Episode 17: Dismantling the Department of Education

When President Jimmy Carter created the Department of Education, he saw it as a path toward stronger public schools and greater opportunity. Decades later, the Trump administration’s push to dismantle it raises new questions about the federal role in education. ⁠Zahava Stadler⁠ and ⁠Jeremy Bauer-Wolf⁠ of New America join the show to explore how the agency came to be and what it might mean if it disappears.

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Transcript

President Jimmy Carter: And now it’s time to take another major step by creating a separate Department of Education.

Shannon Lynch: When President Jimmy Carter called for the creation of the Department of Education in his 1978 State of the Union, he described it as a step toward improving public schools and equal opportunity nationwide. Two years later, the department became a permanent part of the federal government. Now, the Trump administration’s calls to eliminate it raise a bigger question. Why did we build this agency to begin with? And what would it mean to tear it down?

Welcome to Democracy Deciphered, where we unpack the history, headlines, and hopes of American democracy. I’m your host, Shannon Lynch. Today, I’m joined by New America’s Zahava Stadler and Jeremy Bauer-Wolf.

Zahava Stadlar is project director of the Education Funding Equity Initiative at New America, where she leads work on how school funding policies shape equity in public education. Previously, she directed policy at EdBuild and led state school funding efforts at the Education Trust. Earlier in her career, she worked on Race to the Top human capital projects supporting high-need schools. She serves on advisory groups for Allovue and the State and School Finance Project.

Also with us today is Jeremy Bauer-Wolf. Bauer-Wolf is the investigations manager for the Higher Education Program at New America. A former award-winning journalist, he spent more than a decade covering education and politics, reporting for Inside Higher Ed and Higher Ed Dive on federal policy, college leadership and student affairs. His work has appeared in The Washington Post, The Baltimore Sun, and Times Higher Education. Bauer-Wolf holds dual bachelor’s degrees in journalism and public relations from Towson University.

Jeremy, Zahava, thanks so much for joining me today.

Zahava Stadler: Great to be here.

Jeremy Bauer-Wolf: Wonderful to be here.

Shannon Lynch: So, the Department of Education was established in 1980 to give every child in America a fair shot at learning. What was its original mission and how has that mission evolved over time?

Zahava Stadler: I think it’s important to note that the federal government didn’t just start working on education in 1980. There were already offices working on educational issues before the Department of Education was established. But when Jimmy Carter signed the law specifically creating a Department of Education, he said it was about creating one more efficient, accountable, and responsive entity that could coordinate and handle all those education issues. And he specifically said, this really stood out to me, “The time has passed when the federal government can afford to give its second-level, part-time attention to its responsibilities in education. If our nation is to meet the great challenges of the 1980s, we need a full-time commitment to education.”

This is obviously even more true now than it was in the 1980’s. And over time, the department has diversified its responsibilities along with the students and communities that American schools serve, including categories of students with disabilities, English learners, newcomer students. So, the mission and the programs that the department administers have broadened over time as American kids have gotten more diverse.

Jeremy Bauer-Wolf: That’s exactly right. And I will say it’s important to sort of get a picture, at least in my realm of what post-secondary education looked like around the time that the education department was established. You know, it was only about 30, 31 percent of adults that had some sort of post-secondary education in the United States. Years later, we’re now looking at about 65 to 66 percent.

So it’s important that as conservatives paint this picture of a failed education department, in many ways it actually has served its purpose, right, in broadening educational access. Specifically, in higher education, I don’t think folks recognize the sheer amount of weight and power the federal government has in, for instance, administering federal student loans. That’s a $120 billion expense every year. The Office for Federal Student Aid does so much in terms of regulating college access, college participation, and accepting federal funds. So it’s so much important work that it happens behind the scenes.

Shannon Lynch: Okay, so moving us into the present day, as of late, the Trump administration has kind of made dismantling the Department of Education a rallying cry, right? So what’s driving this push within the Trump Administration, and how are they trying to justify this idea to the public?

