The Trump administration has cut Education Department spending by hundreds of millions of dollars over the past few weeks. What does that mean for the department’s future?
Guests
Martin West, professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Editor-in-chief of Education Next, a journal of research and opinion on education policy.
Andrew Rotherham, writer at the blog and newsletter Eduwonk.com. Co-founder and senior partner at Bellwether, a national nonprofit that does consulting and analysis for education systems.
Also Featured
Aaron Ament, president of the National Student Legal Defense Network.
Will Ragland, vice president of advocacy and outreach at the Center for American Progress.
Transcript
Part I
Among the federal agencies the Trump administration is taking aim at is the Department of Education. President Trump recently told reporters that he wants Linda McMahon, his pick to lead the department, to basically eliminate the department and consequently, her position.
DONALD TRUMP: What I want to do is let the states run schools.
I believe strongly in school choice. But in addition to that, I want the states to run schools. And I want Linda to put herself out of a job.
BECKER: Already, the White House has cut almost Trump’s $900 million worth of education contracts and many of the department workers, whom Trump has called radicals, zealots, and Marxists, have been laid off as part of the administration’s crackdown on federal employees.
Trump appears to be following the recommendations of what’s known as Project 2025, a conservative government policy blueprint that was written by the Heritage Foundation. The author of Project 2025’s chapter on education is Lindsey Burke, the director of the Center for Education Policy at the Heritage Foundation.
In June of 2023, she talked about her work on the podcast Brian’s Breakdown, which was produced by the Texas Public Policy Foundation. This is what she said about the Department of Education.
LINDSEY BURKE: Federal bureaucrats are about as far away from, for instance, a local child in Texas as you could possibly get.
They certainly don’t know their hopes and desires and aspirations and needs for the future. They don’t know their family’s values and what they want to get out of schooling. And so they’re really the least well positioned to try to improve educational outcomes.
BECKER: Basically, Burke says the Department of Education should not exist.
BURKE: At this point, I think it really is getting that serious road map out there for how to actually dismantle the department.
BECKER: But many teachers say the Department of Education isn’t just some office in Washington, but an agency that’s needed, and cutting it would affect their day to day lives as well as their students.
Alison Sylvester is a teacher in Vermont, and she says reforms are a better solution to address the problems in American education.
ALISON SYLVESTER: The people of the United States need to really think about what is the future and what do we want to be our future. And our students and our children deserve better. And we need to be not asking what would it look like without it, we need to be asking what would it look like if it was better.
And with a better Department of Education that supports our children not taking away things from our children.
BECKER: I’m Deborah Becker, in for Meghna Chakrabarti, and this is On Point. This hour, we’re looking at the Department of Education, its role and responsibilities, and what eliminating the department might mean for public education.
Martin West is joining me right now. He’s a professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and he also serves on the Massachusetts Board of Elementary and Secondary Education. Welcome to On Point.
MARTIN WEST: Good to be with you, Deborah.
BECKER: So let’s start, go back to start this conversation and give us a little context about what the Department of Education is, what it was intended to be when it began and what are some of the reasons why the president is seeking to eliminate it. So first, let’s start at when the Department of Education was formed. The department, at least as we know it right now, it’s my understanding it began by President Jimmy Carter in 1979, and he spoke about his commitment to education and why this cabinet level office was needed after he was elected governor of Georgia.
Let’s listen to a bit of tape we have from that time.
JIMMY CARTER: No poor, rural, weak, or Black person should ever have to bear the additional burden of being deprived of the opportunity of an education, a job, or simple justice.
BECKER: That is former President Jimmy Carter talking about his commitment to education and he formed the Federal Department of Education in 1979.
So Martin West, tell us, what was the intent behind forming the department? What was its goal at that time?
WEST: The basic idea was to take federal education programs out of what was then called the Department of Health, Education and Welfare and combine it with education activities that were scattered across the rest of the federal bureaucracy and create a new standalone Department of Education that he hoped would have a higher profile.
