“We will drain the government education swamp and stop the abuse of your taxpayer dollars to indoctrinate America’s youth.”
Donald Trump made this promise to a crowd at a rally in Wisconsin in September during his 2024 re-election campaign. Whether you applauded or loathed his statement, Trump is President and his reelection has consequential implications for the U.S. education system.
Trump nominated Linda McMahon as Secretary of Education for his second term and she was officially confirmed in her hearing on February 25th, 2025. Outside of being appointed to the Connecticut State Board of Education in 2009 for a year and serving on Sacred Heart University’s board of trustees, she does not have experience directly relevant to education, as she is best known for co-founding World Wrestling Entertainment with her husband. McMahon has a long history of backing Trump, donating tens of millions to Trump’s causes, and being in his circle of influence. She also chairs the America First Policy Institute board, an organization that is allegedly non-partisan but is understood to be a right-wing conservative policy think tank.
Department of Education (ED) Disbandment
President Donald Trump campaigned on dissolving the Department of Education, and unsurprisingly, many are confused and unsure about what the future of American education looks like under his presidency. His statement seems to be coming to fruition at a surface level. On February 8th, 2025, a group of democratic congresspeople were physically denied entry to the U.S. Department of Education building by a federal employee under orders, the actions of which are unprecedented and the legality ambiguous. Just four days later, Trump called the Department of Education “a big con job” and called for it to be closed “immediately.”
Though many of his other educational policies are feasible, disbanding the Department of Education altogether is not; Trump would need both congressional approval and a 60-person supermajority in the Senate. Even if he wins the congressional vote and all 53 Republican senators vote to disband the Department of Education, the chances of enough Democrats voting for disbandment are virtually nonexistent.
The Department of Education has a troubled history dating back almost 150 years. President Andrew Johnson attempted to form a National education oversight department that collected information on schools throughout America in 1867. The office was demoted to an “Office of Education” due to skepticism about federal control of schooling in 1868 and eventually disbanded. The Space Race with the Soviet Union catalyzed concerns about the U.S. Education System in the 1950s. President Lyndon Johnson’s series of programs in his “War on Poverty” and the focus on uplifting minorities in the 1970s demonstrated the federal government’s increased attention towards the U.S. education system. This growing trend culminated with Congress passing the Department of Education Organization Act in 1979 under James Carter’s presidency with the Department of Education beginning work in 1980.
Trump is not the first president to campaign on dissolving the Department of Education.
Ronald Reagan’s responses to the creation of the Department of Education eerily parallel today’s criticisms. Reagan publicly denounced Carter’s introduction of the Department of Education, calling it a “bureaucratic boondoggle.” Media outlets similarly emphasized the precarious nature of the Department of Education’s survival. A 1982 New York Times article mused that “As the Department of Education’s fate hangs in the balance, friends and foes push in opposite directions – supporters hoping to keep it alive until a Democratic Administration gives it a more active role; the opponents to let the ax fall while Mr. Reagan is in the White House. Ultimately, there were not enough votes in the legislative branch to disband it.
Director of Education Policy at the American Enterprise Institute Rick Hess has a cynical take on the situation, asserting that “the Department of Education actually has very little to do with that debate. Abolishing it doesn’t advance school choice and keeping it doesn’t do much for traditional district schools. But it’s become a symbol of which side you’re on in that debate.” Political polarization over the state of the Department of Education is evidently a long-lasting issue. A 2023 Pew Research Center study found that 62% of Democrats viewed the Department of Education favorably while 65% of Republicans viewed it unfavorably.
School Choice & Vouchers
On January 29th, 2025, Trump signed an executive order for “Expanding Educational Freedom And Opportunity For Families.” This order pledged support to provide parents with school choice and required McMahon to create plans and provide guidance to states to further that aim.
School choice is a hot buzzword, but what does it actually mean? Advocates define it as giving parents the power to send their children to the school they believe is best regardless of financial barriers like private school tuition. They propose accomplishing this primarily through vouchers or equivalent Education Savings Accounts, which grant money to parents to pay for their children to attend private schools. Vouchers ideally target low-income students in poorly performing public schools, thereby giving students better access to new opportunities and motivating public schools to perform better because of increased competition with private schools.
Currently, there are 25 voucher programs across 14 states. Information surrounding school choice and vouchers is often conflicting, with the information presented often depending on the particular agenda of the organization.
