The dismembering of the Department of Education: Reformers react
Hi, gang. I was planning to continue our conversation about blue-state education reform today, but current events intervened. Instead, I round up the reactions to the Trump administration’s decision to send various ED offices hither and yon. Commentaries come from luminaries including Margaret Spellings, Denise Forte, Kevin Huffman, Nina Rees, Checker Finn, Starlee Coleman, Kevin Carey, Ashley Jochim, Rebecca Sibilia, Jed Wallace, Chad Aldeman, Andy Rotherham, Rick Hess, and Adam Kissel.
A lot, yes, but there’s more: I compile the best takes of the week on other issues in education policy, these coming from Condoleezza Rice, Eric Hanushek, Jessica Grose, Matt Yglesias, James Traub, Freddie deBoer, Kevin Huffman, Nat Malkus, Karen Vaites, Dan Buck, Mike McShane, Matt Barnum, Robert Pondiscio, and Ron Matus.
Next week I promise to return to blue-state ed reform and why some insist that it’s just different, not dead. Look forward to contributions from Conor Williams, Heather Peske, Marguerite Roza, and Morgan Polikoff.
Sign up to receive this newsletter in your inbox on Tuesday and Friday mornings. SCHOOLED is free, but a few linked articles may be paywalled by other publications.
The week’s big news, of course, was the Trump team’s announcement that the Department of Education will parcel out big parts of itself to six other agencies. Education reformers have thoughts! Let’s run them down, from most to least opposed.
Kevin Carey, New America
This deeply unpopular administration lacks the votes in Congress to shut down ED. That’s why Secretary McMahon is creating a bureaucratic Rube Goldberg machine that will waste millions of taxpayer dollars by outsourcing vital programs to other agencies. It’s like paying a contractor double to mow your lawn and then claiming you’ve cut the home maintenance budget. It makes no sense.
Denise Forte, Ed Trust
Today, the Trump administration began the process of selling off the Department of Education for parts. The administration has let down teachers, families, and students—those currently in classrooms and the generations to come. The Department is further diminishing these offices that protect student rights and stop discrimination and sending them off to be run by agencies that work on public health and short-term training, which lack the skills, expertise, or capacity in education. This isn’t about improving student outcomes; it’s about implementing a business model that transforms students into widgets instead of human beings who need support.
Kevin Huffman, LinkedIn
Making SEAs call the Department of Labor and State and the Interior and HHS instead of USED is not going to unleash a wave of reform and innovation… That is a deeply unserious idea.
Margeret Spellings, Chalkbeat
Moving programs from one department to another does not actually eliminate the federal bureaucracy and it may make the system harder for students, teachers, and families to navigate.
Andrew Rotherham, Eduwonk
This isn’t trying. This is a stunt that’ll just get unwound down the road. It doesn’t remove red tape as proponents claim—it creates red tape. It’s also inefficient and doesn’t streamline—this adds complexity and layers. This time and effort could be spent on real reform. It’s performance art.
Chad Aldeman, Aldeman on Education
They say they would like to close and “dismantle” the U.S. Department of Education. Instead, they’re pretending as if they’re closing it by sending a lot of its functions out to other federal agencies… The main thing it does is to move some functions from one federal building to another one less than a mile away.
Checker Finn, Education Next
Mostly, it seems, this is all for show—the illusion of carrying out a campaign promise while burdening states and districts with more doors to knock on in Washington and different bureaucracies to satisfy in order to obtain the funds and services that the White House says will continue to flow.
Starlee Coleman, National Alliance for Public Charter Schools
The Secretary of Labor, Lori Chavez-DeRemer, does not have a track record of supporting charter schools. In fact, when she was a member of Congress from Oregon, she sat on the House Education and Workforce Committee and was the only Republican on the committee to support strongly pro-union bills, including bills that would strip the right of teachers to vote by secret ballot in union organizing elections. Consequently, labor unions are among her biggest backers. That doesn’t have to be a problem for charters, but it often is. I hope this isn’t the case but am assuming we won’t be working with as friendly of a team as we were under Secretary McMahon.
Nina Rees, X
Sending the federal Charter Schools Program from USED to Labor is a bit like sending your beloved child to Siberia. 🐻 Set aside the labor secretary’s past alignment with unions, the Dept. of Labor is an even bigger bloated bureaucracy and historically a less effective one.
