Trump's Plan for the Department of Education
How Bad Would It Be?
As part of a ten step plan to reform American schools, Trump announced that he was going to close the Department of Education, and he was going “to send it all back to the states”.
Tenth, another thing I’ll be doing very early in the administration is closing the Department of Education in Washington, DC, and sending all education back to the states. We’re going to end education coming out of Washington, DC. We’re going to close it up, all those buildings all over the place, and yet, people who, in many cases, hate our children. We’re going to send it all back to the states.
How do you show that you know nothing about education? You think that the Department of Education controls public schools. And that’s what Trump thinks. Good Lord.
Schools are a state and local function in this country. At most, the federal government has contributed 10 percent of school budgets. Ninety percent of funding from schools comes from the state and localities.
The Department of Education does two main things: it distributes Title 1 funds for low income students, and it distributes funding for special education. The budget request for 2025 was $82.4 billion. $15.7 billion will go to special education. Another $19 billion supplements the education of low-income children. They also dole out money for career and technical education (which Trump supports), special schools for the blind, career training for adults, and other little projects. It employs 4,400 people.
What doesn’t the Department of Education do? It doesn’t develop curriculum. The states do that. It doesn’t hire staff. Localities do that. It doesn’t do any of the things on Trump’s hate list. Trump is attacking the wrong bad guy because he doesn’t understand how education works.
The Department of Education writes checks for poor and disabled kids. That’s their biggest task. If we need fewer people to write those checks or another department can manage those tasks, then get rid of the Department of Education. Go for it. Disability parents, like me, don’t care.
Theoretically as a special education advocate, I should be very fearful of Trump’s plans for the DOE. But I’m not. Let’s break it down.
The Office of Civil Rights
Eileen Chollet, a disability parent advocate, has an excellent thread on how the elimination of the Department of Education would impact special education. One function of the Department of Education is to handle parental complaints about discrimination. She wrote, “… as someone who works in the policy space professionally and has a lot of experience with the ins and outs of special ed, I am not worried.”
Currently, parents can file a complaint with the Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR) if their child is being discriminated against because of a disability. For example, a parent might say that their student is being unfairly segregated from other kids, doesn’t have equal access to athletics, or is being abused in the school due to the usage of restraint and seclusion.
Sounds good? Well, it can take the Department of Education about nine years to get your complaint. Parents know that. So, well-resourced parents don’t bother to waste their time with OCR complaints. Instead, they hire lawyers to get the school districts to send their kids to private schools, or they spend a ton of money on tutors and private services.
And those examples of violations that I mentioned above — segregation, no access to athletics, use of restraint and seclusion — are EVERYDAY occurrences in special education. My own high-end, fancy pants public school sticks special education kids in the windowless basements of their buildings. Most autistic kids have zero access to after-school sports or clubs. And during my three-month stint as a para, I saw eight-year-old kids pinned on the ground by grown men and forced to sit all day in a 6 x 6 corner of a classroom. The federal government does nothing for us.
If Trump got rid of the Education Department of OCR, that complaint system could get moved to the Department of Justice. Probably nothing would happen there either.
IEPs
In the 1970s, Congress passed sweeping legislation that mandated that public schools had to educate *all* students. Millions of students with medical issues, autism, Downs syndrome, and intellectual disabilities were suddenly given the right to be educated in a public-school building along with their typically developing siblings and neighbors. Prior to those laws, most disabled children were either institutionalized or isolated at home.
But the laws went beyond telling schools that they had to allow disabled children in their building. The laws provided protections for students about “how” they would be educated.
Among the protections, students were given the right to a free and appropriate public education (FAPE) in a least restrictive environment (LRE). And each student would receive a yearly Individual Education Plan (IEP).
An IEP is a document created by parents, teachers, and specials that outlines a student’s current educational needs and establishes learning goals for the student. It should also state how the school will support the student as they reach those goals with additional support systems and accommodations.
Sounds good, right? Wouldn’t every child benefit from those guaranteed rights and attention to their unique educational profile?
Well, the Department of Education doesn’t do much beyond the Kangaroo Court of OCR to govern those laws. So, parents end up with forty pages of IEP crap every year. Most IEPs should be used to line hamster cages.
Every year, parents across the country spend millions of hours and millions of dollars trying to force schools to educate their kids. They hire advocates and lawyers. They self-educate. In the end, it’s impossible to get public schools to do what they really don’t want to do — spend money on disabled kids. It’s awful.
There’s no tweak in an IEP that’s going to get a school district to provide a good reading curriculum or to hire a qualified teacher. The best that you can do it is to create a legal paper trail that will force them to pay the tuition at a special private school.
Does the Department of Education get involved with any of that? No.
The Funding
When Congress passed laws that told states that couldn’t fuck over disabled kids anymore, it sweetened the deal. Congress said that they would pay for 40 percent of all special education costs. However, that never happened. The federal government only pays 13 percent of special education costs. Which leave states and localities to pick up a MASSIVE bill for services.
So, the Department of Education writes a check to the states for services, but those check should bounce.
Without full funding, localities scrounge to cover the costs of educating kids with severe disabilities. Sorry, but it’s not cheap to educate kids with big issues. That’s how it is. No shortcuts there. Someone must pay that bill, and it should be the federal government.
In the end, who pays the burden for the federal government’s failure to properly fund special education? Parents.
Parents must fight for every service, every hour of reading help, every hour of physical therapy. They must fight for a para to accompany their kid to art club. They have to spend hours educating themselves about education law, so they phrase those requests with all the special keyword phrases. Because schools don’t want to pay for anything.
Parents even must fight other parents. I was in an PTA meeting where one mom stood up and asked how we could prevent special education parents from moving to our town and taking up all our resources. Awful woman. If that woman had made that same statement about any other subgroup, she would be on the evening news.
Final Judgement
Why should I care about the 4,400 employees of the Department of Education, who do not protect the rights of special education kids in American schools? They write some insufficient checks — a task which any department could do. They take nine years to deal with OCR complaints — a task which the DOJ could do. So, let it go.
Is the elimination of the Department of Education going to reduce the size of the federal government, which is one of Trump’s goals? Probably not. Is it going to save money? No, because some other bureaucrat is going to have to cut those same checks. Is it going to eliminate the “woke” curriculum? No.
Is this a total waste of time. Yes.
I actually have an open OCR complaint that’s been going on forever so I totally hear you. But I also had one that was resolved quickly. I really appreciate this article. Thank you for writing it. I’m in NYC, led by democrats and the special Ed here under democrats is horrible. Wiping out the USDOE might be great for the people trying to deny FAPE for students with disabilities, whether you are red or blue. I do think that their policy statement are used. As an advocate, I use them. OCR. Osers. This will be no more then. That’s awful.
As a teacher, I've come to view most Departments of Education as Orwellian institutions that prevent education. They tend to create the most onerous and nonsensical policies that hurt those with special needs the most. One can only explain their actions by acknowledging DOEs are not staffed with former teachers who understand the reality of bad legislation.