At the end of the day, he had entered office in 1976, committed to this, having committed to it on the campaign trail, that commitment had won him the endorsement of the nation’s largest teachers union, the National Education Association, the first time it ever endorsed a presidential candidate in U.S. history.
But he ended up running into some opposition in Congress and from within the federal bureaucracy. So it took several years in order to get a law passed and for the department to open its doors.
BECKER: Why did he want this department to have a higher profile? And what was the reason, were there problems with education at that time that he was trying to address with the creation of this department? Or what was the motivator?
WEST: I think there was a sense that the different activities that the federal government was involved in related to education were disorganized and uncoordinated. Because they were housed in different parts of the federal bureaucracy, with some of them, again, within this Department of Health, Education and Welfare.
The irony, though, is that when the department was created, when education status was elevated, they actually didn’t succeed in following through on that plan to bring education related activities together. So just to give, you know, some examples, the Head Start early education program remained outside of the new Department of Education.
The schools on military bases run by the Department of Defense, the only K-12 schools that the federal government directly operates. They remained outside of the new department. It really didn’t follow through on that initial vision fully from the start.
BECKER: And of course, the Department of Ed has been a target of Republican lawmakers for quite some time, even since it started back then, just one year after it was established, Republican lawmakers were saying, We don’t need this department.
Why was there so much animosity toward having this department. Was it because it was disorganized, education programs were so disorganized among other levels of the federal government and that people didn’t see the need for it, or what was going on there?
WEST: That’s right. The department has been under attack … its status from the moment it opened its doors. Ronald Reagan was campaigning for president in 1980 and committed to abolishing the department his predecessor had created. I think really what drives that, and drives the continuing popularity of the elimination of the department as a talking point in Republican primary politics, is simply the depth of the tradition of local control in American education.
The sense that really a strong federal role is in tension with that tradition. There are, of course, some conservatives who take note that education is not mentioned anywhere in the federal Constitution and therefore see any federal role whatsoever as unconstitutional. There are others who concede that the federal government may have a legitimate role to play, but want to keep it minimal and they see the continued existence of the department as inconsistent with that vision.
BECKER: So despite, though, the fact that there was a lot of this opposition since the Department of Education was created, it’s still grown enormously, right? From, I think it started with four employees in 1980, and now it has about 4,000 and it does oversee a lot of different programs, such as student loans, higher education, financial aid programs, and education for students with disabilities and educational grants for low-income school districts.
So there’s a lot going on there. How would you define the current role of the Department of Education and how did we evolve to this big bureaucratic department that it is now?
WEST: Yes, I think about the role of the Department of Education and the role of federal education policy more generally.
I think of four main areas. So one is redistributing funds to support the education of different groups of students. We have the Title I program, the largest funding stream for K-12 education, which goes out to districts to serve economically disadvantaged students. We have the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, which serves students with disabilities.
In the higher ed space, you have Pell Grants and federal student loans. So there’s distributing funds. There’s then issuing regulations on how those funds can be used. And sometimes what else needs to be in place in order for an entity to receive federal funds. Then you have the Office of Civil Rights, which is charged with protecting students’ civil rights in institutions that accept federal funds.
And then finally, you have the federal government’s role in gathering data and supporting research and development activities to support the improvement of educational opportunities. So those are the 4 main roles. What I would say, though, is that those roles all predate the creation of the department.
If I look at the broad sweep of the history of federal education policy in the U.S., the creation of the department as a standalone entity is closer to a footnote than an inflection point.
BECKER: So because of these responsibilities and the way the department was created, it’s not as if a president can just eliminate it.
This was an act of Congress, correct? And that’s important to state here. So Congress would be the one that would have to abolish the Department of Education. That’s not up to the president, is that right?
WEST: That’s right. The law, the department was created by the Department of Education Reorganization Act in 1979.
