President Donald Trump and U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon have called on the Republican Congress to disperse the Department of Education’s programs to other federal agencies. As described in a March 20 executive order, the president hopes to improve student outcomes by reducing the federal burden on educators and moving control of education back to states, local communities, and families.
For K-12 educators who have grown accustomed to the Education Department’s existence over the past 45 years, these moves already sound scary. Those fears are heightened when politicians, district leaders, and union leaders raise doubts about how dismantling the department might affect job security, benefits, and vulnerable children.
I acknowledge the fears, but I am here to argue that these changes will not undermine the work and lives of teachers—and might improve them. Consider these reasons that K-12 educators might not even notice should the secretary and department go away:
1. The federal money will continue to flow. Your representatives in Congress, regardless of party, enjoy being recognized for helping their local students and teachers. That won’t change, unless there is a dramatic, unforeseen shift in the public’s view about the value and importance of federal funding. Congress simply has no reason or incentive to discontinue supplementing the amount that local and state taxpayers spend on our at-risk youth.
In contrast, the president and his staff will propose eliminating a few programs with poor results to make a point. In fact, he did so in his recent budget request for fiscal 2026, which combines several programs into a block grant and cavalierly proposes eliminating $4.5 billion in other K-12 programs. Congress, however, has not embraced those cuts, and the Republican chairs of both appropriation committees have publicly communicated serious concerns about them.
You should recognize this as an annual dance between presidents and Congress. In the end, I expect Congress as always to act in the self-interest of its members and, at a minimum, level-fund the programs.
Congress has been distributing Title I funds since 1965 and IDEA funds since 1975, years before the department became a stand-alone, Cabinet-level agency. The breathless claims equating the end of the department with the end of public schools might just be hyperbole designed to mislead voters. The money will continue to flow long after the department is dismantled and the secretary’s position is abolished.
2. State and local governments, not federal agencies, are the major funders and managers of K-12 education. The federal contributions to our K-12 system are far less than most people realize—less than 8% of the total in 2020. It is important money, providing meals for students and supplementing resources for economically disadvantaged students and students with disabilities. Still, states and districts provide most of the resources and control the decisions that most impact educators, like staffing, calendars, and curriculum.
To be clear, many local school districts are facing hard times and will soon be threatening to terminate their newest teachers. What is driving those financial problems? Many states and school districts did not plan well in the face of two obvious trends—namely, the sharp decline in the number of school-age children and the expiration of temporary emergency federal aid for COVID-19. You might hear or preconceive that the coming fiscal problems are the Trump administration’s fault. Is it—or is local management to blame?
3. Trump and Congress want to give states and local districts the chance to radically reduce unproductive expenditures. Most educators recognize that your local school and district do not deploy every dollar effectively. Often, wasteful spending is a result of burdensome federal mandates and rules. One clear example is the dramatic increase in district staff required to manage federal burdens. According to data from the National Center for Education Statistics, in 2000, the average ratio of district administrative staff to its students was 1-to-485. By 2022, that ratio jumped by 64% to 1-to-296.
The Republican goal is not merely to move Education Department programs to other agencies and abolish a Cabinet-level department but also to strip away the “D.C.-knows-best” mandates. Trump and congressional Republicans are betting that by empowering states and districts to use money as they see fit, the locals’ deeper understanding of their students and communities will lead to improvements in student outcomes.
This “local control” message is often met by naysayers with the concern that some local districts may do worse without federal “guardrails”—as if every school and district need the same guardrails or that maintaining them comes with no cost. Perhaps some local districts will use their freedom to create worse outcomes (although that would be hard to do when roughly a third of our nation’s 4th and 8th graders already cannot demonstrate even basic, grade-level reading or math skills), but I find it more likely that we will see committed, innovative educators improve student outcomes when freed to use federal funding as they think best.
Beyond improving student outcomes, let’s acknowledge that educators have been put in the unpleasant middle of the partisan whiplash between national administrations, as each ties funding to opposing political goals. By moving control back to states, removing strings from federal funds, and eliminating the Cabinet-level agency, we can get national partisan divides out of our classrooms. Dismantling the U.S. Department of Education would be a welcome step towards letting our teachers re-focus on educating our children.