Jed Wallace, Charter Folk
In the short term, I am not overly worried about shifting the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education, including the Charter Schools Program, to the Department of Labor. Yes, it would be preferable to have greater assurance of the Labor Department’s current support of charter schools. But a sudden negative turn for charter schools seems unlikely.
Rebecca Sibilia, The 74
If there is any fundamental role for the government to play, it is the collection and reporting of data. As for the rest of the plan, it sounds like they have spread these programs so far and wide it will be difficult to put Humpty Dumpty back together again.
Ashley Jochim, X
If Democrats want to have credibility with everyday Americans, they need to drop the Chicken Little act. The erosion of educational opportunity began under their watch. It won’t be addressed by defending the status quo.
Rick Hess, Chalkbeat
This is significantly further than I thought they would be able to go without congressional action. I am surprised and impressed, as someone who has always been skeptical of the department’s role. I am open to the idea that it’s good to reduce the department’s footprint. I also think we’re a nation of laws, and it’s important to recognize congressional authority.
Adam Kissel, Education Next
Under the leadership of senior Trump appointees, experts who know what they’re doing, the plan to dismantle ED is likely to succeed with flying colors.
My take, as I wrote on X, is that this is a nothingburger. They will move some boxes and people around, and it will all be undone the next time a Democratic administration takes power.
That’s not to say I think it’s a good idea. Like renaming the Department of Defense the “Department of War,” it will cost time and money, and that matters. But it won’t have much impact in the real world of schools and classrooms.
That’s how I feel about the Department of Education writ large. As long as the money and policies remain, it doesn’t really matter whether it gets sliced and diced or closed down all together. When I was there 20 years ago, I didn’t notice, for example, a great deal of synergy between the K–12 offices and those working on higher education. Splitting them up would barely be noticed.
But I don’t understand why my conservative friends think that killing ED will kill the “woke mind virus.” If parts of the Democratic coalition want the feds to promote social justice and the like, they will just start appointing social-justice warriors to Labor instead of Education.
Mostly it’s all a sideshow. Can we get back to focusing on improving our schools please? (Plenty on THAT below!)
What’s your take? Please weigh in by emailing SCHOOLED (at) fordhaminstitute (dot) org, or simply replying to this email.
Condoleezza Rice offers a sweeping case for education reform, pointing to its economic, technological, and especially political consequences. “My parents were right,” Condi writes. “Education is the holy grail in a democracy.”
Her Hoover Institution colleague, Eric Hanushek, takes to the Washington Post to warn of the “8 percent tax” young people will pay in lost income because of the student achievement declines of the past twelve years. To address it, he argues, we need to return to the reforms popular in an earlier era. “Organizational and teaching decisions are moved closer to the school, and effective schools are given license to continue what they are doing. Incentives are tied to student performance. Teachers are supported and rewarded for their effectiveness. And federal and state authorities support and reward school performance rather than trying to govern how schools produce learning.”
Speaking of which, Kevin Huffman weighs in on Eric’s op-ed in a LinkedIn post, pointing to it as a “serious conversation” (unlike what came out of Washington this week). “There are paths forward involving serious evidence-based academic shifts and interventions,” writes Kevin, “paired with strong accountability, data-driven pathways for older students, and courageous leadership that ruffles some feathers.”
Speaking of paths forward, Jed Wallace points to recent charter victories in Florida, Texas, Alabama, Arizona, and even California, where, as Jill Tucker of the San Francisco Chronicle puts it, “Oakland charter schools join forces to lure families amid district chaos.”
And speaking of chaos, Kelsey Piper (at the Argument) and Rose Horowitch (at The Atlantic) report on the UC-San Diego math remediation scandal. There’s a growing consensus, it seems to me, that grade inflation in high schools is a real problem—and it’s forcing universities to rethink their test-blind and test-optional policies.
On Tuesday, I argued that blue-state ed reform looks down and out, but Matt Barnum correctly points out that voters still trust Democrats over Republicans on the issue.
One reason I’m glum about blue-state reform is the power of the teachers unions. Enter Dan Buck and Anna Low, summarizing a new report by Maxford Nelsen on how to weaken said unions. (Granted, this advice is most likely to be followed by Republicans.) Among the suggestions: reform or repeal collective bargaining laws, like Wisconsin, Tennessee, and Iowa have done; make it easier for teachers to opt out of the unions; and create independent unions that are separate from the AFT and NEA.
Ford can’t find enough skilled workers to run its factories. The problem isn’t just the paucity of trade schools, argues Robert Pondiscio, but America’s inability to help students develop basic academic skills.
