The News
US President Donald Trump signed an executive order Thursday aimed at closing the education department as part of a broader push to shrink the federal government.
The shutdown cannot be completed without congressional approval, setting the stage for a political and legal battle over the agency’s role.
The Department of Education is responsible for offering federal grants and loans to college students, as well as providing funds to low-income schools and disabled students, but has no role in determining curricula or operating schools, which is primarily left to states and local districts.
The executive order directs Education Secretary Linda McMahon to shutter the department aside from some critical requirements required by law, as well as continue to provide “the effective and uninterrupted delivery of services, programs, and benefits on which Americans rely.”
SIGNALS
Rhetoric and layoffs have already transformed the DOE
Getting congressional approval and overcoming legal battles to shutter the education department will be challenging, but Trump’s rhetoric, along with massive layoffs at the agency, has already “radically transformed” the agency, Chalkbeat wrote. Education advocates fear that even if the department’s main functions remain intact, Trump’s efforts to minimize its role will endanger critical expertise and students’ civil rights, and risk the loss of billions in federal funding to state and local education budgets. Despite the administration’s vow to preserve funding for rural and low-income schools, staff reductions at the department have left the fate of those grants unclear. There’s a risk that rural schools “will have to do even more with even less,” an education expert told NPR.
Conservatives have long railed against publicly funded education
Trump’s plan to shut down the education department is rooted in a longstanding conservative movement against publicly funded education, Chris Lehmann of progressive magazine The Nation noted. The administration eventually hopes to replace public education with a privatized model of schooling by invoking “moral panics” over diversity initiatives and critical race theory, Lehmann argued. The conservative New York Post’s editorial board argued, however, that the DOE has been more of a “gift to teachers unions and the left,” lamenting that it has failed to benefit students or lead to greater academic achievement. According to libertarian think tank Cato Institute, the DOE’s incompetence and high costs are an “albatross around [the] neck] of American education.”