On March 20, 2025, President Donald Trump issued an executive order stating that the “Secretary of Education shall … facilitate the closure of the Department of Education.” Education is primarily handled at the state and local levels. However, “the Federal contribution to elementary and secondary education is about 8 percent, which includes funds not only from the Department of Education (ED) but also from other Federal agencies.” An executive order to close the Department of Education has many implications, the nuances of which can be argued endlessly. We could also argue about whether schools will continue getting funding because of the money that comes from other departments. However, on a larger scale, this move makes an incredibly dangerous statement: the federal government no longer sees education as a priority.
President Trump also used very flawed reasoning to justify closing the Department of Education. FactCheck.org states that “President Donald Trump has repeatedly claimed that U.S. schools are “ranked 40 out of 40” in educational outcomes compared with other countries.” However, the site claims that “We could find no international ranking of education outcomes that has the U.S. dead last, as Trump claimed.” In fact, statistics show that “U.S. high school students performed above average in science and reading, and a bit below average in math, according to the latest data compiled by the intergovernmental Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.”
The United States may not be the best in education, but we are far from the worse, which begs the question as to why one would defund the Department of Education. The country is clearly doing very well in terms of educating its people, and such a drastic measure serves to do nothing but disrupt the current status of education in the department. Additionally, if you think the Department of Education is doing a poor job, getting rid of it does not fix the problem. A better approach would be to improve the department’s efficiency and work to make the changes needed to better support education across the country.
One could argue, as President Trump has, that education is better in the hands of the state, and instead of funding a federal department of education, the money should simply be passed onto the states. While this may seem to make sense, it ignores the fact that there are large disparities in the quality of education across states. According to the Education Data Initiative, Alabama’s per pupil spending on K-12 education is $13,461, which is roughly half of Vermont’s spending of $26,974 per pupil. We also see a disparity in outcomes. Looking at the Nation’s Report Card, for fourth grade, Vermont’s average math score is 242, its average reading score is 221 and its average science score is 165. Alabama, on the other hand, has a 231 in math, a 217 in reading and a science score of 145, all of which are lower than Vermont. Looking at fourth graders across the entire country, the highest math score is 251 and the lowest is 183, the highest reading score is 235 and the lowest is 207 and the highest science score is 166 while the lowest is 140. This shows that there are disparities in education quality across the states.
Not only can a federal Department of Education help promote education from a country-wide perspective, it also makes a statement that education is important to the United States. Education is meant to be a basic right, and the stepping stone for every child in the country to have the skills and abilities needed to succeed in the world. It is something that should absolutely be the highest priority of every level of government. For the United States to eliminate the Department of Education is to say that at our highest level of government, we do not care about the education of our students. This is a dangerous and naive message and says a lot about President Trump’s priorities.