GEOFF BENNETT: To help us understand the implications of President Trump's order to dismantle the Education Department, we get two perspectives tonight.

Let's first turn to Rick Hess.

He's a senior fellow and director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute.

Thanks for being with us.

And you wrote in a column recently that you think, in principle, downsizing the Education Department makes sense.

Let's start there.

Why do you think an overhaul is called for?

RICK HESS, Director of Education Policy Studies, American Enterprise Institute: Sure.

There's a lot of confusion about what the department is.

The best description is that it's a megabank with a small policy shop attached.

The biggest thing the department does is manage about a $1.5 trillion portfolio in student loans.

That's a disproportionate share of the work force.

In K-12, the two big programs are Title I for schools serving children of poverty and IDEA for children with special needs.

Combined, those two programs are about $35 billion a year, which is about 3 cents on the dollar of what we spend in K-12 education.

So, look, we have got a lot of adults who aren't educators creating a lot of paperwork, costing a lot of money in salary and benefits in ways that frequently frustrate the ability of schools or colleges to serve kids.

I think you can dramatically downsize that department, shrink the work force, reduce the red tape in ways that are good for learning and good for America's schools and colleges.

GEOFF BENNETT: What about the way it's being dismantled, the mass firings, the lack of transparency?

Any concerns on that front?

RICK HESS: Yes.

I mean, I think there's reasonable concerns about, if you are entrusted with a public agency and you are going to either ask it to do something that's never done, like under President Biden, the student loan forgiveness, or what we are seeing here, firing roughly half the work force, announcing you're going to try to fundamentally limit its activities, it's entirely fair to ask questions about how's this going to work, explain the legal authority for the specific actions.

And, most importantly, in this case, if you are cutting the department in half in terms of staffing, but you're continuing to run all the programs, how are you going to manage that transition in ways that ideally yield a more agile, more responsive, more accountable department?

It's up to the administration to explain that to the American public.

GEOFF BENNETT: The states that rely most heavily on federal funding tend to lean Republican.

These are states that voted for Donald Trump in the last election.

Do you see any political risk in this for him?

RICK HESS: One of the points of confusion here is that whether you -- whether the department disappeared tomorrow or not would not have any impact on the funding for students or -- in schools or colleges.

That is a different conversation.

The Title I program, Pell Grants, IDEA, student loans, those are not directly affected by cuts to staff at the department or by even the abolition of the department.

Doing away with those congressionally authorized programs requires Congress to actually vote to reduce or zero out or change the formulas.

So, one of the things that's going on here is, what we're actually having a debate about is how to run the federal bureaucratic machinery over those programs.

But many in the American public, many students and teachers think we're arguing about something else.

They think we're arguing about the funding streams.

GEOFF BENNETT: Rick Hess, thanks, as always, for your insights.

We appreciate it.

RICK HESS: Thank you.

GEOFF BENNETT: And for another perspective, we turn now to Catherine Lhamon, who served as assistant secretary for civil rights at the Department of Education under both the Obama and Biden administrations.

Good to see you.

Do you agree with that assessment that the DOE is essentially a megabank that provides the machinery to disburse federal funding?

CATHERINE LHAMON, Former U.S. Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights, Department of Education: Well, what Congress has said about what the Department of Education is that it's a civil rights agency.

It's an agency that's designed to make sure that there's fair and equal education for all students in our P-12 schools, as well as our institutions of higher education.

GEOFF BENNETT: So what would happen if you lose that umbrella of the Department of Education for civil rights enforcement?

I mean, the reason why the Department of Education was created was because states, especially in the South, didn't do a good job of ensuring equal access for students with disabilities, students of color.

CATHERINE LHAMON: Right.

GEOFF BENNETT: The list goes on.

CATHERINE LHAMON: Right.

Well, we don't have to wonder what will happen.

We have a historical analog, right?

And in the state of Virginia, just to take one example, a school district in the late 1950s, early 1960s decided that, after courts had ordered that that district integrate to allow all school students equal opportunity, it would shut down every public school.

It would offer no public education to anyone.

And then what it did was to turn around and fund private schools for white students only.

So Black students in that district had no education opportunity.

Unless and until there is a federal backstop against that kind of harm, we will see students discriminated against, we will see students with unequal education.

My mother went to racially segregated schools in Richmond, Virginia, when she was growing up.

We don't need to go back to that kind of education opportunity that is not opportunity for everyone.

GEOFF BENNETT: When you hear President Trump and other Republicans say public education is failing and that we need to dismantle the Department of Education and send this back to the states, the states can do this better, what's your response to that?

I mean, how do you go about improving educational outcomes?

CATHERINE LHAMON: Well I want to first say it is demonstrably untrue that the Trump administration is trying to return education to the states.

There is no administration in the history of the United States that has tried to dictate more what is taught in a K-12 school or what is taught in a college or university.

So it is just not the case that this administration is trying to return education to the states.

It's trying to dictate what our kids learn and it's trying to dictate how -- in a micromanagement that we have no historical precedent for.

And that is unlawful in this country.

But separate and apart from that, what would happen if we don't have a federal backstop against harm is that we will have harm in schools.

We know that the 26 million students who rely, low-income students who rely on federal funding for their equal access to education don't have a minute to waste.

We know that the 6.5 million students who rely on Pell Grants to be able to go to and realize their dreams in college don't have time to mess around with, does it work or does it not work?

What they need is to learn today and to be prepared for their futures tomorrow.

GEOFF BENNETT: In the minute we have left, this idea that current tasks performed by the Department of Education can sort of be dispersed to other agencies, practically, does -- can that work?

CATHERINE LHAMON: No.

And here's how we know.

One, 63 percent of Americans don't want it, so this is not something that anybody is calling to have happen, other than the president.

And, two, the reason that Congress in 1979 created the U.S. Department of Education was that it found -- this is the congressional record -- it found that diffuse educational opportunity leads to harm, leads to incorrect, inconsistent information being released to the states.

It doesn't work.

We know it doesn't work.

We should not be pretending otherwise.

GEOFF BENNETT: Catherine Lhamon, thank you.

Thanks for coming in.

We appreciate it.

CATHERINE LHAMON: Thanks so much.