(C) Common Dreams
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How Dismantling the Department of Education Would Harm Students [1]
['Tim Walker']
Date: 2025-03
In a widely expected move, President Donald Trump is about to issue an executive order aimed at dismantling the U.S. Department of Education (ED), while also urging Congress to abolish it outright. Eliminating the department, which was established by President Jimmy Carter and Congress in 1980, due to the advocacy of NEA and others, has been a key focus of Trump’s anti-public education rhetoric, as a candidate and now as president.
Over the past two months, the White House has issued reckless, destructive, and even illegal directives to destabilize public schools and target some of our most vulnerable students. They include stripping schools of critical funding, launching national school voucher programs, providing more funding and less oversight for private charter operators, and greenlighting Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids on public schools.
The divisive culture war language (“ending radical indoctrination in K-12 schooling”) used by the administration and its allies to justify its actions does not obscure the true aims of Trump’s agenda: taking a wrecking ball to public schools—inflicting damage on millions of low-income students across the country in the process—to pay for tax handouts for billionaires.
Ninety percent of U.S. students and 95% of students with disabilities learn in our public schools. Students across the country benefit from programs run by the Department of Education. Eliminating the department, National Education Association President Becky Pringle said this week, was equivalent to “giving up on our future.”
“If it became a reality,” Pringle said, “Trump’s power grab would steal resources for our most vulnerable students, explode class sizes, cut job training programs, make higher education more expensive and out of reach for middle class families, take away special education services for students with disabilities, and gut student civil rights protections.”
"Americans did not vote for, and do not support," she added, “ending the federal government’s commitment to ensuring equal educational opportunities for every child.”
New Calls to Abolish the Education Department
Ever since its creation, the Department of Education has faced continued calls from right-wing politicians for its abolishment, but the current White House presents the gravest threat yet.
The plan to close the department was a part of the GOP campaign platform and was laid out explicitly in Project 2025, a policy blueprint published by the Heritage Foundation to guide a second Trump presidency. Indeed, the very first sentence of the education section of the Project 2025 manual is: “Federal education policy should be limited and, ultimately, the federal Department of Education should be eliminated.”
Students across the country benefit from programs run by the U.S. Department of Education. Eliminating the department would be equivalent to “giving up on our future,” said NEA President Becky Pringle.
Doing so, however, requires an act of Congress. And bipartisan support for a strong federal role in ensuring a quality education for all students has in the past defeated these efforts. Just last year, the U.S. House of Representatives considered and rejected an amendment to a bill that sought to eliminate the department. More than 60 Republican members joined Democrats in turning back the effort. However, a new bill was introduced in the House last week calling for the elimination of the department by the end of 2026.
While officially closing the doors of the Education Department its key functions and stripping its funds is a very real and present danger. According to reporting in The Wall Street Journal, the White House is weighing a series of executive orders that would abolish programs that are not “explicitly in the department’s statute” and transfer other functions to other federal departments—or, in effect, gutting the Education Department without technically closing it.
How Students and Families Will Pay the Price
When the White House talks about dismantling Department of Education programs, it uses phrases such as “back to the states” to obscure the fact that students— especially lower-income students in rural, suburban, and urban communities and students with disabilities—will lose big.
The Department of Education is a critical champion in enforcing federal statutes prohibiting discrimination and ensuring every student has access to an education that will help them reach their full potential. Dismantling it means defunding programs that feed, educate, and protect our most vulnerable and underserved students, and leaving many families fearful and anxious and communities reeling.
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[1] Url:
https://www.nea.org/nea-today/all-news-articles/how-dismantling-department-education-would-harm-students
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