President-elect Donald Trump enlisted a star-powered new staffer to mastermind his bid to abolish the U.S. Department of Education: Billionaire tech magnate Elon Musk.
Musk’s new role as a chief architect of Trump’s plan to slash and remake the federal government may also have big implications for schools use of technology, treatment of transgender students, work related to kids’ social media use, and what schools’ STEM and career and technical education programs might look like.
Trump on Nov. 12 tapped Musk, the CEO of SpaceX, Tesla, and the owner of X (the social media company formerly known as Twitter) to head up a new federal “Department of Government Efficiency,” alongside former Republican presidential candidate and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy.
Their mission: To “dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies,” Trump said in a statement.
The job—and Musk’s role as a key Trump adviser—also gives him a platform to promote his own, dim view of K-12 schools.
“Conventional education is massively overwhelmed,” Musk argued in a 2021 video posted to the social media site then known as Twitter. He likened schools’ efforts to educate students to what it might look like if local community theater companies tried to stage “The Dark Knight,” a Batman movie directed by Christopher Nolan, with “homemade costumes” and “no special effects.”
That would “suck,” Musk said in the video.
Instead, Musk believes, education should be “as close to a video game as possible. You do not need to tell your kid to play video games. They will play video games on autopilot all day,” he said. “So if you can make it interactive and engaging, then you can make education far more compelling and far easier to do.”
A spokesman for Trump’s transition team did not respond to questions about Musk’s role and its impact on K-12 policy.
Trump, a longtime CEO himself before being elected president in 2016, has often pointed to his own business background as an asset for governing.
But Jonathan Collins, an assistant professor of political science and education at Columbia University’s Teachers College, is wary of bringing a tech entrepreneur’s sensibility to the challenges facing K-12 schools.
In the tech industry, the focus is on efficiency and growth, Collins said. Efficiency is a good idea to bring into education and education reform, but “education isn’t an industry [whose impact] we can judge by immediate growth outputs,” he said.
Education is “about ensuring that students are equipped with the academic and durable skills needed to confront the world’s most pressing problems,” Collins said. “It’s going to be different for different students of different backgrounds and different capabilities.”
Here’s how Musk’s new role might affect areas key to how K-12 educators do their jobs, according to a review of comments he’s made on schools in the public sphere and actions he’s taken.
Musk shares Trump’s wish to get rid of the Education Department
Musk—whose new role focuses on slimming down the federal bureaucracy —has made it clear he’s in full agreement with Trump’s contention that the U.S. Department of Education has got to go.
Just a day before Trump announced Musk’s new gig, the tech billionaire shared a meme featuring former President Jimmy Carter, who signed the legislation that created the department. The text on the meme Musk shared on X says: “In 1979, I created the Education Department. Since then, America went from 1st to 24th in education.” (It is unclear where the data cited in that post comes from or whether it is accurate.)
Musk added in his own commentary above the photo: “Not exactly great value for money!”
Scrapping the education department has been a perennial conservative priority since the agency’s inception more than four decades ago. But repealing the legislation that created the agency would likely require overcoming a Democratic filibuster. That means garnering 60 votes in the U.S. Senate, where Republicans will hold a 53-seat majority during the first two years of Trump’s new term.
But Max Eden, a senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said Musk has a ready-made argument for, at the very least, getting rid of a significant portion of the department’s career staff. Musk “has a business history of dramatically downsizing while focusing on the core bottom line,” Eden said.
Case in point: Musk reported that he laid off about 80 percent of Twitter’s workforce when he took over the company in the fall of 2022. Replacing career staff—who serve in agencies regardless of which party controls the White House in part to maintain institutional knowledge and expertise on particular programs and policies—is something recommended by Project 2025, a sweeping policy document crafted by the Heritage Foundation which includes the views of some of Trump’s former aides as well as politically conservative advocates. Trump hasn’t endorsed the recommendations of Project 2025.
The role of technology and AI in schools could loom large
The tech CEO’s appointment comes as schools are wrestling with big questions around the use of artificial intelligence in teaching and learning—including whether to ban the technology or allow teachers to harness it to grade and lesson plan more efficiently, and permit students to use it to complete their assignments.
Musk hasn’t addressed those questions in detail. But he responded swiftly when New York City schools initially banned ChatGPT, amid fears students would use the tool to cheat. He essentially told the district it needed to adjust to a shifting technological landscape. “It’s a new world! Goodbye homework!” he wrote on X on Jan. 4 of last year. (New York City public schools has since reversed course on its AI ban).
