U.S. President Donald Trump signs an executive order to shut down the Department of Education, during an event in the East Room at the White House in Washington, D.C., on March 20.Nathan Howard/Reuters
Debra Thompson is a contributing columnist for The Globe and Mail.
Last week President Donald Trump signed yet another constitutionally questionable executive order, this time with the intention of dismantling the Department of Education “once and for all.” A longstanding target of American conservatives since its inception in 1979, Republicans consider the department to be an example of a bloated federal bureaucracy that tramples on states’ and parents’ rights.
The education system is one of the most fraught battlegrounds in America’s culture wars. Curriculum topics such as sex education, the cause of the Civil War, LGBTQ+ rights, religion and evolutionary biology have led to various disputes among parents, teachers and students, while the growing popularity of charter schools and voucher programs, book bans, gender-inclusive bathrooms, and standardized testing have all turned into highly polarized issues.
The contentious nature of these debates is understandable, given that education is the preeminent agent of socialization. But the arguments embedded in the Trump administration’s demands are, as usual, disingenuous. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon has said that the reason for the department’s demise is because it is wasteful and expensive federal overreach that uses taxpayer dollars to encroach on states’ and parents’ rights, but what she and Mr. Trump actually mean is to decimate public education. And in doing so, this administration will ensure that the United States remains deeply divided and intractably unequal.
The United States Department of Education is primarily responsible for distributing funding to school districts for economically disadvantaged communities and students with disabilities, administering financial aid for higher education in the form of Pell Grants and the Federal Student Loan Program, gathering statistics, research, and data on educational outcomes, and ensuring educational institutions comply with civil rights laws.
This funding fulfils the legal obligations of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, which helps districts serve students with disabilities, providing more than US$15-billion in funding in 2024. Title I funding is also provided to public schools that serve lower-income communities, approximately US$18-billion in 2023. The amount of K-12 funding varies from state to state, but on average is about 13 per cent of funding to state public education systems (higher, interestingly enough, in states that Mr. Trump won in the 2024 election).
The Trump administration has already limited the department’s abilities to fulfil these functions by firing more than 1,300 employees, effectively cutting its workforce by more than half and attempting to eliminate more than US$600-million in grants that helped place teachers in underserved schools. Now, Mr. Trump has vowed to immediately move the US$1.6-trillion student-loan portfolio and the supervision of special education services and nutrition programs to other government departments.
These are not simply cost-cutting measures. They are an outright attack on federal government involvement in leveling a deeply unequal educational playing field.
How Republicans expect to build and benefit from a meritocracy in which low-income and special needs children bear the brunt of Mr. Trump’s slash-and-burn approach is truly stupefying. The educational success of American children is already largely determined by their zip codes and parents’ income levels. It’s unclear how the Trump administration will create the meritocratic society it claims it desires when poor school districts cannot attract or retain qualified teachers, special needs students lack essential services, wealthy parents abandon the public education system and take their tax dollars with them, and too many American children cannot read at their grade level. Meanwhile, the United States remains one of the wealthiest and most undereducated nations among developed countries.
While Canada has never had a federal Department of Education, our provincial systems are much more consistent and equitable. According to University of Ottawa political scientist Jennifer Wallner, “even as provinces are the primary actor in the field of education, federal equalization payments – something that does not exist in the United States – help ensure that all provinces fund elementary and secondary schooling at reasonably comparable rates.”
In a lawsuit filed on Monday by the American Federation of Teachers, the American Association of University Professors and two public school districts in Massachusetts, the plaintiffs argued that the Department of Education is the “cornerstone of equitable public education.”
This assertion is undeniable. It’s the reason why many American presidents have tried to reform public education through federal funding programs like the Bush-era No Child Left Behind or Barack Obama’s Race to the Top. Both were flagship components of the presidential agendas, and both sought, in different ways, to make public education more egalitarian and to improve educational outcomes, especially for children from disadvantaged communities.
Mr. Trump’s legacy, however, will be the upending of the education system as we know it.