How the Trump Administration wields federal power over public education
By Jeff
Bryant
Indeed, if the court’s conservative majority had provided an explanation, it would likely have been the kind of rhetorical sleight of hand that Justice Elena Kagan described in her dissent to the court’s Free Speech Coalition, Inc. v. Paxton ruling, which radically shifted legal precedent for free speech rules.
In her dissent to that ruling, Kagan argued that the conservative majority’s explanations for its decisions were not based on legal precedent nor the U.S. Constitution, but on “these special-for-the-occasion, difficult-to-decipher rules. … needed to get to what it considers the right result.”
And the “right result” regarding
the fate of the Department of Education appears to be whatever Trump
and the conservative majority want.
This case was, meanwhile, decided “using
the ‘shadow docket’—usually reserved for emergency cases, but more and more
used to quietly rule on controversial questions with brief, often unsigned
opinions,” according to a newsletter by Michael Waldman, president and CEO of
the Brennan Center for Justice.
The court’s ruling came on the heels of the Trump administration’s announcement to withhold nearly $6.8 billion in funding that was to be distributed to schools and districts across the country. The money allocated by Congress was supposed to be distributed to states on July 1, 2025.
It was, by and large, funding that
schools and districts were counting on to pay for programs and personnel, some
of which, according
to Education Week, are required by law. Many schools felt hard-pressed to
find alternative sources of funding or cut services and lay off staff.
Twenty-four states sued Trump over this “illegal” action.
“The withheld money includes about 14 percent of all federal funding for
elementary and secondary education across the country. It helps pay for free or
low-cost after-school programs that give students a place to go while their
parents work,” according to a July 2025 New York Times article.
That Trump administration edict was also issued with “little explanation,” according to the New York Times, with only some vague reassurance about being “committed to ensuring taxpayer resources are spent in accordance with the president’s priorities.”
The Trump administration, however, later announced that it
was reversing its
decision to withhold this amount after receiving a letter from 10 Republican
senators “imploring”
it to release the funds.
But the president’s proposed budget for 2026 “eliminated all
the grants that had been frozen,” NPR reported.
Compounding the harm inflicted on public schools, Trump and
his obsequious conservative majority in Congress also pushed through the One
Big Beautiful Bill that will require staffing
cuts and additional costs from public school budgets. The administration has
also enacted the
nation’s first federal school voucher program that redirects public tax dollars
to private schools.
‘Harmful Risks for Students and Families’
Trump and his conservative allies justify these harms to
public schools by insisting that the K–12 institutions, attended by 83
percent of students in 2021–2022, are “woke” indoctrination camps
and that all decisions about school spending and operations should be “returned
to states.”
But the federal government has never
had the power to set school curriculum, woke or otherwise, and state
governments already
have primary authority over public education.
Where the federal government does
have some influence in education is in its power to conduct research,
fund special programs, and ensure, through civil rights enforcement,
that students and families have access to education services.
In allowing the Trump administration to dismantle the
Department of Education, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority is giving
the go-ahead to abdicate these responsibilities.
The nonprofit education news site The 74 reported that
in the initial round of employee firings and voluntary departures “the hardest
hit” offices included the Office for Civil Rights, which enforces civil rights
laws in schools; the Institute for Education Sciences, which conducts research and collects and analyzes
education statistics; the National Center for Education Statistics, which administers the
National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the so-called Nation’s
Report Card; and Federal Student Aid, which helps students pay for college.
A disempowered Department of Education will “create harmful
risks for students
and families,” according to a February 2025 analysis by
the think tank Century Foundation. “Millions of Americans rely on federal
support from the Department of Education to open doors along their educational
journeys.” These “millions of Americans” include students with disabilities,
whose access to education services is protected by the Individuals with
Disabilities Education Act; low-income students, whose schools receive extra
federal funding through the department’s Title I program; and students and
families who’ve requested federal government intervention because they’ve faced
discriminatory treatment in schools due to their national origin, immigration
status, sexual identity, disability, race, or religion.
“The Trump administration is widely expected to turn civil
rights enforcement on its head in ways that harm historically marginalized
communities,” the Century Foundation analysis stated.
Trump’s other education policies will have equally harmful
impacts on the most vulnerable students and families.