Jeremy Bauer-Wolf Well, first, I’ll say that this is a very longstanding wish among conservatives, right? So the Republican platform in 1980 actually called for abolishing the Education Department, in part because they viewed it as government overreach, big government. But as Zahava is, I think, going to address here, it has been entangled in these culture wars and has become much more of a talking point for the right over time.

Zahava Stadler: Yeah, and I think on that culture war point, in the order to begin dismantling the Department of Education, Trump’s education secretary, Linda McMahon, said that it was about making sure that American schools are not corrupted by political ideologies, special interests, and unjust discrimination. Now, I will say, especially in K-12 schools, a big part of what the Department of Education has done has been civil rights enforcement to prevent unjust discrimination. So there’s a tremendous irony in saying that by dismantling all of the federal oversight, what we’re actually going to do is improve that problem. I think we’re very likely to push in the opposite direction. But when they say corrupted by political ideologies, what they’re really saying is that the federal government has been a force for promoting equity and fairness on the whole in K-12 public schools, at the very least. And I think on the higher ed side as well, which Jeremy could address more than I can.

Ultimately, by removing that federal oversight, what they’re really going to be allowing is for less accountable state officials to really run roughshod over teachers and curricula. So if you think about it, there have been so many efforts over the last couple of years for state lawmakers to do things like require the Ten Commandments to be posted in public school classrooms, require the Bible as part of public school curricula. There have been specific efforts to delete from curricula and school libraries any reference to the fact that there are LGBT people in the world. All of these things, which the administration might recognize as political ideologies if they didn’t like them so much, are only being allowed or the administration is being hands-off about them because these are corrupted political ideologists that are in line with the administration’s views, not because they are apolitical.

The more general thing that you hear the administration saying is that it wants to send education back to the states. And this is something that sounds kind of politically neutral. But ultimately, it doesn’t really make any sense. And just to say this, the vast, vast majority of decisions over K-12 public schools already occur at the state and local level. The federal government exists to provide general oversight and financial support to K- 12 public schools. They say that they’re removing bureaucratic barriers. Actually, what they’re doing is passing on a lot of administrative responsibility that states are not staffed to execute. And so what’s going to happen is that in the absence of federal support, specific funding and grants, that states are going to be forced to cut really important programs and supports for lots of populations of students because the federal government isn’t there to provide that funding and that administrative backstop to things like programs for English learners.

There’s things like mental health supports in schools, to things like federal programs supporting libraries and schools. All of these things are really about helping local administrators support the kids in their classrooms. The federal government hasn’t been taking over any of these functions, and deleting the Department of Education support isn’t going to help them happen better.

Jeremy Bauer-Wolf: On the higher ed side, I would say that in the administration’s eyes, colleges are viewed as sort of co-conspirators in this enforcement of toxic ideology. But the irony here is that the administration's work with colleges through the education department has been, in effect, forcing an ideology upon them. So if you look at some of the recent cases where the administration has targeted colleges for anti-Semitism, which is a very worthy cause and should be addressed. But they are in their deals with colleges, adding provisions that have very little to do with anti-discrimination, right? And are quite plain oversteps, you know, monitoring, hiring, admissions decisions, asking for data points that are far beyond what the federal government has usually expected, demanding almost viewpoint neutrality or viewpoint diversity in changing departments at certain colleges. It is very plainly government overreach that conservatives have long opposed. At one point, I think we should always stress in this conversation is that the Education Department cannot close without congressional authority. And I believe that’s something that the Education Department has fought against in some of these illegal moves. But I went to a recent event that featured Education Secretary Linda McMahon, and she was asked the question, where is the department’s closure at? And the answer was something defective. “Well, it’s still the goal,” So, I think there is recognition that as they cut the Education Department down to size as they dismantle it, there is still lawmaker input to be had here, and doing anything else is impossible.

Shannon Lynch: So let’s say that they are successful in completely dismantling the Department of Education. Like, what could be lost here in practical terms? I mean, the department has been kind of this watchdog for student civil rights for a long time. So what types of populations might be affected the most?