And assuming we’re following normal constitutional procedures, an act of Congress would be required in order to eliminate it. And even then, I think there’s a key question that needs to be asked, which is, are we talking about eliminating the department as a bureaucratic entity, or are we talking about unwinding and eliminating those core functions of the department that I just described?
So it is certainly possible that you could eliminate the Department of Education while simply relocating those federal funding streams and other responsibilities like protecting students’ civil rights, into other portions of the federal bureaucracy.
BECKER: Which, of course, is something that is being talked about right now.
And we will get into that and talk about some of those potential divisions of the responsibilities of the Department of Education when we come back, after a break.
Part II
BECKER: Martin, before the break, we were talking about whether the president does in fact have the authority to eliminate the Federal Education Department. And you pointed out that he doesn’t, really, because it was an organization created by Congress, and this would need congressional approval to eliminate the department.
But I am wondering, I’ve heard the argument that some have suggested that a president does have a responsibility to do something with an agency that he might consider is engaging in unconstitutional practices. So could the president make the argument that the Department of Education is doing something unconstitutional, so therefore a president has the obligation to try to disband it?
EST: The president could certainly make that argument, and I think were he to do it, it would be challenged in court quite quickly and my reading of Supreme Court precedent is that the existence of the Department, the federal role in K-12 education is legitimate under the Spending Clause that allows Congress to spend tax revenue in order to support the general welfare of the United States, and has understood that authority to extend quite broadly.
Of course, one never knows how Supreme Court precedent could evolve over time, but that, I think, would be a long shot.
BECKER: If it is eliminated, and I know you’re going to have to leave this conversation in a couple of minutes, if the department is eliminated, what would, what do you think would be the main effect on education, broadly speaking, for teachers and for students?
WEST: I think the first thing we need to do is then clarify the way in which it is eliminated. So if it is eliminated, and the activities of the department are simply reorganized into other portions of the federal bureaucracy, then I think there would likely be quite minimal disruption. And I doubt educators on the ground would even notice much of a change.
Now, if instead, major federal funding streams like Title I and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act were also to be eliminated, then really the consequences would depend on how states respond to that change. States would then have an opportunity to say, our district serving high shares of students in poverty are no longer receiving this infusion of federal funds. Then we would have an opportunity at the state level to step up and close that gap.
The other thing that would go away are the rules and regulations that come attached to federal funds. For example, the Every Student Succeeds Act, which passed in 2015 and replaced the No Child Left Behind Act, still requires that states have quite detailed test based accountability systems, in place that they test students annually in grades 3 through 8, and once in high school, and if you were to eliminate Title I funding that would eliminate the basis for that requirement.
And states would actually turn out to have a lot more flexibility in how they design the governance systems for their schools.
BECKER: And that would be then tied to federal funding is what you’re saying.
WEST: Yeah, those rules, the federal government can’t make states and school districts do anything when it comes to education.
What it can do is say, we’re going to give you these funds. And if you take those funds, then you need to have these requirements in place.
BECKER: I wanna just go to another point that’s been brought up about the elimination of the Education Department, and while a lot of this, it does suggest that one of the objectives is to make sure that there’s more local control over schools, even though there is quite a bit of local control, as you just pointed out, Martin West, but there’s also some folks who say that they want parents to have more choice in the matter of education.
This is a lot about school choice, about potential vouchers for education. And we mentioned at the top of the program, Lindsey Burke, who authored the Project 2025 chapter on the Department of Education. And Lindsey Burke spoke with the host of the Brian’s Breakdown podcast in 2023 about the Department of Education.
And she mentioned how school choice and vouchers are a priority and should be implemented, should be done, when the Department of Education is eliminated, because parents should have more choice over where their kids are going to school. Here’s a cut from the podcast.
BURKE: Programs like Title I, where we see most of the spending go from the federal government to low-income districts, programs like the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act at the federal level, those programs often are ineffective, sometimes in the case of IDEA end up being litigious.
So taking that money and allowing families to determine how those dollars are spent, what schools work well for them, what education environments work well for them. In other words, making those existing federal programs operate through some type of school choice mechanism.