Under President Joe Biden, the education department advised schools to cautiously embrace the technology, while ensuring that a teacher or school administrator carefully reviews any recommendations made by AI tools, particularly if they have a direct impact on students. It’s unclear if the Trump team will encourage a similar approach.
Many experts argue that AI powered-tech tools can’t replace educators’ judgment or ability to relate to students. But that is a message that could get lost now that a big tech leader is set to play such an influential role in the incoming administration, said Torrey Trust, a professor of learning technology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
“I’m worried about the push from tech company CEOs who think that AI can replace teachers and tutors,” Trust said in an email. “There seems to be a sense that AI can offer personalization for all students at a level that teachers with so many students cannot. However, research has shown that empathy and relationships are significantly more influential in a student’s learning gains than personalization. I am concerned that we will lose the humanity and the human intelligence in education with Tech CEOs in governmental positions.”
Musk’s role may also have implications for tech companies who market their products to educators and students.
Musk, an early investor in OpenAI, the makers of ChatGPT, is now suing the company.
ChatGPT is the foundation of a number of AI-powered ed-tech products, including Khan Academy’s Khanmigo chatbot.
Why Musk created a school that focuses on STEM learning
Musk created his own school, Ad Astra, a private school focused on science, technology, engineering, and math for children between ages 3 and 9.
Different iterations of the school have been located in Los Angeles and on SpaceX’s former headquarters in Hawthorne, Calif. Most of its students are the children of SpaceX employees, including Musk himself.
Regular schools “weren’t doing the things I thought should be done,” Musk said in a 2015 interview with Futurism. “I thought, well let’s see what we can do. Maybe creating a school will be better.”
Musk said in the 2021 Twitter video that the school doesn’t have typical grade levels, a concept popular in Montessori. It emphasizes critical thinking and hands-on or project-based learning, according to its website.
The school rejects the traditional “assembly line approach to education,” Musk said in the 2021 video. “It makes more sense to cater education to match [students’] aptitudes and abilities.”
A new Ad Astra school that could enroll up to 50 students, was set to open in October in Bastrop, Texas, near SpaceX’s launch site. It’s unclear if that happened.
Musk, like big tech CEOs Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerburg, has also participated in K-12 philanthropy. The goal, according to his foundation’s barebones website: To support science and engineering education.
He donated money to several school districts, mostly in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas, where much of his business operations are now located. In 2021, the Musk Foundation awarded more than $3 million to Cameron County-area school districts, including Brownsville, Los Fresnos, Harlingen, and Point. In 2022, Brownsville received another $2.53 million.
The districts planned to use the money to expand career and technical education programs and purchase computer hardware and software to support math and science instruction, according to local news reports.
Transgender issues are personal for Musk
Musk is also likely to be in lockstep with Trump’s push to withhold funding from schools that teach “critical race theory,” promote policies that seek to make schools more supportive of transgender students, or teach American history in a way that some describe as unpatriotic.
Musk and Ramaswamy suggested in an X forum last year that the Education Department was threatening to withhold money from school districts that refused to adopt what Ramaswamy described as “toxic, self-hating racial and gender ideologies,” according to an account of the event by the Daily Caller.
“So we’re basically paying people to hate America,” Musk responded, the news website reported.
The two seem to have been referring in part to the Biden administration’s Title IX rule, which requires schools to support transgender students’ rights, including by allowing them to use the bathrooms and locker rooms of their choice. Trump is expected to rescind the rule shortly after taking office.
This issue is personal for Musk. He said he was “tricked” into providing gender- affirming care for his daughter, Vivian Jenna Musk, who was assigned male at birth. He said that his child was “dead” and that she was “killed by the woke mind virus,” according to an account of the interview in the Washington Post.
Musk moved the headquarters of his company, SpaceX, and social media company X from California to Texas after Gov. Gavin Newsom signed legislation that bars school districts from requiring staff to notify parents of their child’s gender identification change.
It’s an open question whether a Trump education department could withhold money from schools that adopt policies or teach curricula that the administration doesn’t like.
Experts say the CEO of X is unlikely to crack down on social media’s ills
Educators have been raising alarm bells for years about the impact of social media on young people’s mental health, with some school districts going as far as to file lawsuits against the platforms.
It is also an open question what having the CEO of a major social media company will mean for efforts to mitigate those problems through federal regulation.
Given his financial stake in the issue, it seems unlikely that Musk would be a “champion of effective regulation of the whole industry that would prioritize limiting its harms to young people,” said Jeff Carpenter, a professor of education at Elon University and former high school teacher who studies the impact of social media on K-12 schools.
2024-11-14 02:16:02
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