Jeremy Bauer-Wolf: I want to say that even if legally they can’t shut down the department completely, they’re doing a good job at cutting it down to size so that it is not effective in these realms. On the civil rights side, for instance, the folks who are going to feel this immediately are people who have very legitimate discrimination complaints. For instance, the education department dismissed most of the staff that works on civil rights cases and shuttered regional offices in areas like Philadelphia, New York, San Francisco. These are obviously very large metropolitan areas, but these are the offices that were processing most of these civil rights cases. So it’s been caught up in this culture war. You know, they depicted the Biden Office for Civil Rights as furthering wokeness, in effect that is just supporting LGBTQ people, people with disabilities, Black and brown folk. The numbers are reflected here, the number of cases that they’re resolving through agreements with either school districts or colleges have slowed down significantly.

But when I’ve spoken to former civil rights staff, I think the thing that really kills them and keeps them up at night is not just the fact that some of these cases are falling by the wayside—again, very legitimate complaints—some of the monitoring that has happened for identified discrimination is now not ongoing. So the civil rights person that I talked to, she referenced a school district in Pennsylvania who had a gay student who was relentlessly bullied. And it took eight years for that school under monitoring by the federal government to reach a place where it was truly an inclusive environment. But it was, and they’re very proud of that. The monitoring agreements now that are in place civil rights division simply aren’t being enforced. And so, identified abuses, identified discrimination is being ignored. And I want to stress that this is not just, you know, transgender folk, Black and brown folk who are often the target of conservatives, but a vast majority of civil rights complaints over time have been disability related. A bipartisan issue, 70 percent of cases often in any given year. So, these are the folks who I am most worried about, who are being lost in this conversation as the administration weaponizes this division of civil rights.

Shannon Lynch: Yeah, that’s really interesting. Okay, so I just want to switch gears a little bit here. In this conversation, you often hear this term school choice thrown around a lot, right? So first of all, what does that mean? What is school choice within this conversation? And how does it contribute to this push to kind of strip back this federal oversight?

Zahava Stadler: What school choice has meant in general is a huge range of policies that include, yes, vouchers to help students attend private schools, but also publicly funded, publicly governed charter schools. Also, choice to allow students to attend schools either within their school district or outside their school district that wouldn’t be in their immediate neighborhood. There are lots of different forms of choice that have existed over time. This administration has basically only put its money behind school vouchers.

So, first of all, this is a question of budget priority. Where is the administration suggesting that we should invest money? Vouchers are the only education priority, not just choice priority, like the only K-12 education priority that this administration wants to see more money put into. We’ve already had in the big reconciliation budget bill, Specifically, a brand new program that is essentially private school vouchers for K-12 public school students, or K-12 students who often leave public schools. And that’s the only new money we’ve had for K-12 public education at all. While both the White House and House Republicans have been proposing massive, massive cuts to support for English learners, migrant students. Would radically reduce support for teacher development, rural schools, after-school programs. Cuts to food and medical assistance will actually affect schools in big ways, including reducing the number of kids who get free school lunch. The budget that’s currently under discussion in the House of Representatives would take an absolute chainsaw to Title I funding for students in poverty. Everything is being targeted for cuts, except we have new money available for school vouchers that would help people exit the public school system. So that is not only the school choice priority the administration is supporting. It’s basically the only K-12 education priority that the administration is supporting with money.

And I would say vouchers are actually not only narrower, but a real retreat from the kind of school choice that our federal government used to support. Because for a long time, we have used school choice programs as a way of helping families voluntarily opt in to schools that would be more diverse for their kids. This is a big way in which school integration work has continued into the 21st century. We’re now 70 plus years after Brown versus Board of Education. We’re a little less hands-on than we used to be with integration. The biggest remaining way that school systems have been doing this is through school choice, where you make it possible for people to opt into different school environments so that they get access to communities outside their immediate neighborhood. Well, under the Biden administration, there was a grant program called Fostering Diverse Schools. The Trump administration just canceled it two weeks ago, sent all of the final grantees letters saying no more money would be forthcoming. A big way that the federal government has supported school choice in the past has been through the Magnet School Assistance Program. Magnet schools are basically where you have kind of STEAM-focused schools that people apply to that they try to opt into. It might be a science school or a theater school. That program still exists, though the Trump budget actually proposed totally zeroing it out.

