The president-elect has vowed drastic changes, beginning on his first day in office, and the ACLU promises a fight.
Expected policy changes to U.S. public education under the Trump administration will likely involve areas such as universal school choice, critical race theory, transgender ideology, student college debt relief, and higher education accreditation.
In addition, the fate of the U.S. Department of Education (DOE) itself hangs in the balance—though dismantling it would require an act of Congress.
“We will send Education BACK TO THE STATES, and Linda will spearhead that effort,” Trump wrote in a Nov. 19 statement when announcing his nomination of Linda McMahon to lead the DOE in his administration.
The Department of Education was established in 1979 by President Jimmy Carter.
Its scope was to ensure equal educational opportunities, to share research and information that can help state and local education agencies, to provide additional funds to very low-income schools that cannot get by with just state aid and local property tax dollars; and to administer federal grant and loan programs for higher education.
The federal agency cannot mandate curriculum, graduation requirements, or teacher and administrator credentials. Those decisions are made at the state and local levels, where municipal property taxes and state aid fund schools.
The department has taken on more recent tasks such as special education funding, civil rights investigations, and guidance on technology and artificial intelligence education.
Jonathan Butcher, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation Center for Education Policy, says all of those functions could easily be absorbed into other federal agencies, resulting in massive savings for taxpayers.
“Washington is paying an administration to do the work that state departments of education should already be doing,” Butcher told The Epoch Times, adding that federal aid to poor districts amounts to less than 10 percent of per-student allocations.
“Abolishing the U.S. Department of Education provides more authority for states and districts to make decisions for themselves.”
Butcher said the DOE “certainly did not advance policy in any meaningful way,” citing the unsuccessful attempts to provide student debt relief, the continuation of low test scores, and the lack of support for allowing males to compete in female sports.