The decision to withhold congressionally allotted funds to
schools specifically targeted federal grant programs that serve high-needs
populations, such as migrant
students, English
learners, students who need access to academic enrichment
programs, and after-school and
summer learning programs, according to an analysis by
New America, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank.
The impact of the withheld funds would have been “much
greater on students and families in certain school districts—particularly
high-need districts,” New America said.
Nationwide, students from low-income backgrounds would have
been “especially at risk of losing education resources,” according to
New America. “Districts serving high-poverty student populations (those where
over 25 percent of children live in poverty)… [would have lost] over five times
as much funding per pupil as low-poverty school districts.”
The sprawling budget reconciliation bill that Trump and
Republicans passed, with its cuts to Medicaid and food assistance programs,
will also add
to the costs of schools’ student health services and free meals
programs, which are essential to low-income communities.
‘The False Narrative’
The fact that these attacks on the public education system
are being made during a time when conservative Republicans control the White
House, Congress, and the Supreme Court, with little to no explanation, should
surprise no one.
Anyone who’s
been paying attention has long known that the primary role
conservative Republicans feel the federal government has in public education is
punitive and controlling. They have rarely done anything to support schools and
educators and address the needs and interests of students.
This has been clear ever since former President Ronald
Reagan called
for abolishing the Department of Education and then used the
department’s resources and clout to form a commission that issued a scathing
report, “A Nation at
Risk,” now widely discredited,
which education historian Diane Ravitch has said “launched
the false narrative that American public schools were failing.”
Conservatives continued their campaign to use federal
agencies to punish public education when William Bennett, Reagan’s secretary of
education in his second term, weaponized the NAEP. According to education
psychologist David Berliner and James Harvey, an author of “A Nation at Risk,”
who became a prominent critic of it, Bennett changed the
standardized test’s intent, “from its original purpose of measuring what
students at various grade levels actually know to a new goal: judging what
students at various grade levels should know,” and created a “proficiency”
benchmark that “the vast majority of students in most nations cannot clear.”
Conservative Republicans drew a straight line from changing
the purpose of the NAEP to enacting, with the complicity of most
Democrats, No
Child Left Behind (NCLB) during the presidency of George W. Bush. NCLB
set in motion a policy agenda, largely still
intact today. This includes using test score data, like the NAEP, to label
public schools as failures and closing them down or privatizing them. (Although
cutting funds to the NAEP would appear to undercut its weaponization, the Trump
administration has vowed to
continue administering the tests.)
Trump’s first presidential term continued to weaponize
federal involvement in education with the hiring of Betsy DeVos as his
secretary of education. DeVos was openly
hostile to the mission of public education, and she loudly advocated for
redirecting government funds from public education to private schools.
Inequality Is the Point
Democrats, for their part, are currently voicing their
opposition to these cuts.
Even before the Supreme Court cleared the way for Trump to
dismantle the Department of Education, 11 Democratic senators, in March
2025, called
for an investigation into the massive layoffs and spending cuts
McMahon carried out.
The injunction that temporarily blocked the cuts, which the
Supreme Court overruled, was brought by “New York and 20 other Democratic-led
states, two Massachusetts school districts, and the American Federation of
Teachers,” Education Week reported.
“More than 175 Democratic members of Congress,” according
to ABC News, filed an amicus brief supporting a lawsuit brought by the
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People to block the
dismantling of the department. But all of that was before the court’s ruling.
In response to the withholding of billions in federal funds,
more than 100 Democratic House Representatives sent a letter to
McMahon and Director of the Office of Management and Budget Russell Vought
asking why the funds were being withheld in July. In a separate letter,
32 Democratic senators demanded “an immediate end to the illegal withholding.”
But for the Trump administration, and a majority of
conservative Republicans serving in Congress and on the nation’s highest court,
the only constituents that seem to matter are white, wealthy ones. And the
nation’s system of public education should be bent to ensure they get what they
want out of it first.
Jeff Bryant is Chief Correspondent and Writing Fellow for Our Schools, an education project of the Independent Media Institute. In his 30 years of experience as a self-employed freelance writer, advocacy journalist, and consultant, Jeff's work has appeared at Salon, Alternet, Raw Story, The Washington Post, and numerous other prominent outlets.
