Fact: MAGA Republicans want to abolish the U.S. Department of Education (DOE). It’s one of the few items on the to-do list of Trump’s Agenda 47 and the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 (AKA “Agenda 47: The Quiet Parts Said Out Loud”) that the former president is willing to own and talk about.
During her speech to accept the Democratic Party's nomination for president, Kamala Harris alluded to the possible forthcoming political struggle to protect the massive federal agency. Michelle Obama briefly mentioned it in her exceptional speech the night before.
It’s noteworthy that they included the issue in their respective lists of grievances and differences with Donald Trump’s agenda(s) because Republicans have claimed to want to dismantle the department since President Jimmy Carter created it in 1979. And yet, it’s still here.
First, before I go on about the 2024 view of the DOE, let’s start on what I really hope is common ground for all but the most extreme MAGAs: The federal government needed to assert itself into state government, beginning in the 1960s, to end the indisputably racist education systems in place in many states for most of the 20th century.
Those states weren’t going to treat BIPOC students, LGBTQ+ students, or any girl, for that matter, as equal to white, heterosexual males without being forced to.
It’s also true that the department has many more responsibilities now than in 1980, but at the core of much of what it does is an admission that serious inequities remain in this country along racial, gender, and economic lines.
We’ve made progress, but it’s like trying to fill a canyon with bulldozers while some people take dirt out simultaneously. That slow pace and disagreements about the department's constitutionality have made it a constant target. However, even Conservative voices in education, like Frederick Hess, point out that promising to dismantle the Department of Education is a favorite vote-grabber for Republicans. Instead, plenty of Republicans have expanded the agency’s influence on education over the years.
Removing the DOE from our nation’s education system would be a logistical nightmare. The process would take years and is not guaranteed to be the tax-relief boon for the middle class that some promise unless you want your tax dollars to support the private schooling of kids from wealthy families.
And yet, somehow, Trump would create this new education world with only Republican support and without severely hindering the progress of schools still climbing out of the COVID hole. Insert “Yeah, sure, Okay” GIF here.
It seems farfetched, so why should we take this seriously? It’s not about whether Trump and the wannabe new founding fathers from the Heritage Foundation succeed.
The issue is why they want to break up the DOE and what philosophy they want to replace it with. Any amount of progress toward their end goals will have devastating effects on everyone they deem to be “other.”
The Heritage Foundation and Trump believe that special protections for historically marginalized people (the "others") create a discriminatory system against everyone else (them). Their plan calls for eliminating or significantly scaling back Title I or Title IX, two central pillars of the DOE that aim to break the cycle of poverty for students or provide extra protections for historically vulnerable people.
According to the National Center for Educational Statistics, Title I “... provides supplemental financial assistance to school districts for children from low-income families,” and “about 63 percent of traditional public schools and 62 percent of public charter schools were Title I eligible” in 2021-2022. This means the odds are good that you know a student who benefits from Title I.
Any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance must comply with Title IX, and it’s this part that bothers MAGA: Discrimination based on sex includes “sexual orientation and gender identity.” Remember, a Trump America allows for two genders and will take steps to cure “transgenderdism” with therapy. They're convinced that children who receive gender-affirming care are being abused and discussions about sexual orientation in schools are pornographic. We don’t need to learn about LGBTQ+ people because there shouldn’t be any.
They live in a version of the country where we’ve moved past systemic racism if they acknowledge it existed at all. In their version, a “patriotic education” should replace the truth about our history, and issues such as the well-established fact that biased educators discipline students of color more harshly than white students are not concerning, let alone grounds for civil rights violations investigations.
In other words, these issues are at the very heart of why a federal DOE exists and why we don’t leave it up to Oklahoma and Louisiana to decide who is safe in their schools.
It’s possible to have good-faith debates with some Conservatives about whether the DOE has outlived its original purpose, as Libertarian Charles Murray wrote in 2012, or if it’s making a positive difference in education outcomes—the latter point is something plenty of Progressives are willing to discuss.
We need a DOE that supports creating competition within the public school system. School choice should help protect communities and create equitable access to excellent schools. Democrats also must face up to the pushback that unions exert on expanding school choice—often pitting all charter schools as enemies of traditional public education.
It’s not ridiculous to argue for significantly restructuring the DOE, but such an emotionally charged topic deserves an intellectually honest debate. How can we engage in such a discussion when leaders of one party classify LGBTQ+ topics in schools as pornography?
I don’t trust the type of Conservative that will be in power in a second Trump term to make a “good-faith” effort to improve the DOE or replace it with a better system. If you do, ask yourself if you’ve ever noticed a significant change in your child’s education, depending on who the president is or which party controls education policy. If your answer is “I never noticed a change,” maybe, in modern history's most volatile political climate, you should consider why that is and how complacency affects public education.