WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Thursday, pushing forward a campaign promise to break down the institutions, a long-time target of conservatives, calling for the dismantling of the US education sector.
See what Trump said in the players above.
Trump accused the education sector of wasted and contaminated by liberal ideologies. However, it is likely impossible to complete the demolition unless the Parliamentary Act, which created the division in 1979, is carried out. Republicans said they would introduce a bill to achieve that.
See: Trump’s vision to dismantle the Department of Education
However, the department is not set to close completely. The White House said the department will retain certain important functions.
Trump said his administration will close the department beyond “core essentials,” and will maintain Title I responsibility for low-income schools, Pell grants and fundraising for children with disabilities. The White House just said it would continue to manage federal student loans.
The president denounced the division that slowed American academic performance, saying the state would do a better job.
“That’s not useful to us,” he said at a White House ceremony.
Watch: McMahon says Trump will involve Congress in plans to close the education sector
Already, Trump’s Republican administration has taken over the institutions. That workforce has been cut in half and deeply reduced to the Civil Rights Bureau and the Institute of Education, collecting data on the country’s academic advancements.
Public school advocates said the department would eliminate leaving children behind in the fundamentally unequal American education system.
“This is a dark day for millions of American children who rely on federal funding for quality education, including those in poor and rural communities with parents who voted for Trump,” said NAACP President Derrick Johnson.
A March poll by PBS News/NPR/Marist found that 37% of Americans reported President Donald Trump’s plan to eliminate the Department of Education, while 63% reported disapproving the elimination of the education sector. Graphics by Jenna Cohen/PBS News
Democrats said the order would be fought in courts and Congress, urging Republicans to join the opposition.
Trump’s order is “dangerous and illegal” and will disproportionately hurt low-income, coloured and disabled students, said Rep. Bobby Scott, a top Democrat on the Virginia House Committee and Workforce Committee.
The department was “partially established to ensure the enforcement of civil rights for students,” Scott said. “The public school quarantine champions opposed and campaigned for a return to ‘state’ rights. ”
Read more: What does the education department do? Trump Guide Wants to Grow
Supporters of Trump’s vision for education welcomed order.
“There’s no more bloated bureaucracy where kids learn innovation with red tape or direct stuffy things,” Tiffany Justic, co-founder of Moms for Liberty, told social media. “The state, the community, and the parents can take the reins. They adjust their education to what actually works for their children.”
The White House has not officially stated which departmental functions can be handed over to other departments or eliminated them entirely.
The department sends billions of dollars to schools a year and oversees $1.6 trillion in federal student loans.
Today, much of the agency’s job revolves around managing both a wide range of student loan portfolios and a variety of aid programs for universities and districts, including school lunches and support for homeless students. This agency is also important in overseeing civil rights enforcement.
While states and districts already manage local schools, including curriculum, some conservatives are pushing to cut out strings attached to federal money and provide them to the state as “block grants” that are used at their discretion. Block Granting raises questions about key funding sources, including Title I, which is the biggest source of federal funding in America from kindergarten to high school. Families of children with disabilities are despairing what can come from the federal department’s work to protect their rights.
Federal funding accounts for a relatively small portion of public school budgets, at around 14%. This money often supports supplementary programs for vulnerable students, such as the McKinney Vent program for homeless students and Title I for low-income schools.
Read more: 1,300 Educational Employees Are Launched
Universities and universities rely on money from Washington through research grants, along with federal financial aid to help students pay their tuition fees.
Republicans have been talking about shutting down the education sector for decades, saying it wasting taxpayer money and inserting the federal government into decisions that should fall into states and schools. The idea has recently gained popularity as a group of conservative parents demand more authority in their children’s schooling.
On his platform, Trump promises to close the department and “send it back to the state it belongs to.” Trump threw the department as a breeding ground for “extremists, enthusiasts, Marxists” who over-expand reach through guidance and regulations.
Read more: What does the Education Secretary do?
Even if Trump moved to dismantle the department, he leaned against it to promote elements of his agenda. He uses the investigative power of the Office for Civil Rights and the threat of withdrawing federal education funds to target schools and universities that violate orders for women’s sports, Palestinian behaviorism, and transgender athletes participating in diversity programs.
Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, a Democrat on the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, dismissed Trump’s claim that he is state-educated. She said he was actually “trying to “put more control over the local schools and telling them what they can’t teach and what they can’t teach.”
Even some Trump’s allies have questioned his power to shut down an agency without action from Congress, and have doubts about its political popularity. The House considered an amendment to shut down government agencies in 2023, but 60 Republicans joined Democrats against it.
During Trump’s first term, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos tried to dramatically reduce the agency’s budget and asked Congress to bundle all K-12 funds into the block grant. The move was rejected and there was a turbulence from some Republicans.
Leavitt is one of three administrators appointed in the Associated Press case, and is concerned with the First and Fifth Amendments. The AP says the three are punishing news outlets for editorial decisions they oppose. The White House says the AP has not followed an executive order to call the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America.