While the program is still there, the administration just announced that it was yanking millions away from the Magnet School Program and school districts that refused to certify that they are following civil rights law. This kind of circles back to what Jeremy was saying earlier. Because of the way the administration has redefined civil rights, they are forcing school districts to forfeit their federal grant money if they won’t do things like halt efforts to support trans students or students from historically marginalized racial groups. And so they’re saying that those things are civil rights violations. That’s a real through the looking glass kind of definition of civil rights. And they’re yanking funding for school choice all the while saying that they have a high priority on school choice.

So all of these things, pile them up together, supporting school vouchers to encourage people to leave the public school system, cancelling funds for the school choice program that keeps students in diverse public schools. All these things are a signal that the administration doesn’t care about the sustainability of a diverse common school system where all of our kids can learn alongside each other and be prepared for participation in a shared society. I think this is all a real signal that, actually, the Trump administration doesn’t believe we have a shared society and that we’re not trying to preserve or build one.

Jeremy Bauer-Wolf: I think one more point I’d like to make on the civil rights side of this. Obviously, we have seen many headlines about the Trump administration, essentially coercing colleges, obviously slapping them with fines, but the civil rights agreements that they are striking with these colleges, in addition to introducing provisions that go far beyond anti-discrimination, actually narrow the scope of the monitoring that this federal government is doing. So under the Biden administration, several many campuses struck agreements with the federal government, recognizing that they had failed in some regards to addressing anti-Semitism. Those agreements that are in place under the Biden administration not only address anti-semitism, but also other forms of discrimination, for instance, anti-Arab bias, for example. The Education Department, as it is now weaponizing the Civil Rights Division, is actually going back, overriding those agreements and narrowing them. So, no longer are these agreements touching on various areas of discrimination. It is solely focused on one area of anti-Semitism that actually isn’t capturing all of the nuanced problems that are happening on college campuses. And so I take real exception to this idea that the Trump administration is presenting itself as a leader on anti-semitism and anti-discrimination, when in fact, it is in effect weaponizing it. Just to get concessions from these schools that it views as elite and out of touch.

Shannon Lynch: Wow, this is really insightful. Thank you, both of you, for these thoughtful answers. Moving into our last question here, thinking about the future, if we do continue to see this further dismantling of the Department of Education, what can state and local leaders and lawmakers start to do to try to continue some of these protections that we’ve been talking about?

Zahava Stadler: Well, on the K-12 side, I will say, state officials really need to understand their role and their responsibility, by which I mean, there is no federal right to public education. But every single state constitution mentions public school. It’s actually the states that have the paramount responsibility here, and they cannot let something fall by the wayside just because they’ve been abandoned by the Trump administration. And so one thing that people may not realize is that all of those standardized tests that tell us how kids are doing, where we have disaggregated results by different grade levels, racial groups, subjects, all of those things are requirements that are tied to the receiving of federal funds. And that actually, if the federal government retreats from its role here, that there will be no existing requirement for states to tell parents how their kids are doing and to hold schools and districts accountable for how well they’re serving different groups of kids. But states need to recognize that’s actually their constitutional responsibility. So ensuring testing and accountability and reporting and transparency. And also in a lot of states, there is this attitude, and I’m from New Jersey, which everybody likes to say, local control. I mean, every state thinks it’s a local control state, but New Jersey is like the size of a postage stamp and has 600 school districts. So hyper-local control, the state tends to pass the buck to districts on saying, well, school funding and ensuring sufficient resources, a lot of that is property taxes. A lot of it happens at the local level. It’s a lot less the state’s problem. This is wrong. And we need to reemphasize that this is a state responsibility. And that in a lot of communities, if they lose federal Title I money—if they lose money that supports students in poverty—they don’t have a big robust local tax base to pick up the tab to support those students in poverty. This is a state responsibility.

