During American Education Week, an annual celebration of public education held the week before Thanksgiving, the Trump administration reinvigorated its commitment to restructuring the Department of Education.
“The Trump Administration is taking bold action to break up the federal education bureaucracy and return education to the states,” said Secretary of Education Linda McMahon in a press release.
Earlier in November, the federal government announced that many of the agency’s K-12 and college programs will shift to other departments, a decision that will “create a major accountability problem,” said Alvin Makori, a Ph.D. candidate in urban education policy at the University of Southern California’s Rossier School of Education.
In March, President Trump issued an executive order vowing to dismantle the Department of Education, a system the White House said has been “broken for decades” in a post on X.
Since Trump returned to office for a second term in January, nearly half of the department’s workforce has been laid off. Although only Congress has the power to eliminate agencies, the administration is taking steps to permanently close the Department of Education, promising to give more power to states.
“Cutting through layers of red tape in Washington is one essential piece of our final mission,” said McMahon.
The vast majority of funding for K-12 education, 87 percent, comes from state and local governments, according to the Peterson Foundation.
“A lot of us in the education space will commonly call it decentralized, because a lot of the policy lies within the states and within local entities,” said Makori. “It’s almost disingenuous from the current administration’s standpoint to say they’re returning power to the states.”
The Department of Education announced that many grant funds and programs previously managed by the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education and the Office of Postsecondary Education will instead be administered by the Department of Labor.
This transfer of responsibilities “creates an accountability problem in terms of the transparency of the bureaucracy and parents and families not knowing what levers to pull or who to go through to get exactly what they need,” Makori said.
Title I, a federal program that provides financial assistance to schools with a high concentration of economically disadvantaged students, is among the programs being outsourced to other agencies. Ending this could impact over 2.8 million students in low-income communities and lead to the loss of more than 180,300 teaching positions, according to the Center for American Progress.
“Ensuring a brighter future for our children should be a top priority for any administration,” said National Education Association President Becky Pringle, in a statement, “but this administration is taking every chance it can to hack away at the very protections and services our students need.”
Other impacted federal programs include college-preparedness programs, like Upward Bound, that support students from underserved communities, as well as grants for Historically Black Colleges and Universities.
While the Trump administration characterizes these changes as “restoring common sense to classrooms,” others say deconstructing the Department of Education may ultimately harm students.
“There’s a lot of variation across states in terms of curriculum, standards, resources and school funding disparities,” said Huriya Jabbar, an associate professor of education policy at USC. “The goal of the federal government is to step in and help address some of those funding gaps, especially for groups that really need them, like low-income students and those with disabilities.”
“By pushing that back to the states, it’s unclear what role the federal government will play in ensuring that there is equity and access to educational opportunities in every state,” Jabbar continued.
Beyond K-12 schooling, higher education is facing sweeping changes. Although many universities, including USC, rejected the White House’s academic compact, the administration continues to use federal funds in negotiations to change the policies of academic institutions.
On Friday, the administration made a deal with Northwestern to pay $75 million to the federal government and revoke the Deering Meadow agreement, which the university signed in April 2024 with students who participated in pro-Palestine campus protests.
For colleges and universities, Makori said, balancing their responsibilities to students with the pressures from the Trump administration to comply with its demands puts education officials in a difficult position.
“If you reject these compacts, ultimately, you may lose access to some research funds, which is our vehicle for creating these new insights and a way we can help students who need it the most,” Makori said. “But I think first and foremost, [the responsibility] has to be protecting these principles of democracy, freedom of thought and the freedom to research these important things.”
Cornell University also reached a settlement with the White House to restore its federal funding on November 7.
“Schools are the place to practice having disagreement, having dialogue, coming to a compromise and seeing different perspectives,” Jabbar said. “I think people have really targeted public schools by claiming that they’re indoctrinating students.”
The Trump administration’s withholding of federal funds has been met with some legal pushback. On November 14, a federal district judge ordered the administration not to demand payments or threaten to revoke funding from schools in the University of California system in an ongoing civil rights investigation launched by the federal government.
Though the future of education remains unclear, Makori said he believes that politicians and educators are equipped to counter Project 2025, a political initiative published by the Heritage Foundation that aligns with the administration’s goals of dismantling the Department of Education.
“We need a Project 2029 that comes from a totally different group,” Makori said, “people who explicitly aim to protect and uphold the well-being of students and educational opportunity for students and address disadvantages that come from historical discrimination.”