BACK TO THE STATES — President-elect Donald Trump insists that he wants to eliminate the Department of Education “very early” in his administration. The idea, he has said in speeches, is to “send all education work and needs back to the states.” The woman that he’s chosen to lead the department for now — Linda McMahon, who served as the administrator of the Small Business Administration during Trump’s first term — is charged with dismantling the Biden administration’s education policy and spearheading Trump’s priorities. Trump is largely concerned with eliminating what he sees as a leftward shift in education policy — destroying “wokeness” and “left-wing indoctrination” in schools. Fully eliminating the education department would be a bold, controversial swing at education policy — and it could be dead on arrival. The president would likely need 60 votes in the Senate to fully abolish the Department of Education, a significant hill to climb with Republicans holding onto a 53-vote majority. Still, there are other ways for Trump and McMahon to achieve their objectives — by gutting federal education spending, which would essentially render the education department toothless. It wouldn’t be the first time a Republican president sought to eliminate the department. A federal education agency is a relatively new invention; the Department of Education existed in a different form for a brief stint between 1867 and 1868, but was created in its modern form by President Jimmy Carter in 1979. Almost immediately, Republicans took issue with the agency. There was a political dimension to the pushback — critics claimed Carter’s decision to establish the department was a gift to the teachers’ union — as well as an ideological one, grounded in the traditional resistance to the idea of federally control over education. Ronald Reagan took a swing at dismantling the department, pledging to do so in a 1981 address to the nation, but his efforts stalled due to a lack of congressional support. Now, Trump will try his hand. While convincing Congress to straightforwardly abolish the education department sounds like a long shot, Trump’s efforts are grounded in the debate surrounding the culture wars, rather than in other more esoteric areas of education policy. On his campaign website, Trump outlined a few broad priorities, including eliminating federal funding for any school or program teaching Critical Race Theory; calling for investigations into school districts engaging in “race-based” discrimination; abolishing tenure for teachers for grades K through 12; and tossing DEI. Opinions about each of these policy priorities individually — as well as the wholesale elimination of the Department of Education — wildly diverge among policy scholars and experts. Nightly recently spoke with one — Kevin Kosar, a senior fellow at the center-right American Enterprise Institute who has written extensively about these ongoing debates — in order to better understand the role of the education department and the history of the fight. This interview has been edited. What’s the value of a federal Department of Education? What are the drawbacks? The Department of Education has a lot of programs within it that address myriad facets of K-12 school and post-secondary schooling. Some of the programs are ones that really are appropriate for the federal government, such as aid to American Indian schools and collecting statistics on the performance of America’s schools and student learning levels. Other programs, however, are geared toward trying to address various niche local issues, like funding for classroom technologies. These latter programs may be prime candidates for abolition and returning responsibility to the states. Donald Trump says he wants to abolish the department — what would that actually look like in practice? The first question he has to address is, “Am I abolishing the department — or the department and the programs?” Presumably he intends to try to do the former. Regardless, either way he will need to work with Congress to get a statute enacted, and they will need to decide where to assign the federal education programs (like aid to benefit special education students) they want to keep. And all of this will have to be done with some thought to the multi-ethnic, multi-class voters who supported Trump and GOP legislators. If Trump follows through on his promise to abolish the education department or is able to largely de-fang it, are states equipped to take on those duties? What would need to change about the education system? States will be forced to rework their administrative units, who spend a lot of time completing paperwork related to federal funding, and reorient more of them towards carrying out programs. There also is the matter of funding. If the Trump administration and Congress cut funds, well, these states will need to replace that money or figure out how to economize. But, if the Trump administration and Congress decide to not reduce the money but instead to roll the money for these various education programs into broad block grants, well, states will benefit. They will see the same funding but a decrease in costly paperwork and reporting requirements. How does the story of the first Department of Education — established in 1867 and then dismantled by 1868 — and the reestablishment of the department in 1979 explain education politics today? It is a reminder that schooling has always been a local and state matter first and foremost, and that any federal effort to insert itself into this policy area is fraught. Relatively speaking, there’s not much federal funding of education, but Washington has tremendous sway over education policy and curriculum — can you explain that gap? The federal government plays an outsized role by leveraging the dollars to create rules and regulations. The Department of Education attaches “conditions of aid” to all its grants, and issues regulations on how funding is used. It’s like the old saying, “He who pays the piper calls the tunes.” If Trump is unsuccessful — or loses interest — in actually abolishing the Department of Education, what do you think his federal education policy will ultimately look like? What’s the most likely outcome of this fight? I imagine that education policy will change only modestly due to the fact that it is a shared enterprise between the federal government, states, and localities. Big changes come slowly. My hope is that reform will free up states to innovate more in determining the ways they educate students. As any teacher will tell you, one size does not suit all students. Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out with news, tips and ideas at nightly@politico.com. Or contact tonight’s author at slatson@politico.com or on X (formerly known as Twitter) at @samanthalatson. Programming note: Nightly will be off for the holidays between Dec. 25 and Jan. 3. We’ll return to your inboxes on Monday, Jan. 6.
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