Last night, the Trump administration fired more than a thousand workers at the Education Department. It’s not gone; only Congress can abolish a cabinet-level agency. But President Trump can hobble it while retaining a core staff to advance his agenda.
Trump wants to use the department to crack down on schools and colleges with D.E.I. efforts he opposes. He also says parents and local governments should fully control education policy. Meanwhile, Elon Musk’s allies have slashed the education research budget and moved to replace some human labor with artificial intelligence. Combined with earlier layoffs, the latest cuts will leave the agency with about half the staff it had before Inauguration Day.
In today’s newsletter, I’ll explain what the Education Department does and, after this week, what it may not do.
The main job
Students are unlikely to feel much immediate impact. That’s because, despite what Trump says, state and local school districts already make their own decisions about reading lists, curriculums, teacher pay, testing policies and student discipline practices.
Only about 10 percent of funding for public education flows through Washington. It’s mostly directed toward low-income and disabled students. Trump can’t withhold that money. The government distributes it according to formulas set by Congress.
Most of the Education Department’s budget helps students pay for college, through grants and loans. Many Trump allies believe that the student aid program should be transferred to the Treasury Department — and sources in Washington say that work is now underway.
The department’s critics
The federal government has collected data and conducted research on education since the 19th century. But historically, both Democrats and Republicans have doubted whether the United States needs a cabinet department for this.
Jimmy Carter created the department in 1979, fulfilling a campaign promise to teachers’ unions. But even he was skeptical. At a celebration of the agency’s creation, Carter tempered the crowd’s exuberance, warning, “This thing won’t work as well as you think it will.”
Some liberals flatly opposed the department back then, believing that a single federal agency should handle all the programs — health care, cash welfare and education — that affect kids.
Still, in recent decades, the Education Department’s work became part of the Beltway firmament and enjoyed bipartisan support. Many of the programs it oversees are popular. Those include Pell grants, which pay for college tuition, and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, which helps disabled children get services.
Trump’s education goals
The right’s view has changed in recent decades.
Republicans like George W. Bush thought the federal government had an important role: It should ensure that students really learn at school, and it should push more students to and through college.
Trump’s movement has a very different agenda. He and his allies want to give parents public dollars they can use to pay for private school tuition and home-schooling.
Conservatives also oppose student debt forgiveness, a Biden administration priority. (Joe Biden wiped away debt for millions of borrowers. The Supreme Court blocked part of that effort, calling it illegal.) Alongside some liberal allies, they now argue that fewer Americans need traditional four-year college. Both Trump and his education secretary, Linda McMahon, have encouraged more students to pursue vocational education instead.
Trump officials posit that test scores are low because of the federal role in education. And like any government bureaucracy, there is bloat — dated websites and research projects that aren’t relevant to students or teachers in the real world.
Still, achievement improved during two periods when Washington was unusually involved in schools, scholars say. In the 1970s and 1980s, when courts desegregated Southern classrooms, academic gaps between racial groups closed significantly.
Test scores also rose in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Experts are still debating why, but those years were the height of a bipartisan movement focused on standards and accountability. Bush signed a law holding schools and teachers accountable for student test scores. Barack Obama supported those goals, too.
But that meant students took more exams, and a backlash to testing gathered strength. In 2015, Obama signed a law relaxing the federal pressure.
In other words, yesterday’s cuts come at a time when federal involvement in classrooms is the lowest it has been in decades.
More on the federal government: The Trump administration intends to eliminate Environmental Protection Agency offices responsible for addressing the disproportionately high levels of pollution facing poor communities.
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Every day for the past seven years, Sam Ezersky, the editor of The Times’s Spelling Bee, has scrambled 25 letters for millions of solvers. Today, for the 2,500th digital puzzle, he did something he’d never done before: He included S. As regular players know, S is a fraught letter for the Bee, given its potential to increase the word count.
The puzzle, which you can find lower in this newsletter, has a pangram to match the occasion. “Rather than a random word with an S, I wanted to pick a good fun word,” Sam said. See the puzzle below.
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