“And one other thing I’ll be doing very early in the administration is closing up the Department of Education.”
President Donald Trump made this promise in a Sept. 13, 2023, marketing campaign assertion. Since then, he has incessantly repeated his pledge to shut the U.S. Division of Schooling.
Mission 2025, the conservative assume tank Heritage Basis’s blueprint for the Trump administration, additionally supplies detailed suggestions for closing the Schooling Division, which was created by an act of Congress in 1979.
On Feb. 4, 2025, Trump described his plans for Linda McMahon, his nominee for schooling secretary. “I want Linda to put herself out of a job,” Trump stated, in keeping with The Related Press.
I’m an anthropologist and have been finding out U.S. political tradition for years. Throughout Trump’s first presidency, I wrote a e book concerning the extremist far-right referred to as “It Can Happen Here”. Since then, I’ve continued to check the Make America Nice Once more, or MAGA, motion, in search of to know it, because the anthropological expression goes, “from the native’s point of view.”
Schooling insurance policies within the U.S. are largely carried out on the state and native ranges. The Schooling Division is a comparatively small authorities company, with simply over 4,000 staff and a US$268 billion annual finances. A big a part of its work is overseeing $1.6 trillion in federal scholar loans in addition to grants for Okay-12 faculties.
And it ensures that public faculties adjust to federal legal guidelines that defend weak college students, like these with disabilities.
Why, then, does Trump wish to eradicate the division?
A will to combat towards so-called “wokeness” and a want to shrink the federal government are among the many 4 causes I’ve discovered.
President Donald Trump waves to supporters at a Jan. 25, 2025, rally in Las Vegas.
Ian Maule/Getty Photos
1. Schooling Division’s alleged ‘woke’ mentality
At the start, Trump and his supporters consider that liberals are ruining public schooling by instituting what they name a
“radical woke agenda” that they are saying prioritizes identification politics and politically right groupthink on the expense of the free speech of these, like many conservatives, who’ve completely different views.
Range, fairness and inclusion, or DEI, initiatives selling social justice – and significant race concept, or the concept that racism is entrenched in social and authorized establishments – are a selected focus of MAGA ire.
So, too, is what Trump supporters name “radical gender ideology,” which they contend promotes insurance policies like letting transgender college students play on faculty sports activities groups or use loos corresponding with their gender identification, not organic intercourse.
Trump supporters say that such insurance policies – which the Schooling Division not directly supported by increasing Title IX gender protections in 2024 to incorporate discrimination based mostly on gender identification – are at odds with parental faculty selection rights or, for some non secular conservatives, the Bible.
Race and gender insurance policies are highlighted in Mission 2025 and within the 2024 GOP’s “Make America Great Again!” social gathering platform.
Trump has repeatedly promised, as he did on Aug. 14, 2024, in North Carolina, to “keep critical race theory and transgender insanity the hell out of our schools.”
On Jan. 20, 2025, Trump signed government orders focusing on “gender ideology extremism” and “radical” DEI insurance policies. Two weeks later, he signed one other one on “Preserving Males Out Of Ladies’s Sports activities.
2. American Marxist indoctrination
For MAGA supporters, ”radical left“ wokeness is part of liberals’ long-standing attempt to ”brainwash“ others with their allegedly Marxist views that embrace communism.
One model of this ”American Marxism“ conspiracy concept argues that the indoctrination dates to the origins of U.S. public schooling. MAGA stalwarts say this alleged leftist agenda is anti-democratic and anti-Christian.
Saying he needs to fight the academic affect of such radicals, zealots and Marxists, Trump issued government orders on Jan. 29 that pledge to combat ”campus anti-Semitism“ and to end ”Radical Indoctrination in Okay-12 Faculties.“
3. Faculty selection and parental rights
Trump supporters additionally argue that “woke” federal public schooling coverage infringes on folks’s fundamental freedoms and rights.
This concept extends to what Trump supporters name “restoring parental rights,” together with the fitting to determine whether or not a baby undergoes a gender transition or learns about nonbinary gender identification at public faculties.
The primary paragraph of Mission 2025’s chapter on schooling argues, “Families and students should be free to choose from a diverse set of school options and learning environments.”
Range, in keeping with this argument, ought to embody faith-based establishments and homeschooling. Mission 2025 proposes that the federal government might help mother and father who select to homeschool or put their youngsters in a spiritual main faculty by offering Academic Financial savings Accounts and college vouchers. Vouchers give public funding for college students to attend personal faculties and have been increasing in use in recent times.
Critics of college vouchers, just like the Nationwide Schooling Affiliation and American Federation of Academics unions, argue that vouchers would diminish public schooling for weak college students by taking away scarce funding.
Trump has already issued a Jan. 29 government order referred to as “Expanding Educational Freedom and Educational Opportunity for Families,” which opens the door to expanded use of vouchers. This immediately echoes Mission 2025 by directing the Schooling Division to prioritize academic selection to present households a variety of choices.
4. Purple tape
For the MAGA devoted, the Schooling Division exemplifies authorities inefficiency and purple tape.
Mission 2025, for instance, contends that from the time it was established by the Carter administration in 1979, the Schooling Division has ballooned in measurement, come below the sway of particular curiosity teams and now serves as an inefficient “one-stop shop for the woke education cartel.”
To cope with the Schooling Division’s “bloat” and “suffocating bureaucratic red tape,” Mission 2025 recommends shifting all the division’s federal applications and cash to different businesses and the states.
These suggestions dovetail with Trump’s broader try to eradicate what he and his MAGA supporters think about wasteful spending and decontrol the federal government.
Trump signed an government order on Jan. 20 that establishes a “Department of Government Efficiency” headed by billionaire Elon Musk. Musk stated on Feb. 4 that Trump “will succeed” in dismantling the Schooling Division.
An electrical faculty bus is parked exterior a public highschool in Miami in March 2024.
Joe Raedle/Getty Photos
Can Trump abolish the Schooling Division?
At first look, the Schooling Division’s days might sound numbered given Trump’s repeated guarantees to eradicate it and his reported plans to quickly signal an government order that does so. Republican Senator Mike Rounds of South Dakota additionally launched a invoice in November 2024 to shut the division.
And Trump has taken actions, equivalent to in search of to close down the U.S. Company for Worldwide Improvement with out the required congressional approval, which recommend he could attempt to act on his Schooling Division guarantees.
Abolishing the division, nonetheless, would legally require congressional approval and 60 votes to maneuver ahead within the Senate, which is unlikely since Republicans solely have 53 seats.
Trump additionally made related guarantees in 2016 that had been unfulfilled. And Trump’s government actions are prone to face authorized challenges – like a DEI-focused larger schooling lawsuit filed on Feb. 3.
No matter such authorized challenges, Trump’s government orders associated to schooling reveal that he’s already trying to “drain the swamp” – beginning with the Schooling Division.