Posted: 11 February 2025 Author: Oli Belas

In England – since the birth of the National Curriculum in the 1980s, if not before – curricular autonomy for schools has decreased, while accountability, particularly for student outcomes, has increased. This has been a point of contention for several decades now, so it may seem odd to anyone unfamiliar with the US education system that left, liberal, and progressive voices in America are so disturbed by President Trump’s plans to close the federal Education Department

On February 8, 2025, the New York Times shared footage of Democratic lawmakers being blocked from entering the federal Education Department. Among them was Democratic Representative Mark Takano, who explained at a February 7, 2025, press conference that, while he and colleagues had been shut out, staffers from the newly minted Department of Government Efficiency, headed by presidential appointee Elon Musk, had entered “the building where they have access to the private data of millions of students and families.” Those datasets, the Washington Post emphasized, “include[ed] a financial aid dataset that contains the personal information for millions of students enrolled in the federal student aid program.”

Voices critical of England’s education system would likely welcome, if not the total dismantling, the weakening of our Department of Education. But that is because, here, the DoE is perceived as the agent of the curricular reforms pushed through by Michael Gove and the Conservative government between 2012 and 2015. Many of those reforms were and remain unpopular (and there is, perhaps, just a little, cautious and qualified optimism around the new government’s Curriculum and Assessment Review, recommendations of which are expected sometime this year).

In the States, the federal Department for Education is a legacy of Lyndon B. Johnson’s so-called “war on poverty,” of which the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act was a key piece of legislation. The Department’s role is not primarily curricular, but one of oversight, particularly with respect to the various equity measures inaugurated by and added to the ESEA over the last six decades. An educational historian and former Assistant Secretary of Education (under both Republican and Democratic Presidents), Diane Ravitch told Democracy Now! that to abolish the Department of Education would be to abolish federal aid for education, which was introduced in 1965 as “an equity measure, and that equity measure will be wiped out.” Here is Representative Takano again:

curriculum and textbooks […] aren’t things the department handles. Those are all handled at the local level. But what the department does handle is civil rights for the 49 million children in public schools. What the department does handle is $1.6 trillion in federal student aids. What the department does handle is services for the 7 million special education students who receive them. What is the plan for those children?

And that surely is the crux of it: attacking the federal Department of Education is another of the Trump, Project 2025, and MAGA movement’s anti-civil liberties, anti-equity and -equalities exercises. These exercises are of a piece with the alt-right-led attack on “woke,” a word rooted in Black antiracist activism, but the history of which has been obscured, both by its wider adoption (no doubt in both good faith and bad) and by the right’s transforming the word into a term of derision. (On the right, “woke” now operates like a race- and gender-coded “political correctness.) These exercises are part of a sustained strategy of punching down and low; of using the mechanisms of state, including that of education, as a lever not even to maintain, but rather to increase oppression and widen inequality. As Ravitch said in her Democracy Now! interview and Takano in his press conference, Trump’s attack on the Department of Education is an attempt to roll back a series of provisions aimed at supporting the most vulnerable children and their families, including anti-poverty Title 1 school provisions; it is an extension of the charter school and voucher programmes, which, under the banner of choice, principally served the already wealthy.

All of the above makes for bleak reading. So it is worth saying that although Trump and his team can certainly obstruct the Department’s work, the President cannot simply decree the abolition of the Department. Such a move must be supported by Congress, which, CNN reckons, is unlikely. Certainly Takano, to whom we give the last words, and his colleagues seem ready to resist:

We will not cede the responsibility for our future generations to one man, his ideology, and his unelected lieutenants. I will not stand for it. My colleagues will not stand for it. […] Donald Trump and Elon Musk must not and will not destroy the Department of Education on a whim.