Abolishing the U.S. Department of Education: What Do We Know and Not Know

Many soundbites this week have highlighted the expressed desire by President Trump to eliminate the U.S. Department of Education. Could this happen? Is this a serious proposal? At this time AASA urges superintendents to maintain a healthy sense of skepticism that the U.S. Department of Education will be eliminated since there are no concrete proposals in Congress to eliminate it, delegate the funding and hundreds of responsibilities that the Department has to other agencies, or to change any of the funding streams that the U.S. Department of Education manages.

One thing that is important to note is that even if the U.S. Department of Education were to be broken into pieces and subsumed by other agencies that does not mean that funding under Title I, IDEA or other critical funding streams would immediately or even definitively vanish. Prior to the creation of the U.S. Department of Education, Title I, IDEA and many other programs operated within an agency known as the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) which administered these grant programs and also managed funding touching on public health, and social and economic security. The abolishment of the U.S. Department of Education would not necessitate the elimination of Title I or IDEA. These formulas could continue to be funded and administered through another agency. What is more worrisome is whether or not these would become block grants to the state or voucherized in any way, which are easier to cut in the long-term, but even then changing the underlying Title I formula would require a massive rewrite of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act and bring up a host of other policy questions and issues around the formula that would take many months to negotiate.

For now, until we see a concrete plan to segment the many different responsibilities that the U.S Department of Education has under student loans and financial aid, civil rights, data, research and technical assistance, as well as the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services and the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education, we are focusing all of our attention on federal funding levels, fending off a massive federal school voucher program, and protecting E-Rate funding.