States really need to embrace their role here, and lawmakers need to step up for kids who are being abandoned by the federal government. Whether that’s English learners, migrant students, rural communities, or students in property, for states to ensure that they are meeting their constitutional responsibility to serve all their kids, it’s going to require real effort and real investment. And that is, that’s really tough. I don’t mean just to throw that off as an easy responsibility. For one thing, the federal government can spend money it doesn’t have, right? We always have a federal deficit, but actually, states have a legal responsibility to maintain balanced budgets. It’s really hard to spend money that you weren’t spending before all of a sudden. But because the federal government is really leaving states holding the bag, they really need to take it up and make sure that none of their kids get left behind just because they’re being abandoned by federal policy.

Jeremy Bauer-Wolf: On the higher education side, I think my major concern here is that many states, K-12 funding is through formula, higher education has no similar protection, right, and so in periods of economic contraction, we have seen states scale back on higher education funding. So now that the federal government is cutting many of these social programs through one big beautiful bill, a lot of the attention now has moved to states on filling in these gaps in Medicare, for instance. That money very likely could be taken out of higher education. And public higher education is actually where most students attend. I think the public has this idea that a lot of students are flowing to the Harvards of the world, but a very small share of students attend private non-profit schools. Many of these students, these constituents, are going to schools in their backyard, regional publics, community colleges, right? And we will see absolutely real effects from states having to simultaneously scale down higher education funding while the federal government retreats from some of these very important matters, right? And we have historic examples of what will happen.

So, for instance, in PASSHE, this is the Pennsylvania system of public higher education. The Republican governor more than a decade ago did some significant scaling back of funding, which forced PASSHE to raise tuition rates. This was a system that was specifically geared toward helping low and moderate-income students rise through the social mobility ranks, right? And in effect, these funding moves blocked them out. So I am deeply concerned that as the federal government in essence attacks higher education on the so-called elite front, that all of these schools that support some of our most vulnerable populations are also going to suffer. So I would urge states, I understand that we are looking at a very dangerous funding environment, but I would urge states to hold the line and invest in higher education as much as possible. A real good recent example of this is the administration recently declared that grants for Hispanic-serving institutions and certain minority-serving institutions, these are colleges that educate large swaths, for instance, Hispanic folk, are unconstitutional. And so I would love to see states make up some of that gap, right? Because we’re looking now at some of these schools relying on tens of millions of dollars from the federal government that just evaporated. It is a challenging moment, but I hope that states see the real importance of these sorts of investments.

Zahava Stadler: I’ll just say one more thing on this, which is the importance of states as plaintiffs and lawsuits against the federal government. We have seen that, actually, when the federal government has taken illegal actions that have, for instance, suddenly retracted a bunch of funding that public school districts were expecting and that were promised in the last federal budget, they filed lawsuits, and it made a difference. The administration backed off. As Jeremy said earlier, dismantling the Department of Education is itself illegal without an act of Congress. That we’re going to need to see, because the big impact here is on states in terms of the sort of the first rung impact is on state governments, that I would love to see state legislatures step up and provide more funding for their state attorney general’s offices because they’re carrying a lot of water for the rest of us to try and beat back some of these illegal actions that we’re seeing that are really attacks on our public services, including public education.

Shannon Lynch: Interesting food for thought. Okay, well, Jeremy, Zahava, thank you so much for coming on and explaining all of this really complicated stuff about the Department of Education to our listeners.

Zahava Stadler: Thank you so much for having me.

Jeremy Bauer-Wolf: Thank you so much.

Trent Cokley: This was a New America production. Our executive producer and host is Shannon Lynch. Our producers are Joe Wilkes, David Lanham, Jodi Nardi, Joel Rinstra, and Trenton Coakley. Social media by Maika Moulite, visuals by Alex Briñas, media outreach by Heidi Lewis. Please rate, review, and subscribe to Democracy Deciphered wherever you like to listen.