Pop quiz!
A celebrity-turned-politician runs for president on a bold pledge to abolish the U.S. Department of Education. Does that sentence describe:
- A) Ronald Reagan in 1980; or
- B) Donald Trump in 2024?
The answer is: C) all of the above. While Trump’s brash rhetoric about the federal agency has raised fresh alarm bells among voters who oppose him, Republicans’ perennial calls to eliminate the Education Department actually date back to its creation 45 years ago.
No president has come close to fulfilling that promise.
The best chance for getting it done may have come in 1981, when Reagan Education Secretary Terrel H. Bell drafted a 91-page memo about converting the nascent federal agency to a small foundation that would provide conduct research and provide support but “avoid direction and control.”
That memo was the first scoop for the publication you are reading right now—the subject of the very first story in Education Week.
Decades later, the Education Department still operates, unabolished.
“It is striking to see how similar the contours of the debate over the Department of Education today are to what we saw back in 1981,” said Martin West, the academic dean at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
The unsuccessful track record of attempts to shrink the federal role probably won’t end anytime soon, he said. But West and other education leaders say those ongoing debates about governance should not distract from the obligation educators and policymakers at all levels have to improve schools and outcomes for students.
The first attempt to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education hit roadblocks
The federal “office of education” was housed in other agencies until President Jimmy Carter, a Democrat, signed legislation to establish a separate Education Department in 1979 with strong support from the National Education Association.
Just as they are today, early efforts to shutter the department were animated by claims about bloated bureaucracy, excessive spending, and federal overreach into states’ education systems.
Bell’s memo in 1981 stated: “The 10th Amendment, reserving to the states and the people powers not delegated to federal government by the Constitution, has not been followed—especially in education—strictly and wisely by Congress and the courts.”
Trump’s campaign video in 2023 promises: “We’re going to end education coming out of Washington, D.C. We’re going to close it up—all those buildings all over the place and people that, in many cases, hate our children. We’re going to send it all back to the states.”
Bell detailed “a precise blueprint not only for downgrading the year-old department to the status of a sub-Cabinet-level foundation, but also for engineering a fundamental realignment of the federal role in American education,” said the 1981 story, which ran top-of-the-fold in Education Week’s first issue.
The memo called for an aggressive campaign to sell lawmakers on a “radical shift from the status quo.” The plan would have converted federal funding to block grants for states, moved student financial aid programs to the Treasury Department, and shifted scaled-back civil rights enforcement to the Justice Department. It faced immediate pushback.
Today, proposals to slim the federal footprint echo those ideas. Both the 2024 GOP platform and Project 2025, a 900-page conservative policy agenda put out by the Heritage Foundation and created by Trump allies, call for dismantling the Education Department. Project 2025, which Trump has sought to distance himself from, calls for converting major sources of federal funding, like Title I and IDEA, to block grants with few policy strings attached—a plan that Congress has rejected in the past.
Bell was later credited with preserving Education Department
Bell’s mandate from Reagan—to shut down the agency he was appointed to lead—was more than a little ironic. A former Utah state schools chief and acting commissioner of education in the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, Bell had testified in support of forming the Education Department as a separate agency.
The same month he sent his memo to Reagan, Bell formed the National Commission on Excellence in Education, which would later release “A Nation at Risk,” a report on the “rising tide of mediocrity” in American education that helped fuel many later reform efforts, including some that critics on both sides of the political spectrum have panned as federal overreach, like a growing emphasis on standardized testing and support for rigorous state standards.
Bell, increasingly convinced of the need for federal leadership, slow-walked the effort to end the Education Department as it faced resistance from a skeptical Congress, those involved told Education Week when Bell died in 1996.
“What he did was weave and bob. He elongated the process until the momentum died,” said John F. Jennings, then the director of the Center for Education Policy in Washington and a former longtime House Democratic aide.
Bell resigned after Reagan’s first term, when the president said the agency “remained a target for elimination,” Education Week reported. Bell lamented that he’d been unsuccessful in convincing conservative critics that it would be a mistake to withdraw “all federal concern and support of education.”
“There was simply no commitment to a federal leadership role to assist the states and their local school districts in carrying out the recommendations of A Nation at Risk,” he wrote in his 1988 memoir, The Thirteenth Man.