BECKER: Martin West, I’m wondering how much of this also is to perhaps make way for school choice, would you say?
WEST: It is the case that the push for private school choice, that is, policies that support families in gaining access to private schools, has a lot of momentum in the states right now, particularly in red states, many of which have passed quite expansive education savings account laws in recent years. I think the challenge for those who would like to see the federal government support that activity is that the financial role in K-12 education in general of the federal government is quite limited.
So in a typical year, the federal government only provides about 8% of total K-12 education spending, and that only goes so far. Even if states were able to allocate that funding in a way that could go to private schools, as well as public schools. And really think that choice is more likely to be decided at the state level rather than a consequence of what’s going on with the department.
BECKER: Martin West, Professor of Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He’s also a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research and serves on the Massachusetts Board of Elementary and Secondary Education. Thanks so much for being with us.
WEST: It was a pleasure. Thanks, Deborah.
I want to turn now to Andrew Rotherham, who’s co-founder of and the education consulting non-profit Bellwether, also a member of the Virginia Board of Education. Welcome to On Point.
ANDREW ROTHERHAM: Thank you, Deborah. Thanks for having me.
BECKER: So I wonder, what would you say is the main role of the Department of Education, and how might education be broadly affected if, in fact, President Trump’s attempt to eliminate it succeeds?
ROTHERHAM: There’s a couple of ways to look at that question, Deborah. One is, if you just look at the balance sheet of the department, you would say, this is a bank. Because most of what the department does in terms of the actual dollars is student loans. And we don’t talk about that a lot. That touches, there’s over 40 million borrowers.
That touches families across the country. So that’s actually the largest activity. But in K-12, its largest activity is these large categorical programs that Marty talked about. So funding special ed, sending money to low-income communities through the Title I program, special education enforcement, career and technical education.
It’s a set of activities and I liken it to the sort of the plumbing in your house. A lot of it is stuff you probably don’t think about every day. It just happens, but you will notice it if it is not there.
BECKER: So couldn’t though these functions be moved to other agencies? Couldn’t there be a different overseer of the plumbing and you’d still be able to make sure that the pipes work?
ROTHERHAM: In some cases, certainly. I think there’s a very real conversation now about whether or not should the student loan portfolio be moved to the Department of the Treasury. Both because that’s more in line with what Treasury does. And as happens to every secretary in the modern era, when they get into the job, they come in with big education ideas and then suddenly discover they’re actually a banker, and they have to pay a great deal of attention to that loan portfolio.
So you could. There’s arguments for merging some of the career technical work with the department of labor so there’d be more coherence in job training programs and how people earn credentials and more synergy there. In fact, in the first Trump administration, they proposed merging the Department of Education and the Department of Labor with an eye towards that proposal. Obviously, didn’t go anywhere. I think what gets lost in this is all of these agencies have shown they can run very effective programs.
They can run ineffective programs. And so the question really is this effort to restructure the department? Is this sort of a, like a Shawshank Redemption approach to it, where they’re just going to try to smuggle the department out piece by piece and get rid of these activities? Or is it a serious effort at government restructuring, which does happen.
Cabinet agencies get created, merged, changed. The Department of Homeland Security is certainly a recent example of that. And is this actually a serious effort at trying to do that with an eye towards program efficiency and program integrity. And honestly, it’s been really chaotic in Washington.
It’s too soon to tell. And I think there’s a lot of very understandable questions and concern about the level of competence and diligence that any restructuring would happen at. And so what has happened, I think politically is you actually have a lot of people open to reform of these agencies and who think we need to do things differently in order to do them better. But are very skeptical of this administration’s approach and ability to pull it off.
BECKER: But if we go back to the funding where it might really affect students and where we’re talking about affecting teachers and students at the very basic level of education, particularly special education, which I know it doesn’t provide a lot of the funding for special education, but it does provide protections for students with disabilities and other forms of funding for special education.
