Dem
47
GOP
53
Donald Trump famously once said: "I love the poorly educated." He wants to keep that going by keeping people poorly educated, so he is trying to dismember the Department of Education. He can't formally abolish it by XO. Only Congress can abolish it, and probably a number of Republicans are afraid of a campaign in which their opponent claims "Your congressman voted to defund your kids' school," so the votes for abolition aren't there.
Plan B is to gut the DoEd from the inside, and that is what Trump is doing. Or trying to do. He has signed XOs that move agencies within the DoEd (and their budgets) to other departments. For example, $28 billion in funds for K-12 schools got moved to the Department of Labor. After all, kids work hard in school so that qualifies as labor. Indian Education programs will go to the Department of the Interior. Child care access will go to HHS. Foreign-language education will go to the State Department. Secretary of State Marco Rubio speaks fluent Spanish, but his Department is ill equipped to handle foreign language education in K-12 schools. The Office of Civil Rights, which Trump dislikes, escaped this time, but is definitely on the chopping block in the next round.
Secretary of Education Linda McMahon, unlike any of her predecessors, excepting the OTHER Trump SoE Betsy DeVos, does not like her Department and would be happy to see it abolished, or at least defunded. She says Americans are tired of bureaucracy. Trump probably doesn't even understand what the Department does, but McMahon almost certainly does. It doesn't set the curriculum for any school in the country and has nothing to do with hiring or firing teachers. It exists due to the way education is financed in the U.S. The money for schools comes mostly from local property taxes. The Scarsdale, NY, school district has the highest median household income in the country at $238,000, with housing prices and property taxes to match. If Scarsdale wanted to provide every student in the system with a free top-of-the-line M4 MacBook Pro, that wouldn't be a problem at all. In contrast, in Perry County, AL, the average household income is $36,000. No MacBook Pros for those kids.
What the Department of Education mostly does is try to level the playing field a little bit by funneling money into poorer school districts and helping minority students make it in a system stacked against them. Trump probably senses this roughly, so he is against the Department and wants it to go poof! McMahon understands her marching orders and is doing what she can to gut her Department. Most cabinet secretaries work the other way. They try to get more money for their departments, not less. For example, McMahon recently gave technical education programs and family literacy programs to the Labor Department. Her stated view is that the function of education is to prepare children to enter the workforce. A fair number of other people would strongly disagree with that and say the function of education is to create an informed citizenry that can make good decisions for themselves, their families, their states, and their country, especially electing capable leaders.
The chairman of the American Association of School Superintendents, David Schuler, is not happy with McMahon trying to gut the Department of Education by moving pieces of it hither and yon in the federal bureaucracy: "It is difficult to see how transferring cornerstone programs... out of the department will result in streamlined operations, especially for the nation's small, rural and low-capacity districts." Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) was less polite. She said: "This is an outright illegal effort to continue dismantling the Department of Education. And it is students and families who will suffer the consequences as key programs that help students learn to read or that strengthen ties between schools and families are spun off to agencies with little to no relevant expertise." (V)