Cutting the department of education is theater, not a plan

On Thursday, U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order to "begin eliminating” the U.S. Department of Education. It was exactly as expected: a performative exercise that will achieve none of the president’s stated campaign promises, ​including shutting down the agency.

That’s because the president doesn’t have the authority to eliminate the Cabinet-level department without congressional approval, and lawmakers just voted to keep it alive for at least another year.

Despite all the pomp, Trump is focused on fixing the wrong problem and that presents Democrats with a perfect opportunity. The reality is that this administration has no plan to deal with the post-COVID-19 collapse in student achievement and Democrats know what to do. But seizing the narrative won’t be easy, as their party is still heavily associated with unpopular pandemic-era school closures.

Trump has already laid off half the staff at the Education Department and slashed $600 million in grants. He said Thursday the partially dismantled agency will continue its "core necessities,” but added that he will also use it to fight culture wars by withholding money from progressive schools that advance the values of diversity, equity and inclusion or promote gender ideology.

By slashing jobs and zeroing out programs, he hopes to starve the agency enough to persuade Congress next year to send what remains of the agency’s $238 billion budget to states in the form of block grants.

"Students in our public elementary and middle schools score worse in reading today than when the department opened,” Trump proclaimed during the White House event in the East Room, which he filled with students in desks and Republican governors in chairs.

Trump is right about that, but wrong when he suggests dismantling the Department of Education will fix it. The department didn’t create the crisis in student achievement; nor did "woke” instruction. Sending money in block grants to the states isn’t the answer — states already provide 90% of all education funding and develop 100% of the curriculum.

The real cause of the student performance meltdown? COVID-19. The pandemic erased two decades of gains on the National Assessment of Educational Progress and high schoolers’ scores on the ACT plummeted to a 30-year low.

According to the latest report from the education research organization NWEA, "the gap between pre-COVID and COVID-19 test score averages widened in 2023-24 in nearly all grades, by an average of 36% in reading and 18% in math.” The group estimates the average student will need the equivalent of 4.8 additional months of schooling to catch up in reading and 4.3 more months in math. The uneven performance of students in areas where marginalized students are living in poverty is particularly alarming.

Inaction could have repercussions for a generation. According to one estimate, if students don’t recover from the pandemic-era academic declines, it will cost them $2 trillion in lost lifetime earnings.

Trump has no plan to reverse this decline and he has offered no assurance that states will suddenly do better.

The president’s executive order will be challenged in court and Democrats may be tempted to get caught up in the rhetoric of defending a bureaucratic agency. A better approach would be to fill the policy void with a creative and comprehensive plan for education remediation.

Experts have already laid out what to do. Many school districts proposed recovery plans that included tutoring, summer schools, extended-year schooling and accelerated learning. But researchers found these plans were abandoned as they dealt with the loss of experienced teachers, disruptive students and a shortage of capable tutors.

What students need now are programs that accelerate the training of teachers and tutors and fund grade-level summer-school programs at scale. The federal government could distribute the aid, monitor student achievement, fund grants and provide assistance to disabled students. And when states meet strict performance measures, they could be rewarded with having the federal money converted to more flexible grants.

Key Democratic constituencies — mainly teachers’ unions and progressive organizations — may not like some of this. And they were the driving force behind keeping schools closed for so long during COVID-19. But most parents and mainstream Democrats now see that as a mistake. Admitting that is the first step to regaining voters’ trust.

Dismantling the Education Department has been a Republican talking point since Ronald Reagan was president, but the public is closer to where most Democrats are than they are to Trump and his party. A Reuters/Ipsos poll last month found that 65% of Americans opposed shuttering the agency while only 30% supported the move.

Simply giving money to states with no strings attached (which is what Trump’s block grants would be) is not a good plan. During the pandemic, Congress gave states an unprecedented $189 billion to address pandemic-era learning losses in K-12 education, and still the losses mounted.

And no-strings-attached allocations can be manipulated by pro-voucher governors to direct funds to private schools. Vouchers may be popular with some Republicans, but in every state where they were on the ballot in November, voters rejected them and sided with preserving public schools. Vouchers widen the gap between rural and urban districts and deepen disparities between the families that can afford to take advantage of them and those that cannot.

A country’s future depends on the quality of its citizens’ education, but the Trump administration is washing its hands of that obligation. Instead of focusing on bathrooms and locker rooms, the president should be talking about math and reading. Democrats now have an opening to redirect the conversation and this time be loud about it.