At the Republican National Convention last week, multiple speakers discussed cutting funding for schools teaching critical race theory and allowing transgender athletes to compete through Title IX.
Republicans like Rep. Byron Donalds of Florida, for example, repeatedly mentioned “universal school choice,” referring to the part of the GOP policy platform that seeks to give parents more of a say in what their children learn in school.
“We believe schools should educate, not indoctrinate,” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said at the convention. “We stand for parents’ rights, including universal school choice.”
Eric Trump, the son of the former president and Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, described the current education system as “brainwash[ing]” children “instead of learning the fundamentals in school.”
“Education will be handed back to the states,” Eric Trump said.
Republicans and Democrats have long been divided over how to handle public education in the U.S. Polls suggest that within the past few years, as Republicans like Trump have become more vocal about wanting to separate the federal government from education, more parents — and voters — seem to agree they should have more authority over what their school-age kids learn.
Overall, education across the United States is funded and overseen by state and local governments. But the federal government does fund some areas and sets requirements for the state and local authorities to comply with, which is where the Department of Education (DOE) comes in.
As we inch closer to the 2024 presidential election, Republican calls to dismantle the DOE seem to be growing louder. But what would that actually look like?
What is the argument behind shutting down the Department of Education?
The Department of Education has long been a target of criticism by the Republican Party. But the current GOP case against the agency is rooted in the belief that the federal government should not be funding curriculums that teach “critical race theory, gender ideology or other inappropriate racial, sexual or political content.”
According to Republicans, this includes a long-established academic framework that teaches students about the history of institutional racism — from how settlers stole land from Native Americans to the civil rights movement.
For Republicans like DeSantis, who signed the Parental Rights in Education Act in 2023, cutting out the DOE would allow schools to ban instruction on gender identity and sexual orientation for students, limit history lessons on racism that, he claims, encourage “ideological conformity” and reject Advanced Placement class options like AP African American studies.
The DOE, however, says on its website that education is already primarily a state and local responsibility in the U.S., with federal funding contributing only 8% to elementary and secondary education.
Variations of the DOE, going as far back as 1867, have been massively unpopular with Republicans. In 2023, the Pew Research Center found that 65% of Republicans polled viewed the DOE negatively, and in 2022 more than half of Republican parents of K-12 students said they felt the federal government had too much influence on what public schools were teaching.
CNN reported that at the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2022, Trump said, “Across the country, we need to implement strict prohibitions on teaching inappropriate racial, sexual and political material to America’s schoolchildren in any form whatsoever. And if federal bureaucrats are going to push this radicalism, we should abolish the Department of Education.”
In early 2023, Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky introduced a bill to abolish the DOE by the end of the year, writing, “Unelected bureaucrats in Washington, D.C., should not be in charge of our children’s intellectual and moral development.”
Recently, Trump and other Republicans have taken issue with the federal agency’s policies around diversity and LGBTQ inclusion, some of which, like the DOE’s “Final Rule” under Title IX, protects students from harassment over their ethnicity or sexual orientation. Republicans argue it undermines “the original intent of the gender-equity law” from 1972, which bans discrimination based on sex in education. In April, the DOE expanded Title IX rules to protect against discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity.
At a conference in June, Trump said he would sign an executive order on the first day of his presidency to cut funding for “any school pushing critical race theory, transgender insanity and other inappropriate racial, sexual or political content on to the lives of our children.”
What would happen to the Department of Education’s duties if it were dismantled?
While the DOE has several responsibilities, its biggest sectors are student loans, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act (IDEA) and Title I, which provides financial support to schools and school districts with high percentages of students from low-income families.
Conversations surrounding shutting down the DOE have spiked in recent months thanks to the 2024 election, but no Republican candidate has really detailed how they would handle DOE redistribution. While Trump was president in 2018, his administration proposed merging the DOE and the Department of Labor into one agency, but it never got the approval from Congress to implement that plan.
Earlier this year, House Republicans proposed cutting Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) by 80%. Title I is meant to support underfunded schools and help the education of over 26 million children, and its elimination would disproportionately affect students of color. The funding cuts would also cause 226,000 teachers, aides and staff to be laid off.
Another proposal House Republicans offered in July sought to cut $10 million from the DOE’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR). The OCR’s purpose is to investigate allegations of discrimination — in 2022, the OCR resolved over 16,000 cases of potential civil rights violations against students.
Title III, another DOE program Republicans want to cut, is dedicated to funding language assistance programs for the more than 5 million students in K-12 grades who are learning English as a second language.
Other proposed cuts include slashing funding for state grants that help teachers, for Federal Work Study programs that provide part-time jobs for students with financial need, for magnet schools and programs that help with full-service community colleges and for research and development grants that go to historically Black colleges, tribal colleges and minority-serving institutions.
How would someone go about eliminating the Department of Education?
Experts told Politico that it’s “nearly impossible” to kill an entire government agency. Federal employees are protected from layoffs by civil service laws, and the president can’t just decide to downsize government agencies without backing from Congress.
According to Rick Heiss, the director of Education Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, in terms of any threat to the DOE, “it’s a safe bet that the big programs aren’t going away.” Hypothetically, if Congress agreed with the president to dismantle the DOE, it’s likely there would be a rearrangement of all its programs, funding and employees to other departments instead of cutting everything. In fact, the DOE was originally part of a larger agency called the Department of Health, Education and Welfare which then-President Jimmy Carter split up in 1980.
“The fact is that few policymakers, right or left, are willing to call for slashing (much less spending) federal aid for low-income students or learners with special needs,” Heiss wrote in an op-ed for Education Week. “The practical effect would be to move this stuff to other Cabinet agencies.”
