So much is wrongheaded about the misguided effort of Elon Musk and his crew to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education. It’s hard to know where to start. From what Musk has done so far, and President Trump has said, it’s clear neither knows anything much about the department’s origin, mission or development. They are engaged in bureaucratic blitzkreig founded on profound ignorance. I’ve never been convinced that “disruption” is a virtue, for starters, but what is being done to the department goes beyond that to outright destruction, which damages not just citizens of color, whom the destroyers have targeted, but also the educational prospects of all Americans.
Trump is acting under the misconception that the Department of Education has somehow imposed on schools “critical race theory.” He and Project 2025 authors have perverted it from a legitimate theory of American law into the one of the latest racist code phrases. The president appears not to know that the department’s charter, adopted by Congress in 1979 and signed into law by Jimmy Carter, essentially declares that no department official can “exercise any direction, supervision, or control over the curriculum, program of instruction, administration, or personnel of any educational institution, school, or school system.” Public Law 96–88 recognizes the primacy of parents, local governments, states and private schools in education. Because Congress created the department, the Trump administration cannot dismantle it without another act of Congress.
According to the Associated Press, one of Musk’s first steps was to cut nearly $1 billion in funding. The agency within the department that tracks the progress of the nation’s students, collects and shares research on effective teaching, and evaluates federal education programs. This federal agency, now called the Institute of Education Sciences, existed under a different name before the department did and has long been considered to perform useful, politically neutral functions. What could be wrong with documenting what works in education or where the nation’s children stand academically?
Trump and Musk’s crew have also moved to eliminate the department’s scholarships, mostly graduate school fellowships, designed to promote diversity in specialized fields of study. The administration claims they amount to racial discrimination. As lawyers say, that is “not in evidence.” If the administration thinks these fellowships are discriminatory, it should go to court and prove it.
Until that happens, they serve a purpose outlined in the department’s founding charter: meeting “a continuing need to ensure equal access for all Americans to educational opportunities of a high quality, and such educational opportunities should not be denied because of race, creed, color, national origin, or sex.” Look at the disproportionately white enrollment in graduate schools, and you’ll be hard-pressed to conclude the modest number of these federal fellowships somehow lead to the exclusion of white students seeking advanced degrees.
Furthermore, the Musk-ites may think department scholarships for Native Americans are based on race. They are not. Under longstanding federal policy, they are based on their political status as citizens of sovereign Native nations. Bet Musk and his crew don’t know that.
Considerable federal funding to promote the education of economically disadvantaged students also predates the Department of Education. The Title I funding was authorized in the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, part of Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Poverty.” States, which have primary government responsibility for public education, were neglecting the needs of poor kids. Even with Title I funding, poor kids still lag behind.
Why would anyone believe states would do better by these kids without Title I? School districts already have great flexibility in how they spend this money, be it on teacher aides, supplemental instruction, or other needs. Yes, students of color are overrepresented among those targeted with Title I funding. But poor white students benefit from this funding stream, too.
Another stream of department funding targets students with special needs. This is a program that also was created before the department, under a 1975 law that was based on a pioneering Massachusetts law, instigated in part by Hubie Jones when he was director of the Roxbury Multi-Service Center. Public Law 94-142 mandates every child receive an “appropriate education” regardless of physical, mental or behavioral disabilities. The law has gained such acceptance that some white suburban parents have gotten their children designated as having special needs so, for example, they are given extra time to complete exams.
Well, Team Musk has come up with the not-so-brilliant idea of moving special education funding to the Department of Health and Human Services. It makes no sense. HHS is already a sprawling, unwieldy department. Why add more functions to it? Ever more competent secretaries past than recently confirmed Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have grappled to manage HHS. In addition, the special needs of children are best managed by people who understand the intersection of their individual challenges and their capacity to learn. The program would be misplaced at HHS.
Another idea that the administration has floated is transferring a Department of Education function, the college student loan portfolio, to the Treasury Department. The federal government’s practice of lending money to students to go to college also goes back to before the department’s creation. The loans started with a 1958 law signed by Dwight Eisenhower and were greatly expanded by the Higher Education Act of 1965, signed by Johnson. So being one of the department’s functions is not the problem, whatever the Musk crew thinks that might be. Besides, do we really want the department whose mission is to ensure the country can pay its bills worrying about whether former students pay their loan notes? Federal student loans are a big federal program but pale in size to the nation’s overall budget, spending, and debt.
Musk and his crew may think they are being too smart by proposing to move Education Department functions to other departments. That’s not a futuristic idea or even a novel one. They are actually moving to recreate a problem the Department of Education was established to solve. The first section of its charter law found that “the dispersion of education programs across a large number of Federal agencies has led to fragmented, duplicative, and often inconsistent Federal policies relating to education.” Returning to that situation would not represent progress.
Has Musk and whichever of his minions he has assigned to destroy the U.S. Department of Education ever read that law? It would not seem so. They may be using artificial intelligence to guide their actions, but human intelligence and judgment appear to be lacking. Just about every federal agency could be more efficient and perhaps slimmed down. But making them so requires judicious, careful evaluation and decision-making.
The nation’s future rests on the development of our collective human intelligence. The Department of Education as currently constituted gives the country a better chance of an equitable, prosperous future than what the administration’s chaos-makers envision, as they hack away without adequate study, forethought and discernment.
Ronald Mitchell
Editor and Publisher, Bay State Banner
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