And we spoke with Will Ragland, Vice President for Research at the Center for American Progress’s Department of Advocacy and Outreach. And he said that disbanding the federal education department would have severe effects on programs for students with disabilities. Many of these, he said, did not exist prior to the creation of the Department of Education.
So let’s listen to what he said.
WILL RAGLAND: Students with disabilities were not afforded a free and fair educational opportunities. They were put aside, were an afterthought. And now they’re very targeted interventions that are mandated and required by federal law. To make sure that these kids have a free and fair education, including individualized education plans, where they work with school systems to really figure this out.
BECKER: So I wonder, Andrew Rotherham, what do you say about funding for students with disabilities, education programs for students with disabilities and also Title I funding?
ROTHERHAM: Sure. The special education issue is a very complicated one. The federal government has never fully funded its commitment under that law.
It’s been making progress towards it to pay 40% of the excess cost because special education is expensive. In some cases, exceedingly. But in general, students in special education need, they need additional services and so forth. There’s also a whole debate about over identification for special education, particularly where reading is concerning kids who just haven’t been taught to read well, but the special education law, yeah, it’s important.
It provides funding to communities across the country. It also sets up a structure for rights for parents. And there’s a lot of work on oversight, making sure states are meeting their obligations, making sure localities are. That law I think is best understood actually as a civil rights law as much as it is an education law.
And there’s a lot of concern. One idea that’s been floated is that special education should be moved over to the Department of Health and Human Services. And that’s a proposal that I have a lot of questions about and concerns about. Because it is an education program. And so by definition, I think it should be at the Department of Education.
It’s not only an access program. It’s an educational quality program, but those are the kinds of things that are being considered. Title I is a different issue. And I think actually points up to one of the things that is going to happen here over time. We’re still in the shock and awe phase on this, with some of the things that are being cut and the chaos and so forth.
Title I goes to most communities in this country, because simply to essentially to be able to design a funding program that can get enough votes to get it through the House of Representatives, the money ends up touching most communities. Then it obviously, more of it goes to low income communities.
But there are low income communities in red and blue states. And as we’re starting to see with a lot of these things that are being proposed, these are not just blue state issues. They affect everywhere. And so that’s why you’re starting to hear, people in Ohio, which is a red state, but they are concerned about if you get rid of indirect costs or you severely curtail that with research, that’s going to cost $700 million at Ohio state.
That’s excuse me, there’s $700 million of that research that would come down in Virginia where I live. We get about $78 million for our universities in federal research dollars. We get enormous amounts in Title I and so forth. And so I think like right now there’s a lot of chaos and confusion and action.
But at some point, some of the laws of basic political gravity are going to start to apply again. And people are going to say, Hey, you know what? Some of these things are going to cost us money. They’re going to cost our constituents money. And that’s when, although Congress has been pretty AWOL on this so far, that is when they will start to get involved.
And as Marty said, they have enormous say here, given our constitutional system.
BECKER: But if we go back to just, let’s say, the special education funding, because we heard from Lindsey Burke, who authored the education chapter of Project 2025, and she talked about funding for students with disabilities, and she said that a lot of this money isn’t being used directly for education, because of the way things are structured, where parents of students with disabilities can sue a school district to make sure that their kids are getting the correct educational opportunities.
Lindsey Burke implied that a lot of the money may be going for lawsuits or other things that aren’t directly related to education. Do you think that there is a strong argument to be made that the Department of Education is in need of reform, in whether it’s spending for students with disabilities or a lot of the other programs, because it’s a massive federal bureaucracy that may need an overhaul?
ROTHERHAM: Yeah, that’s a great question. And there’s a lot of things going on there. I think most people agree the Department of Education is in need of reform and modernization, as we think about what our education mission is. If you look at, right track, wrong track numbers with regard to parents and public schools, they’re going the wrong way.
Parents are frustrated. Coming out of this pandemic, we had just generational learning loss and achievement levels are back to 1990s levels, because of what happened with the pandemic. And they were declining during the second part of the last decade as the federal role on accountability started to lessen.
