The National Association of Scholars (NAS) welcomes and endorses Senator Jim Banks's introduction of the Promoting Equal Learning & Liberty (PELL) Act, which seeks to end federal support for Minority-Serving Institution (MSI) grant programs. The MSI program uses taxpayer money to advance race discrimination: it unconstitutionally rewards institutions of higher education that meet and maintain racial and ethnic quotas. Enduring federal education reform requires statutes to consolidate and reduce the number of Education Department programs, and to eliminate programs that fund race and sex discrimination. The PELL Act is a major step forward in the necessary campaign to reform federal higher education policy.
The PELL Act achieves a NAS policy goal by different means. In Waste Land: The Education Department's Profligacy, Mediocrity, and Radicalism, and in its accompanying Legislative Guide, we called for the elimination of Minority Serving Institutions (MSI) programs within the Education Department. The PELL Act instead comprehensively lists each and every reference (as far as we can tell) to MSIs throughout the federal code and converts them into Pell Grant support. The PELL Act is an extraordinarily impressive act of legislative draftsmanship—and converting MSI grant funds into Pell Grant funds seems to be both good in itself and political good sense. Both Senator Banks and Senator Banks’s legislative office have done a very impressive job in converting the general urge to remove race discrimination from federal education into a detailed, practical bill. Senator Banks’s Indiana constituents, and Americans as a whole, should be grateful for the hard, effective work that has been done on their behalf.
Americans also should note that the PELL Act is a carefully tailored reform. It removes program support for individual race discrimination—but it does not affect Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and Tribal Colleges & Universities (TCU). America supports these as institutions, for historic reasons, and supporting them does not entail race discrimination as MSU grant programs do. We called in Waste Land for continuing support for HBCUs and TCUs, and we are glad that the PELL Act makes the same distinction.
The PELL Act pioneers the larger, necessary task of education reform: not just to rely on Executive Orders, not just to transfer Education Department programs to other administrative homes, but to change federal statutes in detail to eliminate or systematically reform every wasteful, counterproductive, illiberal, and discriminatory program in the Education Department. Reforming Executive Orders is marvelous, and so too is the drive to eliminate the Education Department as an administrative unit—but enduring education reform also will require Congress to reform federal statutes. There is no time like the present to start.
We know that to introduce a bill is a far cry from changing the law—particularly when you need a supermajority of 60 senators for most legislation. But to introduce a bill is to begin to change the climate of opinion—and perhaps much or all of the PELL Act can be introduced into future financial reconciliation legislation, as previous elements of substantive education reform legislation became part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. We cannot say when the substance of the PELL Act will become law—but that moment has just become measurably nearer.
There’s always more to be done. We’d be delighted if Senator Banks or other legislators were to introduce bills to eliminate race discrimination in K-12 education spending programs. A good start would be to rescind authorization for programs such as Equity Assistance Centers. As for further higher education, a good priority would be to eliminate or reform programs that fund “sustainability.” But we also would understand if they focused on getting the PELL Act passed into law before announcing their support for further reforms. There’s only so much that can be achieved in any one year.
More good has been done in Washington since January than we dreamed was possible. The introduction of the PELL Act is a welcome early Christmas present and a fitting culmination of an excellent year of education reform.
Photo by Andy Feliciotti on Unsplash