Robert’s, Dan’s, and Anna’s AEI colleague Nat Malkus was curious whether California’s wildfires and ICE raids could explain the slowdown in its progress curbing chronic absenteeism, so in true Nat style, he dug into the data. His conclusion? “The takeaway here is not that wildfires and immigration enforcement have no impact on attendance in the 2025 school year—I believe both do. Rather, it’s that last year’s larger slowdown in progress on attendance is not easily attributable to novel external factors.” And sadly, that slowdown is evident in states nationwide.
Now let’s turn to Georgia, where Karen Vaites is dismayed that the state’s grab bag of approved reading programs has resulted in lots of districts making poor choices. “Among districts using approved programs, most selected basals,” Karen writes. “The programs with stronger evidence of efficacy (CKLA and Bookworms with standout performance in studies, EL Education with frequent use in top-performing states Louisiana and Tennessee) have much less traction in Georgia.” And echoing Nat on chronic absenteeism, it’s not just one state. She’s worried about problematic state-approved lists in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, too.
Let’s stick with the science of reading for a moment. Chad Aldeman
readskimmed all 48 submissions to the Fordham Institute’s Wonkathon on implementing state reading laws and highlights his favorites. (Thanks, Chad!) Lots of folks are worried that efforts are leaving out important elements, including pre-K, writing, content knowledge, frequent assessment, and parental engagement. And everyone agrees that implementation can’t be a box-checking exercise, but is an ongoing, continuous process. As Kymyona Burk writes about the work in Mississippi, “we put a stake in the ground, and with strong leadership and in partnership with schools and districts we continue to do the work required to ensure our landmark legislation lives up to its promise.” Vote for the Wisest Wonk by Monday!Meanwhile, Mike McShane offers six lessons that microschools can take from the charter movement. Among my favorites: widen your human capital pipelines, build networks, and don’t forget that education is political.
I hope the microschools folks are listening to Mike, because the sector is growing rapidly, perhaps too rapidly for quality-control guardrails to hold (insofar as there are any). That’s my take, at least, from a new paper by Ron Matus on à la carte education in Florida. “This school year,” according to Ron, “140,000 Florida students will participate in à la carte learning via state-supported education savings accounts, up from 8,465 five years ago. Their parents will spend more than $1 billion in ESA funds.” And: “Last year, 4,318 à la carte providers in Florida received ESA funding, more than double the year prior. Many of them are tutors and therapists, but a growing number offer more specialized and innovative services… Former public school teachers are also a driving force in creating them, just as they’ve been with microschools.” Buckle up!
GMTA. Last week, I used Beth Macy’s new quasi-memoir on growing up in impoverished Ohio to discuss Stéphane Lavertu’s new Fordham study on high-achieving low-income students. This week Jessica Grose uses it as a jumping-off point for her New York Times column on the challenges of rural poverty. The most interesting passages, though, have to do with the college versus trade school debate. “I sometimes detect a blithe condescension to the ‘learn a trade’ advice,” Jessica writes, “as if learning how to weld or how to become an HVAC specialist or a cosmetologist is easy. These jobs can require the same kinds of executive functioning, people skills and intelligence that a college education requires, just applied differently.”
Freddie is right that it’s a shame (and irrational) that so many parents are driving their kids to school when they could walk, bike, or take the school bus. But are we sure it’s “fear” that’s (ahem) driving that habit? Maybe the parents want to give their kids a little more sleep in the morning or need to quickly shuttle them to activities in the afternoon.
Matt Yglesias, meanwhile, celebrates the bipartisan, cross-ideological support for school phone bans, even though the causal evidence of harm is rather weak. “It is somewhat challenging to pin down the precise causal impact of smartphones on human welfare,” Matt concedes, “but we know very clearly that people are largely using these devices to waste time in low-value ways…. A good place to start taking action against overconsumption is in spheres of life where the baseline expectations for human freedom are lower: the lives of children, especially the parts spent physically in school.”
Tennessee officials propose a reduction in world language requirements to make room for more CTE electives. Sounds familiar! —Lillian Avedian, Nashville Banner
The conventional wisdom is that Hispanic and especially Black students are over-identified for special education services. But as Paul Morgan’s research has shown, students of color are in fact under-identified, and thus under-served, for several learning disabilities, including dyslexia. The implications are stark and go beyond reading struggles. —Jessika Harkay, The 74
“Trump made the citizenship test harder. What if every American had to take it?”
—James Traub, The New York Times
See you Tuesday,
Mike