The US Department of Education announced on March 11 that it will cut almost half of its workforce, gutting the department and advancing President Donald Trump's goal of eliminating it altogether. This threatens to upend decades of progress and hard-won reforms that strive to protect our nation’s most vulnerable students from neglect and discrimination.
The administration’s intentions for the department would do nothing to make our public schools more effective. Rather, they would create a public education system that is less able to ensure America’s children receive the education they deserve under federal law.
Dismantling the Department of Education would thrust our entire country’s public school system into chaos, with the rights and well-being of millions of children at risk. History indicates that students with disabilities, Black, brown, and Indigenous students, students experiencing homelessness, immigrant children, and low-income families would suffer the most.
Stay up-to-date with the politics team. Sign up for the Teen Vogue Take
The department has been the target of conservatives ever since it was established as a Cabinet-level agency by President Jimmy Carter in 1979. President Ronald Reagan promised on the campaign trail and in his 1982 State of the Union address to eliminate the then-new department. However, congressional approval is required to do that, and while lawmakers have pushed bills to do so since the 1980s, they have failed to gain support. The move is wildly unpopular with the public. Recent polling from Ipsos found that only 32% of American adults support eliminating the Department of Education.
The “Make America Great Again” agenda, reflecting past conservative policies and a number of the proposals in Project 2025, effectively seeks to extend protections and privileges to some students while cruelly excluding many others.
Decades ago, schools legally turned away children with disabilities. Those who were admitted were often relegated to inferior classrooms. It was not until the passage of the law now known as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) in 1975 that educational rights were federally protected for children with disabilities. Today, IDEA guarantees every child with disabilities the right to free, appropriate public education and 7.5 million students relied on IDEA-mandated services including speech therapy, individualized instruction, and classroom aides during the 2022–23 school year, the most recent year for which data is available. But these mandates don’t enforce or fund themselves. They require a federal backstop, an entity capable of ensuring that the thousands of school districts across the country comply. That entity is the Department of Education because even with protections like IDEA in place, students with disabilities often do not experience the educational equity many of their peers enjoy.
Federal oversight of local school districts is also critical for students experiencing homelessness, which totaled more than 1.3 million during the 2022–23 school year, according to the most recently available data. Under the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act, the department works to make sure these students can spend the day learning in a safe and supportive school environment and prevents schools from erecting bureaucratic barriers, such as requiring records, documents, or a fixed address before allowing a student to enroll, that would otherwise deny them their right to an education.
And through Title I — a cornerstone of federal education funding — the department channels critical funding to high-poverty school districts serving our most economically disadvantaged communities, providing essential resources for initiatives like academic interventions and smaller class sizes. Without this targeted federal investment, high-poverty schools would face catastrophic resource deficits, deepening the already stark educational divide between affluent and low-income communities.
Critics of the department who decry “federal overreach” deliberately obscure the truth: The department doesn’t control curriculum decisions or day-to-day educational operations, areas that are the purview of state and local entities. Rather, one of the department’s core priorities – indeed, one of its foundational purposes – is to ensure that students' civil rights are protected.
History and the recent past are littered with evidence of educational injustice when federal protections aren’t honored. In 2014, a teenage boy with disabilities in rural Montana was allegedly sent to his school’s basement and “forced to watch DVDs or sort nuts and bolts instead of receiving adequate educational services” before ultimately being removed from school. In 2017, Disability Rights Montana filed a lawsuit against the school district and the state Office of Public Instruction [OPI] over the student’s treatment. At the time, a lawyer for the OPI told the Billings Gazette they couldn’t “comment or confirm a complaint existed due to the Federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act.” The parties reached settlements totaling more than $1 million in 2018, the Missoulian reported.
To this day, we hear of districts turning away students without fixed addresses. Meanwhile, last summer in the San Diego Unified School District, the federal Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) found “serial perpetration of harassment with insufficient district response, leaving district students vulnerable” to sex discrimination and sexual assault in school, as the Los Angeles Times reported. Federal monitoring is crucial to address this kind of cruelty and denial of student rights.
When such discrimination infiltrates state and local education systems, OCR can step in as a critical enforcer of antidiscrimination laws, taking action when Black students are suspended at disproportionately high rates or when schools refuse to accommodate a child in a wheelchair. This continued oversight is needed now more than ever. In January, OCR reported having “received the highest-ever number of complaints per year for the past three years, and in [fiscal year] 2024, culminating in a 64% increase over the complaint volume OCR received during the previous administration.” Now is not the time to dismantle the only department that is equipped to tackle these issues head-on at the federal level.
Eliminating the department’s ability to monitor and enforce antidiscrimination laws will further permit discrimination without accountability, potentially opening the door for more racially segregated schools, denial of access to education for children with disabilities and students experiencing homelessness, and deepening educational inequities across race and class. Even the most well-intentioned state and local officials, whose budgets are already stretched thin, will have to make painful financial decisions without federal support. Again, it is our nation’s most vulnerable children who will suffer. The Department of Education isn’t perfect. But it’s the best defense we have against letting local whims, state politics, and budget constraints silence the dreams of millions of children.
We have two paths before us. One path builds on our hard-won gains, helping ensure that no matter their background, every child can access high-quality public education. The other path hurls us backward into an era of cruelty and neglect. Congress, the final arbiter of the department’s existence, has a choice. If we claim to believe in the potential of our nation’s children and the promise of our democracy, Congress cannot allow the Department of Education to be eliminated or further gutted. The cost — in human capital, in lost dreams, in permanent setbacks — will be borne not by politicians, but by the generations of children whose future hangs in the balance.
