The Trump administration is reportedly preparing an executive order aiming to “abolish” the Department of Education—a prominent demand of far-right activists in recent years. His pick for Secretary of Education—Linda McMahon—is hostile to public schools and supports the privatization of public education.

The U.S. public education system needs all sorts of reforms to boost its capacity to provide an excellent education to all children. But public education is also why the United States became the richest country the world has ever seen, and its future depends on maintaining and strengthening this system—not tearing it down.

What does the Department of Education do?

The Department of Education (DOE) accounts for about 3.5% of the entire federal budget and provides crucial funding for public K–12 schools, narrowing some of the huge gaps between needed resources and state and local revenue. Specifically, the DOE provides funding for low-income children through Title I funds and funding for special education through IDEA programs. These resources help balance the scales of school funding, as high-poverty districts often get less funding from local sources, which rely heavily on property taxes. The DOE also administers crucial programs—like Pell grants and loans—that make college attendance possible for those who are not rich. 

Often, demands to “abolish” the DOE are accompanied by vague reassurances that the money spent by the DOE will somehow be “returned to the states.” But the vast majority of money spent by the DOE is exactly given to state and local school systems. Figure A shows that just over 51% of federal funding goes to the third of districts with the greatest need (as measured by district poverty), while only 18% goes to the third of districts with the lowest neighborhood poverty. Unless one is entirely confident that a Trump administration-led effort to “return” this money to state and local districts will somehow be as effective in targeting higher-poverty districts, it is a near-guarantee that any effort to cut or abolish the DOE will take money directly out of those districts whose students need it the most.

The DOE has also sought genuine efficiencies as one of its key endeavors. The DOE in previous administrations has tightly monitored colleges that took federal government resources and failed to provide a quality education. Given the skyrocketing cost of college attendance and the rising importance of having a college degree, the DOE’s efforts to find these efficiencies should have been widely praised and built upon. Instead, however, the Trump administration has blocked these efforts. For example, the Obama administration’s DOE implemented two rules cracking down on for-profit colleges that saddled students with debt but failed to provide a quality education. These rules sought to cancel debt for these ill-served students and fine the colleges. But the first Trump administration rolled back these rules.

The biggest proponents of abolishing the Department of Education make vague claims about K–12 public schools “indoctrinating” children in “leftist” values. But the federal government has almost no direct sway over what is taught in K–12 public schools, that is overwhelmingly decided on the ground in local school districts. If parents in these districts (or anybody else) want a curriculum change, they should focus their attention on local decision-makers, not the DOE.

Privatization is not the answer

Nearly 90% of K–12 students attend public schools. A strong research base indicates that these schools would benefit from higher levels of resources, with dollars translating directly into higher test scores and better post-school outcomes for students. Privatization of public schools is not a serious option to make them better—yet privatization is the clear goal of the Trump administration.

Secretary McMahon has a long history of favoring voucher programs, which allow parents to use public taxpayer dollars to send their children to private school or home school. There is no evidence to suggest that private schools or homeschooling could possibly translate these resources into more effective student outcomes than public schools (see evaluations of the evidence here, here, and here). Further, the majority of students who “take up” vouchers are already attending private school, basically providing a windfall to affluent parents at the expense of public schools.

These voucher programs pose a grave danger to public school budgets in states where right-wing advocates have had early success. In states like Arizona, voucher programs have ended up costing nearly 10 times its projected cost. To the degree that growing voucher programs do entice some parents to send kids to private schools, there are direct fiscal costs to students choosing to remain in public schools (see our district-level calculator to learn more).

Recent proposals put forward by Republicans, backed by the White House, seek to create a national voucher program in the form of a new tax credit where taxpayers who donate would get 100% of their money back. While most tax credits for charitable causes are structured where part of the contribution is paid by the government and part by the taxpayer, in the case of this national voucher tax credit proposal, the government would pay for all of it. In effect, their effort to privatize education at the national level essentially functions as tax shelters for the wealthy.  

Like most of the Trump administration’s efforts, the drive to diminish the DOE shows they have no serious interest in making public institutions work better or more efficiently, they just want them stripped of resources.