Calls to dismantle the Education Department echo partisan divides
Today’s calls to end the department appear to be a way for Trump to tap into institutional distrust and conservative concerns about recent federal education decisions, like President Joe Biden’s plan to forgive student-loan debt or Title IX guidance that directed schools to allow transgender students to use restrooms that align with their gender identity.
“I don’t really get what the thesis is other than it’s a bumper sticker,” said Margaret Spellings, who served as U.S. Secretary of Education under President George W. Bush. “The further along we get, and the more constituents there that are bought into the programs, resources, and expertise—that ship has sailed.”
In a national YouGov poll conducted July 8-11, 51 percent of Republicans supported eliminating the agency, compared to just 7 percent of Democrats. Annual polls by Gallup have also found that, while a majority of Americans are satisfied with their own child’s school, Republicans are far less likely than Democrats to report satisfaction with the U.S. education system as a whole.
Some Americans also misunderstand that a majority of funding for schools—and a majority of decisions about their governance—are state and local, Spellings said.
The challenges associated with dismantling the federal agency have only grown over the years with the passage of new civil rights laws it must enforce, new data it must collect, and the expansion of its budget. That’s why people like West, who advised Sen. Mitt Romney on education when he campaigned for president, see Trump’s call to shut down the department as more of messaging effort than a sincere plan.
“One of the things you learn by looking at what happened in the early 1980s is that, were a president to want to eliminate the department, it would take a massive investment of political capital,” West said. “Reagan, it seems, was not willing to make that a priority. And there was no indication [during Trump’s term in office] that Trump made that proposal—or frankly, anything else related to K-12 education—a priority.”
Trump previously attempted to scale back the Education Department
During his previous term, Trump proposed merging the department with the U.S. Department of Labor in a 2018 plan that never got off the ground. He also proposed converting 29 existing federal programs into a flexible block grant, a proposal Congress rejected.
Trump supporters like Oklahoma State Superintendent Ryan Walters have continued those calls during the 2024 campaign.
“The federal government comes up with a new initiative every few years. They give you some money, and they think they can control states and schools,” Walters told a gathering held by the conservative activist group Moms for Liberty in 2023.
Before Trump, the last presidential candidate to call for abolishing the Education Department in the party platform was Sen. Bob Dole, who lost his race to President Bill Clinton in 1996. Bush, who was elected in 2000, favored a stronger federal role, and that philosophy became the basis for No Child Left Behind, a bipartisan law that introduced new requirements for testing and accountability as a condition of federal funding.
“As a Republican, he was all about accountability for spending, and he used to talk about education as a civil right,” Spellings said of Bush. “It made sense not to abolish it, but to use the federal role in a discrete and muscular way. If we are going to spend our money in the name of addressing the achievement gap, let’s get our money’s worth.”
The law has faced pushback from teachers’ unions and conservative lawmakers alike. But Spellings said she’s also heard from state and local school administrators who said it gave them political cover for making tough calls to improve their systems, which she considers a good use of the federal power she had.
Bush’s predecessor, President Barack Obama, also signed a bipartisan education bill, the Every Student Succeeds Act, which replaced NCLB and gave states more discretion in how they structured their accountability systems.
Today’s schools face new challenges: a mental health crisis, rapidly evolving technology, and continued efforts to help students recover academically after pandemic-related interruptions.
Today’s proponents of ending the agency say those issues should be handled by states. Opponents say the federal government must take a leadership role.
Parceling the agency’s programs out to other agencies would be nothing more than a superficial change that eats up a lot of political capital, Spellings said. And actually dismantling federal funding streams would be a Herculean task that would be met with immediate outrage from superintendents in every congressional district who rely on that aid to keep schools open.
Questions about how the federal government is structured shouldn’t distract from urgent, complicated conversations about how to help students succeed, Spellings said.
Will voters, educators, and policy makers still be arguing about the federal role in education 45 years from now?
“I’m sure we’ll be continuing to debate the federal role in American education,” West said, “but I hope that we will spend more of our time debating the substance of that role, rather than where within the federal bureaucracy it is housed.”
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