The non-profit EdChoice advocates for school choice and asserts that “ Of the 26 studies that examine the competitive effects of school choice programs on public schools, 24 found positive effects, one saw no visible effect and one found some negative effects for some kids.” Corroborating that statement, Trump’s executive order declares that “the growing body of rigorous research demonstrates that well-designed education-freedom programs improve student achievement and cause nearby public schools to improve their performance.”
Meanwhile, the National Education Association (NEA), the largest labor union in the U.S., made up of over 3 million teachers and other personnel at schools that generally supports democratic leaders condemns vouchers, calling them a “catastrophic failure” that robs public schools of their funding in favor of private schools, which often already attended by higher-income students. The association interviewed Josh Cowen, an author of a book condemning vouchers and a professor of education policy at Michigan State University. He stated that the “Trump presidency saved the voucher movement” and blamed “radicalization of the right, the religious fundamentalism,” and hyper-individualistic tendencies for promoting the voucher system when “results around vouchers were coming in and they were not good.” Josh Cowen states that “2007 was the first time researchers started to notice that around 70% of students were already enrolled in private schools — and it’s the same number today.” Indeed, a 2023 PEW Research Center study found that 70% of voucher students did not previously attend public school in Indiana. The study also found that the system “eroded public school performance” with the passage of time.
“Vouchers are the education equivalent of predatory lending. The right wing markets vouchers specifically to families of color, to low-income families, as if there are a whole lot of high-quality private school providers that will take all of these children in mass amounts. We know that doesn’t happen. We know the schools that do accept them tend to be barely hanging on, tend to be subprime as I call them, as the academic results show,” said Cowen.
The head of the NEA is an outspoken critic of McMahon’s appointment, stating that “Rather than working to strengthen public schools, expand learning opportunities for students, and support educators, [McMahon’s] only mission is to eliminate the Department of Education and take away taxpayer dollars from public schools.”
A Chalkbeat article by Matt Barnum discusses and synthesizes data from several studies without a particular political leaning. Although older research shows positive or insignificant effects on test scores, four recent studies in their respective states found that low-income students receiving vouchers did not improve test score performance, with scores dipping to various degrees in three of the states, and dipping, then improving in Washington D.C. Five studies or analyses demonstrated either insignificant or moderately positive effects on college enrollment and/or degree completion. Information on parent and student satisfaction varied study to study, though an overview study concluded that elevated school choice led to increased parent satisfaction. Targeted voucher programs have shown to improve public school performance by encouraging competition in six regions. The article acknowledges several caveats with data from each of these studies including specific limitations such as the fact that many of them focus on targeted voucher programs, which would likely be different than the more wide-spread programs that the Trump Administration could potentially institute.
Chalkbeat pointed out that increasing the universality of voucher programs can result in either increased costs of education to taxpayers or less money being diverted to public schools, citing that the projected cost of a 2022 Arizona universal private school choice law jumped to $276 million from $33 million. Studies on smaller school choice programs have not found that they worsen segregation, but universal programs could potentially exacerbate segregation given how the universal choice option of charter schools has “led to moderate increases in racial and economic segregation.”
Censorship
Trump signed an executive order on January 29th for “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling,” demanding that schools instill a “patriotic admiration for our incredible Nation,” and stating that schools are indoctrinating innocent children with “radical, anti-American ideologies,” alluding to Critical Race Theory, education about the LGBTQ+ community, and support for transgender children in schools.
State-passed gag orders about gender, race, and sexuality have created a growing pile of banned books in American schools, with three times as many books being banned between 2023-2024 than the year prior. More conservative regulation on what is taught in classrooms is a growing trend and one that is poised to flourish under Trump’s presidency. On January 24th, just days after Trump’s inauguration, the ED’s Office for Civil Rights issued a statement declaring that it “Ends Biden’s Book Ban Hoax.” This statement revealed that his administration has already removed the Biden administration’s book ban coordinator, who monitored book bans and legal issues concerning civil rights violations over banning books featuring minority communities. Their decision allegedly restores “the fundamental rights of parents to direct their children’s education” according to the acting assistant civil rights secretary defending the decision. Since the decision has been made, all 11 pending civil rights complaints were dismissed.
