Opinion: Health of democracy depends on health of public education (2025)

Since its creation, the Department of Education has been under attack. The agency oversees the federal student loan program, distributes some public school funding, runs programs to assist low-income students and students with disabilities and works to protect civil rights, prohibit discrimination and ensure equal access in schools. It does not oversee curricula in K-12 public schools. Federal statute specifically forbids it.

As I wrote last August, Project 2025 proposes to close the Department of Education. President Trump claimed that he wasn’t connected to Project 2025. Well then, he’s dancing at the ends of the strings of people who are.

He nominated Linda McMahon for secretary of education. She has no background in public schools except for a year on the Connecticut Board of Education (which ended when it was found that her claim of an education degree was false). She also pushes ideas that would defund and destroy public schools. Disqualifying? Not in the least. She’s been confirmed by the Senate. (Sen. King voted ‘No,’ Sen. Collins voted ‘Yes.’)

Her self-admitted mission is to eliminate the department. This tracks with White House directives that strip schools of funding, launch voucher programs, provide more funding and less oversight for private charter operators and allow Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to raid public schools.

Shutting it down is difficult, but they can remove its functions and funding. As of this writing, President Trump is expected to issue one or more executive orders to abolish programs that are not “explicitly in the department’s statute” and transfer its functions to other departments while urging Congress to abolish it. A new bill has been introduced in the House calling for the elimination of the department by the end of 2026.

Cuts will damage states’ ability to meet state constitutional obligations to provide adequate and equitable education. In some states, federal funds contribute 25%. That’s an unbudgeted obligation that might drag down entire school systems. And if you make public education fail, you turn parents away from public schools and toward privatization.

Title I, which supports schools with high concentrations of students living in poverty, would be converted into block grants and sent to individual states, without accountability or oversight, to go toward vouchers and charter schools. Redirecting funds needs congressional approval, which has not come in the past. But there’s an effort in Congress to advance privatization, and those funds would be a tremendous boost to that.

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) function, as well as the Office for Civil Rights, would be transferred to agencies lacking expertise and resources in those areas. This threatens students who receive special education and leaves students vulnerable to discrimination based on race, gender, disability and religion.

Dictators know that if they destabilize public education, they destabilize democracy. It’s pretty clear. They’ll starve public schools and funnel these resources to discriminatory and unaccountable private schools or tax cuts for billionaires.

Another motivation for destabilizing public education is greed. Close to $900 billion is spent on K-12 education. If even a portion of that money gets redirected, somebody’s getting richer.

The department also administers Pell Grants, federal student loans and loan repayment and forgiveness programs. This would be moved to either Treasury, Commerce or the Small Business Administration. President Trump has said that SBA Administrator Kelly Loeffler “would really like to do it.”

Loeffler violated federal law and Senate ethics rules by soliciting campaign funds inside a federal building. This was 100% proven since she did it during a national TV interview on Fox. More recently, she bragged that her party won in Georgia at least partly because of a law that curtailed the state’s absentee and vote by mail programs. She didn’t say that it suppressed turnout, but she did say that the law reassured conservative voters “disenfranchised” by the lie of voter fraud that their votes would count. How might someone who thinks this way administer all of that sweet, sweet financial aid money?

Shutting down the department starves public education, supports private (mostly religious) schools with your tax dollars regardless of your own religion, indoctrinates children into a particular religious point of view and limits open access to education. Where access to education is unequal, as the Truman Commission reported, “education may become the means, not of eliminating race and class distinctions, but of deepening and solidifying them.” The string-pullers are not attacking the Department of Education. They’re attacking education itself. And then what happens to what’s left of our democracy?