politics pushing its ugly head in. Debate is wonderful. With regards to inaccuracies, I think ultimately, through pushing for more competition, more transparency, some of those inaccuracies that are being used in indoctrinating our students for years and years now, will be blown out of the water because they will be seen for what they are, that they’re lies, and the schools that will allow that will lose students and will lose good faculty, and ultimately lose their their place. Right now, a perfect example is I’ve been working with the U.S. Department of Education on an issue I brought up earlier about four charter schools that are together in network and are potentially being put out of opportunity for anyone in the future because of a funding issue that the state Department of Education in Michigan is bringing about. We want, hopefully now, the U.S. Department of Education under new leadership, to take a stance on that to say, ‘no, you cannot do this for political reasons, just because you don't like the fact that these schools have gone in the inner city and shown you up by putting standards in place, allowing religion to be part of the schools in a voluntary way, but not shying away from it and from the values that are there. You cannot withhold resources.’ Oh, by the way, these are ESSER funds that have come to the state and are to be used for these purposes. So these are things we're going to have to do, and to have Parents Defending Education and other entities that are willing to be those spotlights I've used to illustrate is so important. When my kids were in 4H, we had the horses and the pigs and the chickens and sheep. When we’d go in the feed room in the morning and would turn the light on, you heard the scurrying of furry things. Why? Because the light went on and the furry scurrying things went away. And I think what we need to do is keep the light on, because the scurrying furry things have now had the light put on them in the educational community. And what we're doing is saving the good feed, the good nutrition, the good education that will come to our students if we're willing to keep the course and keep the light on. This committee will do that.
Washington Reporter:
Congressman Walberg, thanks so much for chatting.