The argument about the federal government's role in education was revitalized by President Trump's obsession, which also served as a potent unifying factor among his party's factions.
Republicans adopted a policy statement in 1980, two months after the Education Department's official opening, urging Congress to close it.
Now, over forty years later, President Trump might be the closest Republican president to realizing that promise.
Even though it would take a congressional act to abolish the agency, Mr. Trump has committed himself to the cause and is reportedly drafting an executive order to do so.
The argument over the federal government's role in education has been rekindled by Mr. Trump's obsession, which has also effectively brought his party's ideological factions—traditional establishment Republicans and ardent supporters of his Make America Great Again movement—together.
According to Christopher F. Rufo, a trustee at New College of Florida and a senior scholar at the conservative Manhattan Institute think tank, "this is a counterrevolution against a hostile and nihilistic bureaucracy."
This is how the party arrived at this point.
Conservatives present their case.
Republicans opposed President Jimmy Carter's signing on a 1979 statute that established the agency from the beginning, claiming their support for local autonomy, budgetary responsibility, and limited government authority.
They maintained that state and local governments should be in charge of managing education more so than the federal government.
Ronald Reagan's pledge to control a federal government that he claimed had overreached itself on several topics, including education, helped him win the White House a year later in his third run for the presidency. During his 1982 State of the Union address, Mr. Reagan urged Congress to abolish the Education Department and the Energy Department.
"We will keep working to reduce the number of federal employees, and we need to eliminate more unnecessary government spending and waste," Mr. Reagan stated.
He failed to convince the House's Democratic majority to support his idea, and while the subject began to wane as a Republican priority, it never completely vanished.
In the middle of the 1990s, Newt Gingrich, the speaker of the US House of Representatives at the time, demanded that the agency be abolished. Both former Governor Mitt Romney and Representative Ron Paul backed closing the Education Department or significantly cutting its size during the 2008 Republican presidential primaries.
Despite having a sizable majority within the Republican-controlled House, a plan to abolish the agency was defeated last year with 161 Republicans in favor and 60 against.
Sending federal funds to public schools, managing federal student loans, and overseeing college financial aid have been the main responsibilities of the Education Department. The organization supports initiatives for students with disabilities and upholds civil rights laws in educational institutions.
John B. King Jr., the former education secretary during the Obama administration and current chancellor of the State University of New York, told reporters Thursday that the department's history is as a civil rights agency that makes sure students with disabilities receive the services they require and that English-learners receive the assistance they require. "Removing that hurts families and students."
Trump reinvigorates the debate.
Except criticizing Common Core standards, which sought to establish some uniformity among states, Mr. Trump made almost no references to education during his first presidential campaign in 2016. Although his administration did not prioritize it, he did occasionally advocate for the dismantling of the Education Department.
However, Mr. Trump is skilled at grabbing hold of topics that appeal to his hardline supporters. This included embracing the concerns of the parents' rights movement, which emerged from the opposition to school closures and other restrictions during the coronavirus pandemic, during his 2024 campaign.
That movement gained speed by uniting around resistance to progressive agendas that favored requiring particular education standards and inclusive policies for L.G.B.T.Q. kKids Activists complained that these regulations endangered parental rights and values.
The purge of staff and policies at the Education Department in the weeks since his return to office has thus vividly demonstrated how Mr. Trump's goal to abolish the department became entwined with his focus on eliminating diversity, equity, and inclusion programs from the federal government.
The only explicit directives Mr. Trump gave Education Secretary Linda McMahon in a draft executive order intended to dismantle the department that circulated in Washington this week were to end any diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives that were still in place.
Mr. Trump's list of ten criteria for "great schools" on his campaign website includes eight instances of criticism of gender or transgender issues.
“One reason this issue has so much momentum was definitely the pandemic and the populist frustration that Washington was not on the side of parents,” said Frederick Hess, the director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. “The Department of Education really became emblematic of a lot of what was going on that was wrong.”
Project 2025 intended for abolishing the department, too.
A multiplicity of Mr. Trump’s moves during his first six weeks in office were hinted at in Project 2025, the right-wing vision for revamping the federal government.
In the foreword of the 992-page booklet, the Education Department is criticized for employing individuals who "inject racist, anti-American, ahistorical propaganda into America's classrooms."
According to the memo, despite 45 years of federal expenditure, student test scores have not increased, and schools should respond to parents rather than "leftist advocates intent on indoctrination." However, it doesn't explain how that might alter if state and local school systems, who have spent exponentially more on education over that same period, were given more authority.
According to the Project 2025 blueprint, "this department is an example of federal intrusion into a traditionally state and local realm." "Congress should close it and give the states back authority over education for the benefit of American children."
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