So I think most people think there is room for modernization. There is room for change. That’s the first thing. The second aspect of that is the special education law, for instance, it hasn’t really been reauthorized in 20 years. Congress is not doing its job. Every major piece of education authorizing legislation is overdue to be reauthorized, whether that’s education research, whether it’s things like Head Start that are run out of HHS, whether it’s that core elementary and secondary education act.
All of it. The Higher Education Act. And so Congress needs to do its job here.
Part III
BECKER: Andrew, before the break, we were talking about some potential reforms to the Department of Education. You said there’s definitely room for modernization there on several fronts, and Congress has a role here. But I wonder if you want to expand a little bit about ways that you think the Department of Education could be reformed.
ROTHERHAM: Yeah, that’s a great question. Before we get to that, Deborah, I do want to answer that. So the third part of your question with regard to Lindsey Burke, her assertion that a lot of this is going to litigation and so forth. I think it’s really important to remember —
BECKER: And we should just clarify this is money for students with disabilities.
And she was saying that this money is being misused. And so it’s one of the reasons why she feels the Department of Education could be eliminated. Go ahead. I’m sorry.
ROTHERHAM: Yeah, no, exactly. Thanks for clarifying that. I think it’s a really good example of where you stand is where you sit on this.
So it’s easy to look at that and say a lot of that money is going to litigation. That’s wasteful. But if you’re a parent and you believe your child is entitled to services that they’re not getting, or they are not getting services they need because they have a disability, that litigation can be your only recourse.
And there is a reason that the special education process provides that avenue for parents. We can argue about, should other parents have similar rights and things like that. But special ed parents, they don’t look at that money for litigation and the things around that as wasteful. They look at that as a way that their rights are being protected by this federal program.
Now, more generally. Oh, I’m sorry.
BECKER: No. There are other issues aside from money for students with disabilities. Folks have pointed to the problems with the federal student financial aid forms and all the delays, which of course is overseen by the Department of Education, showing that this is a problem with the department and perhaps why it needs to be overhauled.
Also, the latest test scores for elementary school students in the U.S. have dropped, accountability, is there something that the department could do or should be doing differently to address some of those concerns after those very high-profile mistakes by the department?
ROTHERHAM: Yeah, absolutely.
And look, if you want someone to defend what happened on FAFSA, you’re going to have to find a different guest. That was inexcusable. And yeah, and it affected the most vulnerable Americans. And there’s some evidence that really impacted kids going to college, low-income students who need financial aid the most.
And so that was exactly, I don’t know how anyone can look at that and say the response to proposals to get rid of the department is simply, let’s just defend the status quo. We have to make changes. And that’s a very good example of a place where that system needs to be modernized, made more responsive for parents.
That was enormously frustrating and unfortunately, I think that’s one reason why when you get out of Washington, where people are versed in lots of these programs and what they do, when you go around the country, the idea of getting rid of the Department of Education is not nearly as controversial. And you talk to a lot of people, and they are, yeah why not?
What does it do? So I think it’s incumbent on people who believe in a strong federal role in education to make that case. And I would simply say it is how can we possibly have a talent strategy, a learning strategy to respond to things like what you talked about, with the learning loss, and then also to look forward.
President Trump wants to have more chip manufacturing in the United States. That’s an important goal. In Virginia, we’re opening schools focused on that at the high school level, to help kids start to get prepared for careers in that industry.
But we’re going to need more of those schools, who is going to build those chips if we want to bring chip manufacturing back to this country and lessen some of the pressure on places like Taiwan, then we are going to have people who could actually do that work here. That requires an education strategy. And so you can say that there’s lots of problems at the department, lots of areas to do better. I wholeheartedly agree with that, but I think you’re fundamentally going to get back to this issue that Marty talked about in the first segment, Terrel Bell, President Reagan’s secretary, was brought in to dismantle the department.
