Morning Edition is diving into promises President-elect Donald Trump said he would fulfill in his second term. We asked several education policy experts about Trump's promise to close the Department of Education.
What President-elect Trump said about closing the Department of Education
President-elect Donald Trump may break from the Republican Party of old in many ways, but not when it comes to how the party views the federal government's role in education.
"One other thing I'll be doing very early in the administration is closing up the Department of Education in Washington D.C., and sending all education and education work and needs back to the states," Trump said in a video posted to social media in October 2023 where he laid out his vision for education. "We want them to run the education of our children because they'll do a much better job of it."
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Trump's platform also responds to issues that conservatives have rallied around for years by promising to "cut federal funding for any school pushing critical race theory, radical gender ideology, and other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content on our children."
The role of the federal government in education
There are limits to how much influence the president or the federal government can exert over local schools.
"The U.S. Constitution doesn't say anything about schools or about education, and it kicks all of that work to the states," said Jon Valant, director of the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution. "But over time, the federal government has come to play some really important roles."
Those roles include protecting students' civil rights, disbursing Title I funds for students in poverty and students with disabilities, collecting data on schools, and administering federal student loans for higher education, Valant said.
"It is not an agency that is telling schools what to do. They're not defining curriculum. They're not telling schools which teachers they can hire or which books to use or anything along those lines," Valant said.
Valant pointed out that, since the closures of the COVID-19 pandemic, trust in public schools as an institution has dropped, especially among Republicans. And that may be part of the reason that Trump has targeted the department.
Can Trump alone close the department? What issues would closing it cause?
Closing the department requires an act of Congress. Valant said that even with full Republican control of both chambers, the idea would be unlikely to gain traction. One reason is money.
"If you look at the states that rely the most on Title I funding as a share of their per-pupil education spending, it's actually a bunch of red, rural states that get the largest share," he said. "You run into opposition not just from Democrats … But actually a lot of congressional Republicans have real concerns about it because they see the threat that it poses to their own constituents."
Another reason to keep the department open, said Rick Hess at the American Enterprise Institute, is that the Trump administration would need to use it to fulfill its other commitments.
"It strikes me that a lot of the other promises Trump made about holding campuses accountable, about responding to antisemitism, or the excesses of DEI, require using some of the machinery at the [Education] department," Hess said.
Dominique Baker, an associate professor at the University of Delaware, said that machinery could include the department's Office of Civil Rights.
"When the Department of Education is concerned about a civil rights violation, they can announce that they're going to do an investigation for an institution. They can request documents," she said. "Generally speaking, institutions don't want to get on the bad side of the Department of Education."
Valant predicts that early moves from the new Trump administration would involve the interpretation of civil rights. Trump has said he would withdraw Title IX protections that the Biden administration extended to transgender students, for example.
"One of the more likely moves from the Trump administration will be getting rid of those regulations and changing the way that civil rights enforcement happens within the Department of Education," Valant said.
What the Trump team said
NPR asked the Trump transition team if the president-elect could provide more details on his plan to eliminate the Department of Education and if the incoming administration had concerns about Republican-led states getting less federal funding for education.
Karoline Leavitt offered the following statement in response: "The American people re-elected President Trump by a resounding margin giving him a mandate to implement the promises he made on the campaign trail. He will deliver."
Conservatives have consistently taken aim at education
Trump's pledge may sound familiar. He talked about it in 2016, and it follows a Republican tradition as old as the department itself. Ronald Reagan made the same vow in his first presidential campaign. He later backed down after opposition from Congress.
Local schools have become the focus of several conservative fights, primarily around issues of school choice, how kids are taught about race and U.S. history and inclusion of LGBTQ+ students.
Trump embraced these issues as president and on the campaign trail this year. He has criticized the Biden administration's expanded protection of sexual orientation and gender identity, called for universal school choice supported by vouchers, and advocated for limiting how schools teach about race and gender.
Obed Manuel contributed. Suzanne Nuyen edited.
The radio version of this story was edited by Ally Schweitzer.
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