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Within days of her confirmation by the US Senate as Donald Trump’s new education secretary, Linda McMahon was promising to dissolve her own department.
The former professional wrestling promoter reiterated the president’s campaign pledge “to provide quality education through school choice to all students, and . . . make sure that education is back at the state level where it belongs.”
Yet educators warn that policies to scrap the federal education department, increase parents’ choice over schools, reduce central government funding and cut oversight by decentralising decision-making would hit lower income families the hardest.
Diane Ravitch, president of the Network for Public Education, a campaigning group, warned that any cuts would create “vast” inequality between rich and poor states.
“The purpose of federal funding was to equalise spending,” she said. “That would disappear, and rich states with tax money would no longer have any responsibility for poor ones.”
Keri Rodrigues, co-founder of the National Parents Union, warned that her non-profit group would fight the abolition plan in the courts.
“He’s going to try to clear out what’s not nailed down, and not staff the things that are,” she said. “It will leave American families in a state of chaos.”
While Trump has drafted an executive order to abolish the department, such a move would require a super majority in Congress of 60 votes, which his party does not have.
The president at the weekend renewed his attacks on the federal system.
“We want to bring the schools back to the states, because we have the worst, literally, we have the worst education department and education in the world. We’re ranked at the bottom of the list, and yet we’re number one when it comes to cost per pupil,” Trump said on Fox News on Sunday.
Parents should have greater power over school choice and governance, to reduce employment protections for teachers and to stop the teaching of “inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content”, he added.
The US spends around $900bn on primary and secondary school education each year, most of which comes from states and local districts, primarily through property taxes which vary widely between richer and poorer areas.
However, about 14 per cent is paid by the federal government, which helps address these local funding imbalances, including more than $16bn in annual “Title I” funds directly to support children from low income families.
A further $14bn is administered by the Department of Education under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, earmarked for children with disabilities and special educational needs. Many Republicans would be likely to resist overall cuts to these programmes, which benefit their constituents.
Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said that under Trump “the biggest issue is defunding an already stretched to capacity public school system . . . to undermine public education as we know it.”
That system faces additional strain from Trump’s calls to round up illegal immigrants.
The superintendent of a school in the northeastern US, who asked that he and his location not be identified because of the sensitivities, said: “I’ve had two families withdraw their children because they would rather all go back home than risk being separated from their kids.”
He says the departure of such undocumented students could tip his schools below the threshold for eligibility to receive Title I funding, cutting his budget by 15 per cent.
Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association, a teachers’ union, said that just as Trump’s first term aimed to “destroy public education, demonise teachers and de-professionalise” through measures including proposed budget cuts, there will be “more of the same in Trump II.”
Another potential shake-up is the president’s call for “universal school choice”, allowing parents to remove their children from public schools and take the funding to pay for alternative private, charter or home schools or tutoring. He argues this would increase learning outcomes and parental satisfaction, and reduce costs.
The primary mechanisms for this would be vouchers or “education savings accounts”, which already exist and are determined by individual US states. But he has backed the creation of federal tax credits for scholarships to top up funding for parents opting out of the public school system.
Jon Valant, a senior fellow with the Brookings Institution think-tank, cautions that school choice does not always lead to improved outcomes. He points out that many parents — and some Republican politicians — see the measure as undermining state support for public schools.
“Vouchers are not popular including among many Republicans,” he said. He added that in three states where they were on the ballot in November’s election — Nebraska, Colorado and Kentucky — voters rejected them.
“You have this ‘wild west’ with vouchers,” he said. “We don’t know what the effects are but nothing suggests they are positive. Parental choice could drive a wedge between the wealthy and other families, and [would] drain a lot of resources.”
Trump has also threatened to withdraw federal funding from schools teaching topics he considers “Marxist” and stop programmes “that promote the concept of sex and gender transition”.
His rhetoric echoes measures already under way in some states. Texas’s education board voted late last year to provide funding to schools teaching a voluntary Bible-infused curriculum in elementary schools, breaking with the secular tradition in public schools. The state’s governor has also pledged to follow the example of Louisiana in requiring the Ten Commandments to be displayed in all public classrooms.
“This is an effort to coerce young people and inculcate the idea that one religious tradition is more important than others,” said Rev. Paul Brandeis Raushenbush, head of the Interfaith Alliance, a group founded in response to the growth of the religious right.
“As an American, a pastor, and a parent I object to this. What America got most right was allowing everyone to be free and to thrive in their own way.”