That was his job. And as he became familiar with it, he discovered, yeah, there’s problems here. There’s things we need to do differently. But he actually became a real advocate for the department. He wrote a book about it called the Thirteenth Man that still is worth reading. And I think that’s what people are going to realize.
If the choice is the status quo versus getting rid of it, that’s the wrong choice. The choice is given the challenges we face as a country, given what we’ve learned about what works and doesn’t work, what does reform actually look like? We can talk about on education, data and research.
There is room for a complete overhaul. And I think even people who, there’s a lot of people who don’t like the way the DOGE team is going about that, but are also not saying we should keep things as they are. At the department across the programs, you will hear the same. There are people who really think we do need to modernize how we do career and technical education, how we do apprenticeships, how we allow people to accumulate these credentials and so forth, but they don’t want to see those programs simply eliminated or pushed down wholesale to the states.
I think once again, once the sort of dust settles, those kinds of conversations and ideally Congress’s involvement, they will start to step back up into their role, we’ll have a more serious conversation about what those things look like.
BECKER: And just to your point, we spoke with Aaron Ament, who’s former chief of staff for the seven divisions of the council’s office at the Department of Education, and he oversaw fraud and accountability cases related to government payments to higher education. And so this is another issue here that I just feel is relevant that maybe folks aren’t considering.
But what Ament says is under the Trump administration, the work of reducing fraud without the education department is at risk. Let’s listen.
AARON AMENT: We’re seeing that work grinded to a halt in the recent weeks, as I think the agency is turning course, we also have seen the firings of inspectors general across different agencies, including the department whose job it is to curb this fraud and abuse. That is why we have an inspector general, but they don’t seem too interested in doing that. And I think you know what we’re seeing is really troubling.
BECKER: I guess what I want to ask you, Andrew Rotherham, is, how much of this, or really what do you think is the main intent of the White House to do this? There may be some things that could be modernized, as you point out. There may be some things that need an act of Congress. There may be some work that is potentially compromised right now, but still necessary work that needs to be done.
What is the overall reason for doing this? Some have said that this is a vengeful attempt on the part of the White House, because of former President Biden’s work on trying to reduce student loan debt here. Some have said that this is a symbolic move on the part of the White House to address some of the culture wars that we’ve seen play out in school districts around the country.
And while it may not affect a lot of these programs and things that the department does right now, what it does do is send a message that we are not going to allow the Department of Education to continue to work as it has in the past. What are your thoughts about that?
ROTHERHAM: Yeah, that is a great question.
And I think it’s a mash up of all those things. I don’t think the president has actually thought like super deeply about this. I think he likes the attention and adulation he gets when he takes shots at the Department of Education. And so he’s putting out executive orders and people, he doesn’t get upset and people he likes cheer.
I think it’s at that level. I think there’s people in the West Wing of the White House, who they don’t like the department. They want it gone. They are ideological in terms of culture wars and so forth and they are going to be pushing for that. And then if you look at some of the people who’ve been nominated like Kirsten Baesler. Who is the state superintendent in North Dakota. Penny Schwinn, who’s the former state superintendent in Tennessee.
Penny’s been nominated to be the deputy secretary. Kirsten to be in charge of elementary and secondary. They’ve both talked about, and in Kirsten’s case, written some stuff about how we need to streamline the federal role. We need to make it more efficient, but they’re not, they’re neither hardcore culture warriors, nor are they abolish the department people.
And so you’re getting these sort of different pressures. And I think we’re still at this point where President Trump does seem to operate in this sort of Art of the Deal style where he says these things that are very out there. And then you come back. And I think we’re seeing some of that.
If you listen to Linda McMahon’s hearing, she was not echoing some of that rhetoric about just getting rid of the department and so forth. She was talking more in terms of reforming program administration. You’ve got again, the folks who are issuing these various executive orders and so forth.
And then you’ve got this team of more seasoned, pretty well-regarded education professionals among Democrats and Republicans. Kirsten was president of the council of chief state school officers, the advocacy organization that represents all the state the state superintendents of education.
