WASHINGTON — The Trump administration says that I plan to dismantle The Department of Education is proposing a solution to the nation's underperforming academics – a solution that could free schools from the constraints of federal influence.
However, some school and state officials feel the plan adds more bureaucracy and does not clearly benefit students who struggle with math or reading.
Instead of being housed by one agency, most Department of Education the work will now be divided among four other federal departments. For President Donald Trump, this is a step toward complete closure of the department and giving states more power over schooling. However, many states say it will complicate their role as intermediaries between local schools and the federal government.
The plan increases bureaucracy five-fold, “certainly creating confusion and duplicity” for educators and families, Washington state's education chief said. His counterpart in California said the plan was “clearly less effective” and was causing disruption. Maryland's superintendent expressed concern about “challenges in coordinating efforts with multiple federal agencies.”
“States have not been involved in this process, and this is not what we asked for and not what our students need,” said Jill Underly, Wisconsin State Superintendent. Underly called on the Trump administration to give states more flexibility and reduce standardized testing requirements.
Education Minister Linda McMahon said schools will continue to receive federal money without interruption. Ultimately, she said, schools will have more money and flexibility to serve students without the existence of the Department of Education.
However, the department has not disappeared – only Congress has the power to abolish it. Meanwhile, McMahon's plan leaves the agency in a sort of federal limbo. The Department of Labor will take over most of the funding and support for the country's schools, but the Department of Education will retain some responsibilities, including policy leadership and broad oversight of the Labor Party's education work.
Such deals would transfer programs to the Department of Health and Human Services, the State Department and the Interior Department. The agreements were signed days before the government shutdown and announced Tuesday.
Signing work-sharing agreements with other departments is nothing new: the Education Department already had dozens of such agreements before Trump took office. And local school officials regularly collaborate with other agencies, including the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which oversees school meals. What's different this time is the scale of the programs offloaded – for example, most of the funding for schools is from the Department of Education.
Still, Virginia Schools Superintendent Emily Ann Gullickson, for example, said schools are used to working with multiple federal agencies and applauded the administration's efforts to give states more control.
Reaction to the plan was largely political, with Democrats saying the shake-up would harm America's most vulnerable students. Republicans in Congress called it a victory over bureaucracy.
However, some conservatives opposed the dismantling. U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, said on social media that outsourcing programs to agencies without political experience may damage young people. And Margaret Spellings, Republican President George W. Bush's former education secretary, called it a distraction from the nation's education crisis.
“Moving programs from one department to another does not actually eliminate federal bureaucracy, but it can make it more difficult for students, teachers and families to navigate the system and get the support they need,” Spellings said in a statement.
There is little debate about the need for change in school education in America. His math and reading scores fell sharply in the wake of COVID-19. Before that, reading scores had stagnated for decades, and math scores weren't much better.
McMahon said it was evidence that the Department of Education had failed and that it was unnecessary. At a White House briefing on Thursday, she called her plan a “hard reset” that doesn't end federal support but ends “federal micromanagement.”
Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers union and one of McMahon's most vocal opponents, questioned the logic of her plan.
“Why would you create a new infrastructure, a new bureaucracy that no one knows anything about, take the old bureaucracy and destroy it instead of making the old bureaucracy more efficient?” Weingarten said at an event on Wednesday.
The full impact of the shakeup may not be clear for months, but it is already causing concern among states and school districts that have come to rely on the Education Department for its policy expertise. One of the functions of the agency is to perform the functions hotline for questions about complex funding formulas, special education laws and more.
The department did not say whether officials in this role will keep their jobs during the transition period. Without that help, schools would have little ability to clarify what can and cannot be paid for with federal money, said David Lowe, superintendent of Minnetonka Public Schools in Minnesota.
“It may be that services are not provided because you don't have an answer,” said Lowe, who is also president of AASA, the national association of school superintendents.
Some question whether other federal agencies are capable of absorbing the influx of new work. The Department of Labor will take over Title I, an $18 billion grant program that serves 26 million students in low-income areas. They will go to the Labor Administration, which currently handles grants that serve only 130,000 people a year, said Angela Hanks, who led the Labor Bureau under former President Joe Biden.
At best, Hanks said, it would “cause chaos for school districts and ultimately our children.”
In Salem, Massachusetts, the 4,000-student school system receives about $6 million in federal funding that helps support students who are low-income, homeless or still learning Englishsaid Superintendent Steven Zrike. He worries that transferring these programs to the Department of Labor could lead to new “rules of engagement.”
“We don't know what other conditions will accompany the financing,” he said. “The level of uncertainty is enormous.”
Other critics noted that the Department of Education was created to consolidate educational programs that were distributed across multiple agencies.
Rep. Bobby Scott, D-Va., ranking member of the House Education and Workforce Committee, called on McMahon to rethink her plan. He cited the 1979 law creating the department, which said the dispersal had led to “fragmented, duplicative and often inconsistent federal education policies.”
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AP education writers Moriah Balingit in Washington, Bianca Vazquez Toness in Boston and Makiya Seminera in Raleigh, North Carolina, contributed to this report.
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