Convinced it’s yet another wasteful government bureaucracy, Donald Trump says he’ll blow up the Department of Education — which happens to be a top priority in the Project 2025 blueprint.
Since it split off from the former Department of Health, Education and Welfare in the 1980s, the Education Department has been a frequent target for the far right, who see it as a wasteful, “woke” bureaucracy interfering with local control of schools.
Donald Trump, the once and perhaps future president, talks about it frequently. Project 2025, the radical conservative blueprint for dismantling the federal government, put it high on the next president’s to-do list.
They both call for the Department of Education to be demolished.
While it’s become one of Trump’s favorite talking points, he’s not the first president to come up with the idea. He’s the latest in a long line of powerful, right-wing conservatives, dating back to President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, who want to abolish the 157-year-old department.
The Department of Education sets the nation’s education policy through initiatives like the Every Student Succeeds Act and the Higher Education Act. It also helps guarantee access to a fair and equitable education for all children. But it also protects the civil rights of minority or disadvantaged children, and has helped countless Black students pay for college.
What’s less obvious is why far-right Republicans want to blow it up in the first place.
Trump has repeatedly said he plans to “close the Department of Education, move education back to the states.” Like Trump, the Republican Party’s 2024 campaign platform argues that the department is a “woke” bureaucracy that wastes taxpayer money and interferes in local decisions. They don’t like the department’s push for racial equity, or its achievement incentives, or its protection of gay and transgendered kids.
But the Ed Department’s biggest K-12 programs, by dollar amount, go to high-poverty schools, as well as providing Pell grants for college and money for students with disabilities. That’s why Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump’s Democratic Party opponent, has vowed to protect it.
Here are three facts you should know about why the Department of Education is important to Black students and why it should stay.
1. States already have the power to set education policy
Formerly a division of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, the DOE does a lot of different tasks, including monitoring school performance and promoting evidence-based practices. Its highest-profile work is protecting and enforcing students’ civil rights. But while it does have a policy agenda, and sometimes sets education goals and often uses financial incentives to implement education policy, like the Every Student Succeeds Act and No Child Left Behind, it does not directly dictate what states can and can’t teach. State education departments have the freedom to set their own standards.
2. The DOE encourages diversity, which helps all kids
Research shows that Black representation in both majority-white and predominantly-Black schools helps boost the learning experience of all students. As a result, the federal DOE encourages schools to make diversity a priority — and calls on its Office of Civil Rights Enforcement to make sure minority students’ rights to an education are protected. More on that later.
Under the Biden administration, the department is investing more than $300 million in programs that increase school integration, including the Magnet Schools Assistance Program that aims to reduce racial isolation. The Fostering Diverse Schools initiative is also a new initiative to increase school socioeconomic diversity, which awarded more than $14 million in new grants.
The administration also secured funding and grants designed to diversify the teacher workforce, which is more than 80% white and female. It involves everything from loan forgiveness for aspiring teachers to designation of money for HBCUs, which train a majority of Black teachers.
3. The DOE protects the rights of all children
Back in the 1960s and 1970s, the DOE took on the mission of equal access to education for all students, regardless of race. That meant enforcement of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, among others, which prohibited discrimination in education based on race, sex and disability.
In recent years, however, the DOE’s role on that front has shifted, depending on which party holds the White House. The Obama administration, for example, used the department to try and disrupt the schools-to-prison pipeline: DOE officials told schools that data showing a disproportionate suspension of Black students could indicate civil rights violations. The DOE under Trump, however, rolled back those rules.
Now, the Biden White House has made protection of LGBTQ students the new civil rights frontier. It issued new Title IX rules that guard against discrimination, particularly against trans students. But conservative states are pushing back.
This piece was published at Word in Black on Oct. 23, 2024.