So I think all those pressures are at some point going to collide. And as I said earlier, they’re also going to collide with just the normal gravity of politics, senators and members of Congress care about the money getting spent in their states and districts and so forth. And then I think out of that you’ll see some sort of reform package.
But I think we’re a long way from that. More immediately, it’ll be issues around school choice with regard to reconciliation and some of these questions about the president challenging Congress’s spending authority and the way the law works under the Impoundment Act, he and his team want that change.
And so I think there’s a number of upstream things to happen before we actually get to this conversation on what would an actual restructuring of the department look like?
BECKER: But there should be some concern, I think, and there certainly is at this point, about exactly what might happen in classrooms.
And part of that is because of what Linda McMahon said during her confirmation hearings. Linda McMahon being President Trump’s pick for education secretary. And I know she may not have been as absolute as the president in terms of wanting to eliminate the entire federal Education Department, but she was asked about the government’s role in shaping curricula, which of course, as Martin West pointed out, the federal government and the Education Department are not supposed to be determining curricula at all.
But when Linda McMahon was asked about it by Senator Chris Murphy, Murphy said, are certain anti diversity and inclusion executive orders affecting curriculum right now? And would they under her authority at the Department of Education?
Let’s listen.
CHRIS MURPHY: My son is in a public school. He takes a class called African American History. If you’re running an African American History class, could you perhaps be in violation of this corridor, of this executive order?
LINDA McMAHON: I’m not quite certain, and I’d like to look into it further and get back to you on that.
MURPHY: So there’s a possibility, there’s a possibility, you’re saying, that public schools that run African American History classes, right? This is a class that has been taught in public schools for decades could lose federal funding if they continue to teach African American history.
McMAHON: No, that’s not what I’m saying.
I’m saying that I would like to take a look at these programs and fully understand the breadth of the executive order and get back to you on that.
BECKER: Andrew Rotherham what do you take from that statement from President Trump’s choice for Education Secretary, Linda McMahon, statements made during her confirmation hearing?
ROTHERHAM: Yeah, a couple of things about her. She’s very well regarded in Connecticut. And among Democrat and Republican education folks there. And she was on the state board there briefly, as well. And she got, she was confirmed with 80 something votes for the small business administration in the first Trump term.
I suspect what we’ll see here is a party line vote. At this point for obvious reasons this time, but she got high marks for her tenure there. So she’s a competent program administrator. She built a successful business, all of that. But she’s also a Trump loyalist and she is going to take her orders from the White House.
And she’s going to do what they want to do. And again, there’s, as I said, there’s some competing power centers on that question. And that clip you played, first part of the clip that you didn’t play was when she was asked about Black History Month and she was asked about Martin Luther King and so forth.
And she said, yeah, of course, of course, that stuff should be taught. And then we got to this more, would she make an expansive declaration about curricula and so forth across the country? And she declined to, and I think if people listen to the whole clip, it’s something of a Rorschach test.
They’re going to take away different things. I do expect we’re going to see pressure on this. I suspect they will not be picking close in boundary cases. They are going to pick edge cases and drive a political wedge there. But I think you are going to see a push on that.
And one indication of that is late on Friday afternoon on Valentine’s Day. They released a letter from the office of civil rights. It’s called a Dear Colleague letter. And I know that sounds like really nice, but Dear Colleague letters are not, usually they start with a little bit of nice language and then they turn the knife, and this one is no exception.
And where they took a very expansive look at what sorts of activities would be in violation of the Civil Rights Act with regard to diversity. It’s a poorly written letter and it’s raised more questions than it’s answered on exactly what’s going to happen. But I do think you are going to see pressure on that.
I think Linda McMahon should have had a more specific answer and a better answer to Senator Murphy’s questions. And because they’re going to put pressure on that, she is going to have that answer. That answer at some point, and that will bring them into collision with a lot of states, red and blue, depending how far they decide to push it, or we may see more of this around higher ed and it won’t actually touch K-12 that much.