Title IX interpretation changes and consequences
Title IX is a national civil rights law that asserts that “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.” The Biden administration interpreted this law to include prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity, a move that would help protect LGBTQ+ youth in schools. However the law has already drawn several legal challenges, including eight lawsuits signed onto by 26 states. The rule is also blocked in any school attended by a child of the conservative organization Moms For Liberty, bringing the total number of states where the rule is challenged to 44.
As of January 12th, 2025, a federal court struck down this interpretation of Title IX nationwide. The court justified the decision by stating it exceeded the ED’s authority under Title X, violated the Constitution, and called it “arbitrary and capricious.” Since then, Trump signed an executive order banning transgender women from women’s sports and enforcing the law under threat of withholding funding for schools that do not comply. In Trump’s previous presidency, he rescinded Obama’s instruction for schools to include a gender neutral bathroom on the premises, so his willingness to influence educational policy based on his beliefs about the LGBTQ+ community should not be surprising.
The official Title IX interpretation has instead returned to what it was under former Education Secretary under the 2020 Trump Administration Betsy DeVos, causing several ramifications for sexual assault policies at colleges. Compared to rules under the Biden Administration, it reduced the liability for colleges in sexual misconduct cases, required live hearings and cross-examinations, and allowed lawyers to be present at the hearings. Although this interpretation is welcomed by those who feel that accused individuals will receive fair trials, others feel that it is cruel because it requires victims to relive traumas before a live audience.
Student loans
Student loans are another highly polarized topic. Biden proposed his SAVE plan in the summer of 2023, which is a type of Income-Driven Repayment (IDR) Plan. IDRs are payment programs that allow borrowers to pay a set portion of their income based on a formula taking into account their family size and income for 20-25 years, after which any remaining debt is forgiven. Unlike other IDRs, Biden’s SAVE Plan would drop the repayment time to as low as 10 years (for those who borrowed $12,00 or less), cut undergraduate loan payments in half, and pay for growing interest with a government subsidy so the principal balance would not increase. SAVE would have cost approximately half a trillion dollars over a ten year period to accomplish this aim. The America First Policy Institute expresses a right-wing viewpoint on the SAVE plan, asserting that Biden’s debt forgiveness programs are “illegal, unfair, and inflammatory” “bailouts” and “behavior-changing incentives that punish responsibility.”
The Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals officially blocked the entire SAVE plan on February 21st, 2025. Some provisions had already been blocked by the same court in August of 2024. The Texas Standard interviewed the executive director and managing counsel of the non-profit Student Borrower Protection Center Persis Yu on the situation. She believes that the Missouri Higher Education Loan Authority (MOHELA) influenced a coalition of Republican attorneys general led by Missouri to oppose the plan because it did not benefit from the SAVE plan aiding borrowers in resolving their debts. Yu asserts that “what this case really is doing is pitting the interest and the financial well-being of millions of student loan borrowers against a single loan servicer in Missouri.” The official trial report Standing seems to corroborate Yu’s analysis about MOHELA’s involvement, as it states that “MOHELA is harmed by the SAVE rule”, and “Missouri suffers a cognizable financial harm” when MOHELA accounts are closed because MOHELA’s reduced profits reduces “ its ability to fund education in Missouri.” Over 8 million Americans are already enrolled in the SAVE plan, and are anxious and unsure about the long-term implications of the court’s decision.
The Trump administration seems to have used the federal court’s ruling as justification to stop accepting not just SAVE Plan applications, but all Income-Driven Repayment (IDR) plans. A notice at the top of the SAVE Plan website announced that “A federal court issued an injunction preventing the U.S. Department of Education from implementing the Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE) Plan and parts of other income-driven repayment (IDR) plans. As a result, the IDR and online loan consolidation applications are temporarily unavailable. Borrowers can still submit a paper loan consolidation application.” While the court undoubtedly struck down the SAVE plan, the report does not mention any ramifications for IDR plans more broadly, so the second portion of the website’s announcement, and basis for closing all IDR applications, is suspect. A December 2024 Bankrate article provides recent information about IDR plans prior to the Federal Court’s ruling, and states that around 28.5% of student borrowers were enrolled in IDRs. It is currently unclear whether the application closing is temporary or how student loan programs will change.
