“I’m gonna close the Department of Education and move education back to the states,” former U.S. President Donald Trump said on his campaign trail. He mentioned a similar measure during an interview on Fox News and a rally at Temple University in June 2024.
In August, he told X owner and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, “I want to close the Department of Education.”
“We spend more money per pupil than any other country, by far, and yet we’re at the bottom of the list,” Trump said during a rally in Indiana, Pennsylvania. “Out of 40, we’re ranked about No. 40, and I’m going to close the Department of Education and move education back to the states, and we’re going to do it fast.”
Trump echoes what has been codified in Project 2025, a conservative playbook spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation. It comprises actions the next Republican president can take within the first six months of taking office. Project 2025 plans to support a bill for parents to have more access to classroom materials, eliminate programs with “gender ideology and critical race theory,” and allow parents to decide if their child can use pronouns other than those mentioned in their birth certificate.
While Trump’s team has tried to separate themselves from Project 2025, Democrats have continued to warn voters of what might befall Americans should he win the election — it would “strip away our freedoms – by forcing states to report on women’s miscarriages and abortions, cutting Social Security and Medicare, and eliminating the Department of Education,” Vice President Kamala Harris’ official presidential campaign.
“We are not going to let him eliminate the Department of Education that funds our public schools,” Harris said during her speech at the Democratic National Convention and placed the DoE on the same priority level as programs like Social Security, Medicare, and the Affordable Care Act.
A shutdown of the Doe, a Cabinet-level agency within the U.S. government, would require an act of Congress and bipartisan support. During Trump’s presidency, he proposed merging the Education and Labor departments into one federal agency, but this was not the case. Such a proposal is not new. Former Republican President Ronald Reagan also called for the elimination of DoE in 1981 but backed down, citing a lack of congressional support.
Trump has not said how he intends to shut the department down, which would need an act of Congress. Proponents of the elimination of the department argue that while the spending per pupil and public school employees have increased, math, science, and reading scores have either remained stagnant or decreased during the same period of time.
“The performance of 17-year olds has been essentially stagnant across all subjects despite a near tripling of the inflation-adjusted cost of putting a child through the K–12 system,” says a CATO Institute study. Despite the ongoing debate, DoE persisted during Trump’s administration.
Programs impacted
Jackie Anderson, president of the Houston Federation of Teachers, says the proposal to turn over the DoE to states is an attack on public education, enabling more book bans in Texas, a shift of focus away from school safety, and lesser protections for LGBTQ+ students.
“The plan, in keeping with the Heritage Foundation, would be highly detrimental to Blacks, Latinos, and other minorities here in the Houston area or in Texas for that matter. It will allow the state to resort to the vouchers,” she said.
Moreover, school districts like Houston ISD, which has a majority of minority enrollment, need the extra money that federal funds provide.
“If we did not receive that money from the federal government Department of Education for our district, our district would have to shut down. We would not be able to educate our students in mass numbers… it would no longer exist,” Anderson added.
The DoE has the following functions, which may be impacted if it is eliminated:
- The DoE funnels federal funding to K-12 schools, including the Title I program for low-income students and the IDEA program for disabled children, and manages student loan and financial aid programs. These programs amount to around $28 billion every year, per CNN, or 10% of all school funding. The rest is paid by state and local taxes. Project 2025, on the other hand, says Title I funding for schools should be turned into vouchers and then slowly phased out, and money from the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act should go to parents directly.
- The DoE also provides funding through programs like the Pell Grant, which amounts to about $30 billion a year.
- The Department makes federal regulations and makes decisions on discrimination complaints in schools and colleges.
- It has also tried to strengthen protection for transgender students and administer student loan forgiveness — both have hit legal roadblocks.
- When Trump was president, his administration rescinded the Obama-era guidance that aimed to ensure minority students were not unfairly disciplined in schools.
- While the DoE is not the primary source of funds for schools, it might be the money to avoid federal rules.
Does Houston reflect this concern?
Nearly every school district in Harris County is underfunded, according to a recent Kinder Institute analysis that drew from data in the School Finance Indicators Database. The analysis also said school districts with a higher proportion of minority students were more likely to have “larger spending gaps,” and where the gap exceeds 40% tend to have lower TEA ratings for overall student achievement.
Sylvia Bradshaw, a retired teacher who taught at Rucker Elementary in Houston ISD for 18 years, says the DoE has an overarching impact on local education. Based on her observations, although public schools are funded through tax dollars, she would notice a dearth of funds that the state could not replenish. Often, she and her colleagues paid for their students’ supply needs from their own pockets. However, federal grants helped.
“If you limit the federal funding or the influence of the federal programs, that has a devastating effect on the quality of education that our students receive,” she said. “If you come from a school that’s in an affluent neighborhood, everybody in the neighborhood wants to contribute. When you are unable to do that, you need that extra support. You can’t just depend upon the state government because sometimes… the political needs outweigh the social needs of the community.”
Anderson added Black students will miss out on quality education if states decide to impose vouchers on their students.
“[Black children] would be uneducated for the most part because if they cannot afford to supplement that voucher, where are they gonna go to school?” Anderson wonders. “I can envision charter schools popping up all over the neighborhoods to get that voucher money, but what kind of accountability or criteria are going to be for those new opening charters?”
