‘The Department of Education Has Not Improved Student Achievement’

President Donald Trump signed an executive order Thursday afternoon that aims to eliminate as much of the Department of Education as he can.

The move comes after a decades-long expansion in unilateral federal influence over education without accompanying improvement in student educational outcomes. 

“The Department of Education has not improved student achievement. It hasn’t made schools more efficient, and it hasn’t made Washington more successful,” Jonathan Butcher, a senior research fellow in education policy at the Center for Education Policy with The Heritage Foundation, told The Daily Signal. 

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According to Heritage Foundation policy experts, “The current gap in learning between students from the highest 10% and lowest 10% of the income distribution is roughly four years of learning—the same as it was [in the 1960s] when [President Lyndon] Johnson launched his War on Poverty.”

The Department of Education employed more than 4,000 employees prior to the Trump administration’s recent reduction of the workforce by about half. Butcher also estimates that 41% of the salary costs of state education agencies comes from the federal government. Data published in 2023 shows that state education agencies employ more than 48,000 employees around the country.

Under the Trump administration, the Department of Education recently eliminated $600 million worth of grants that the administration summarized as being used to “train teachers and education agencies on divisive ideologies.”

In an interview with The Daily Signal, Butcher explained that essential services, such as federal assistance for children with special needs, would continue even as the politicized aspects of federal education policy in the Department of Education are eliminated.

Butcher noted the anti-federalism nature of basing education policy in Washington.

“I would say the [Education Department] also limits the ability that states and districts have to make decisions for themselves,” Butcher said, adding:

For example, states are required under law to test their kids in grades three through eight in math and reading, and that’s a part of No Child Left Behind. And there’s no flexibility on the kinds of tests that the states can use.

“I mean, they are under pretty strict guidelines on how they can, how they can accomplish that, and that means that there’s very little flexibility they have over the curriculum, which is really what a big part of this comes back to, is that the curriculum drives what’s on the test,” Butcher said.

As Lindsey Burke, the director of the Center for Education Policy at The Heritage Foundation, noted in an assessment of the Department of Education, reading outcomes on the National Assessment of Educational Progress were the same in 2022 as during the past 30 years. Math outcomes for fourth and eighth graders saw the largest decline in 2022 since the exams began being administered in 1990.

Keeping in-person schooling shut down during the COVID-19 outbreak is widely thought to have contributed to those declines. 

In 2022, only 27% of eighth graders were proficient in math on the NAEP and only 31% were proficient in reading on the exam. The NAEP Long-Term Trend Assessment, Burke pointed out, shows that there has been broad academic stagnation since the 1970s with lackluster performances in math scores. 

Nor has the department reduced the cost of higher education. Tuition at public universities has radically increased since 1987, some 213%, contributing to the cost-of-living crisis. That increase has occurred even as an estimated 44% of college graduates are not in jobs requiring college degrees. 

Total student loan debt stands at more than $1.7 trillion. The federal government originates and services about 90% of this debt through the Department of Education. 

Burke noted that prior to the creation of the Department of Education, management of federal education programs was spread across multiple departments and agencies. Consolidating them under a single department allowed for special interests to capture the decision-making process.

According to data from the National Center for Education Statistics, from 1960 to 2016, the number of students in public schools grew by 40%, while public-school administrators increased by more than three times that number, 137%. 

Trump has shown he is willing to reform education in the United States through the means at his disposal. Now, it’s time for Congress to do its part in prioritizing students above administrators and taxpayers above special interests.