What Trump’s policy on DEI means for education
Trump signed an executive order vowing to “end” government-sponsored Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DEI) initiatives, calling it a cause of “immense public waste and shameful discrimination,” and signed a similar anti-DEI executive order on January 20th and 21st, 2025, respectively. Ending DEI initiatives is one of many actions taken by the Trump Administration that was outlined by Project 2025, which Trump distanced himself from during his campaign. On February 17th, 2025, the Trump administration announced that it has terminated $600 million in grants for teacher training on “divisive” ideas like critical race theory, DEI, social justice activism, and white privilege.
The federal district court for the District of Maryland temporarily blocked these two executive orders just four days later on February 21st, stating that the executive orders’ provisions that mandated all executive agencies terminate equity-related grants or contracts, requiring all these agencies provide a certification that they did not employ DEI programing, and requiring the Attorney general to take action against DEI programs in private companies and educational institutions unconstitutional because they violated free-speech and due process.
Despite the court’s blocking, the ED also launched an “End DEI” portal on February 27th, where anyone can report discrimination based on race or sex in publicly funded K-12 schools by writing their email, school or school district and its ZIP code, the transgression in under 450 words, and upload supplementary files. The press release of the statement quotes Co-founded of Moms for Liberty Tiffany Justice, who says “For years, parents have been begging schools to focus on teaching their kids practical skills like reading, writing, and math, instead of pushing critical theory, rogue sex education and divisive ideologies,” but now parents can “share the receipts of betrayal.”
Its introduction has raised concerns for teachers because of the highly politicized nature of what Trump’s administration could consider discrimination. Is teaching a book featuring a LGBTQ+ character “discriminatory and divisive” towards cisgender heterosexual students, or is a class discussion, or even a student talking about food desserts, neighborhoods that are often lived in by people of color where there is little to no access to fresh food, considered “social justice activism” that could make white students uncomfortable? Who reviews these reports and ascertains their validity, and will those processes be transparent? At its best, the portal could be used to identify acts of discrimination against anyone. At its worst, Trump’s DEI portal could become a tool of intimidation used to eliminate any discourse in schools that doesn’t align with the Trump administration’s viewpoints and restrict teacher’s autonomy over their classrooms.
Education Research Grant and Contract Cancellations
The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), created by Trump and led by Elon Musk, canceled $900 million worth of contracts in the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) in early February 2025. They canceled close to 170 grants, higher than the 89 reported in DOGE’s social media post, and paused grant review panels. DOGE made these decisions under the justification of eliminating wasteful government spending.
Higher education researchers allegedly told Inside Higher Ed. that they would lose online access to restricted data sets, forcing them to receive data on physical disks mailed by the Department of Education and view them on computers in private rooms disconnected from the internet. Assistant Professor of Education Policy at the University of Wisconsin Madison said that this new system would “literally means we are stepping back in time decades” and that it is a “huge waste of time” for researchers and the Department of Education itself. An anonymous faculty member at a Pacific Northwest college said losing access to IES data sets would create a six-month or longer time period where there would simply be no data to analyze, forcing her to restart her project from scratch.
The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) was most severely cut. These grants funded research that provided data to policymakers and the American people to help them make more informed, evidence-based decisions. Past NCES leader Mark Schneider proposed that cuts could pave the way for an opportunity to modernize, but Trump has demonstrated little interest in doing so. Consequently, many higher education officials feel disillusioned, disregarded, frustrated, and confused about the status of their work. Institute for Higher Education Policy president Mamie Voight said that “Our country and our students deserve better,” because these “irresponsible” cuts would “cause long-term scarring on America’s education system.”
Conclusion
Educational policy and funding is in a constant state of flux. Trump has pushed for many of his policy goals concerning educational policy by signing executive orders. Congress has constitutional authority to reverse executive orders, a court can rule that it is unconstitutional, and future presidents can rescind or amend earlier executive orders. While Trump’s imminent policies may seem overwhelming now, the next administration may easily roll back his changes as he has done for many of Biden’s policies.
Administrations only make changes to policy if people express their opinions on them. That is why it is imperative that we stay informed beyond epigrammatic headlines because we cannot express opinions if we do not understand how politics influences education and vice versa. The Trump administration has made very consequential changes to the American education system, and we need to know what they are so we vote and carry out civic activism that reflects the goals and aspirations of the American people, regardless of political party.
“We will drain the government education swamp and stop the abuse of your taxpayer dollars to indoctrinate America’s youth.” Donald Trump made this promise to a crowd at a rally in Wisconsin in September during his 2024 re-election campaign.