On the campaign trail, Donald J. Trump depicted the nation’s public schools as purveyors of an extreme ideology on gender and race. One of his proposed remedies has been to revive a Reagan-era call to shut down the federal Department of Educationokebet, founded in 1979.
“We will move everything back to the states, where it belongs,” he said in one speech. “They can individualize education and do it with the love for their children.”
Democrats have vowed to resist the effort.
But is shuttering the department possible? And if not, how could Mr. Trump use the agency to achieve his policy goals?
Is the Department of Education at risk?Project 2025, a conservative blueprint for the second Trump administration, lays out a clear plan for how the Department of Education could be shut down. While Mr. Trump has distanced himself from Project 2025, many of its architects were close to his campaign.
The proposal envisions moving much of the department’s work to other federal agencies, like Health and Human Services, before devolving the federal government’s main funding stream for K-12 schools, known as Title I, to the states. The process would theoretically take 10 years, and could lead to vast decreases in funding for public education. Those budget cuts would disproportionately affect low-income children and those with disabilities, since federal K-12 funding is largely targeted toward those groups.
But any effort to close the department would have to go through Congress. Lawmakers would have to vote to disband the agency, a highly unlikely proposition, according to education experts in both parties. Republican members of Congress would most likely hear opposition from superintendents and other education leaders in their districts; schools in Republican regions rely on federal aid from the agency, just as schools in Democratic regions do.
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