Perhaps you’ve been wondering why many recent articles, predictions, and speculations about Trump’s plans for the U.S. Department of Education focus on its abolition, while others predict that it will be forcefully deployed to reshape what schools teach.
Consider the Washington Post’s excellent education reporter Laura Meckler, writing on November 12:
President-elect Donald Trump has promised sweeping changes to federal agencies, but there’s one he wants to do away with altogether: the Department of Education.
And here’s Forbes on November 20, announcing the choice of Linda McMahon to be education secretary:
President-elect Donald Trump has tapped Linda McMahon—one of his top donors, a former cabinet member and wife of billionaire former WWE chair Vince McMahon—to lead the federal Department of Education, an agency he has repeatedly vowed to shutter in favor of relegating all educational responsibility to individual states in his second term.
But here’s Meckler again, just five days later on November 17:
…while his promise to shut down the Department of Education has drawn enormous attention, experts in both parties say this is not likely to have sufficient support. A more likely outcome is Trump using the department to press a conservative worldview.
And here’s PBS on November 15:
Donald Trump’s vision for education revolves around a single goal: to rid America’s schools of perceived “wokeness” and “left-wing indoctrination.” The president-elect wants to forbid classroom lessons on gender identity and structural racism. He wants to abolish diversity and inclusion offices. He wants to keep transgender athletes out of girls’ sports....
What’s going on here? Is the federal role in education slated for elimination or expansion? Is McMahon’s mandate getting rid of her agency or empowering it?
There’s no way to be sure today—and I’m not the first to ponder this seeming paradox. But there’s ample reason to be unsure, and that’s because the Trump world has long sent exceedingly mixed messages when it comes to K–12 education and the federal role therein.
One clear message is that education belongs to the states, localities, and parents—and Washington should get out of the way. There’s certainly no need for an Education Department if the federal role is minimal or even nonexistent.
But another view—and faction—holds that Uncle Sam should require schools to do the right thing and prevent them from doing wrong things, with those things being decided by Trump’s acolytes.
You’ll find both views—and the resulting mixed messaging—in both the Republican platform and Project 2025.
The 2024 platform, for instance, says this:
We are going to close the Department of Education in Washington, D.C., and send it back to the States, where it belongs, and let the States run our educational system as it should be run.
But it also says this:
Republicans will ensure children are taught fundamentals like Reading, History, Science, and Math, not Leftwing propaganda. We will defund schools that engage in inappropriate political indoctrination of our children using Federal Taxpayer Dollars.
Project 2025’s education chapter, written by the Heritage Foundation’s Lindsey Burke, says this:
Federal education policy should be limited and, ultimately, the federal Department of Education should be eliminated... The federal government should confine its involvement in education policy to that of a statistics-gathering agency that disseminates information to the states.
But it also says this:
No public education employee or contractor shall use a name to address a student other than the name listed on a student’s birth certificate.
A sage veteran of earlier Republican administrations terms this a tug-of-war between the “decentralizers” and the “centralizers.”
It’s not limited to education, of course. The libertarian (or decentralizing) strand within conservatism has always wanted as little government as possible, along with minimal regulation and low taxes. What one might call the “traditionalist” strand has long sought to deploy government power to ensure people behave properly and be prevented from doing things regarded as immoral, sacrilegious, or unpatriotic. They can’t help but be centralizers!
Decentralizers have pushed in the past to scrap the department, to “voucherize” Title I, and to “block grant” just about everything else, as well as to rescind a slew of regulations and rein in the department’s Office for Civil Rights.
Centralizers are often found in Democratic administrations—consider the strings President Barack Obama attached to Race to the Top, as well as sundry Biden-era regulations involving gender and school discipline. But the centralizing impulse also runs deeper than you might think among conservatives, sometimes—this may be counterintuitive—in the form of mandating school choice and parental rights.
The Project 2025 chapter on education, for instance, recommends a host of legislative and regulatory moves that would ensure parental rights and role in their children’s education and provide school choice within existing federal programs. Such recommendations parallel bills that GOP members of Congress have introduced to expand federal tax credits for education, extend “education savings account” options, and enact a “parents’ bill of rights.”
Trump’s choice of Linda McMahon as Education Secretary—Mike Petrilli has called this her “consolation prize” for not being given the Commerce Department—may simply signal that education, for now, will be a policy backwater.
While she’s a long-time supporter of charters and choice, it’s a little difficult to picture her doing battle over bathrooms. She’ll likely go through the motions of trying to get her department abolished—as Terrel Bell did, with no success, back in the early Reagan years—but neither she nor anyone else is likely to get Congressional assent to repealing the agency’s innumerable spending programs nor its protections for kids with disabilities.
Does that mean in the end, that little will change?
Perhaps. But remember, too, the very last act of the previous Trump administration in the realm of education: releasing the report of the “1776 Commission ,” which sought to refute the then-inflammatory “1619 Project” and combat “identity politics” by proffering its own view of U.S. history. It contained this passage regarding the duty of school and educators:
States and school districts should reject any curriculum that promotes one-sided partisan opinions, activist propaganda, or factional ideologies that demean America’s heritage, dishonor our heroes, or deny our principles.
I agree with that statement myself, as do many Americans, and I note that it doesn’t call for the federal government to get involved with curricular disputes. But I wouldn’t count on the team that will take over the White House on January 20 to be equally restrained.
Editor’s note: This was first published by The 74.
