The U.S. Department of Education, Explained

As far as education policies go in the 2024 presidential election, calls from Republicans to abolish the U.S. Department of Education have generated significant debate during a campaign season when politicians’ attention is largely focused elsewhere.

On the campaign trail and in his platform, former President Donald Trump has called for the federal agency’s elimination, arguing recently that it’s an “abuse of your taxpayer dollars” that allows schools to “indoctrinate America’s youth.”

The Republican Party’s official platform calls for shuttering the 45-year-old agency.

And Project 2025, the conservative policy document spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation and written by a number of former Trump aides and allies to the former president, also proposes scrapping the department and making major changes to the two major funding streams it oversees: converting funding for the Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act into “no-strings-attached” block grants to states and ending Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which provides funding for schools with high populations of low-income students.

Trump’s Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, opposes eliminating the department, saying in her Democratic National Convention address that “we are not going to let him eliminate the Department of Education that funds our public schools.”

In reality, getting rid of the Education Department would require an act of Congress, which would be nearly impossible to pass without Republican control of both the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate. Even then, it might not happen. While the idea has been floated around elections and in conservative circles for decades, proposals to eradicate the department have never gotten off the ground.

The conversations about it, however, make one thing clear: Many people don’t have a full understanding of what the federal Education Department does and how it affects K-12 schools, said Rachel Perera, a researcher at the Brown Center of Education Policy at the Brookings Institution.

“There doesn’t seem to be an understanding that in the U.S., most education policy around early childhood, K-12, higher ed. … the federal role is very narrowly defined,” Perera said.

The federal Education Department doesn’t decide what schools can and cannot teach; that is largely determined by state lawmakers and local school boards. It also doesn’t allocate most of the funding that schools receive, which primarily comes from state and local funding formulas.

With calls for the department’s elimination continuing to surface in the remaining weeks of the 2024 campaign, Education Week decided to break down how the federal Education Department works and what it does for K-12 schools.

How was the Education Department created?

The federal government has long had a role in education.

President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, a law that provided funding to support equal access to education, in 1965, establishing Title I, which aims to support education of students living in poverty. Ten years later, in 1975, Congress enacted the Education for All Handicapped Children Act, to support states in meeting the needs of students with disabilities. That law was amended in 1990 to become the Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act, known as IDEA.

On Oct. 17, 1979, then-President Jimmy Carter signed a law creating the U.S. Department of Education. Beforehand, all federal education policymaking and enforcement of federal education laws fell under the purview of the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, which was renamed the Department of Health and Human Services when the law was enacted.

At the time, Carter said the goal of the department was to make educational issues a “top-level priority,” hold federal education programs accountable, streamline federal education funding, and ultimately give local communities control of their schools.

The department quickly faced opposition when President Ronald Reagan came into office. Reagan’s education secretary, Terrel H. Bell, issued a 91-page memo recommending that the agency be converted into a small foundation for conducting research. That memo, the first effort to abolish the department, didn’t lead to any real action, however.

What are the different offices in the Education Department?

The Education Department is broken down into various offices, which oversee specific programs. The offices with the most oversight of K-12 schools are:

• The Office of Elementary and Secondary Education, which oversees policy to support state agencies and school districts in improving preschool, elementary, and secondary school student achievement;
• The Office of English Language Acquisition, which works to improve academic outcomes and access for English Learners;
• The Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services, which supports the education of students with disabilities;
• The Institute of Education Sciences, which facilitates research on educational issues and student academic performance;
• The Office for Civil Rights, which enforces laws prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sex, race, religion, and disability status;
• And the Office of Career, Technical, and Adult Education, which supports career preparation programs for K-12 students.

What does the Education Department do for K-12 schools?

At the most basic level, the department administers a budget of nearly $80 billion that covers programs addressing prekindergarten through postsecondary education.

The agency’s budget pays for a variety of education grant programs. The two largest for K-12 schools are Title I, an $18.4 billion program that sends extra money to schools with high populations of low-income students, and IDEA, a $14.2 billion program that helps schools pay for special education services for students with disabilities. IDEA lays out the requirements schools need to follow in providing special education.

The department also has a slew of smaller grants that support schools. The Carl D. Perkins Career and Technical Education Act of 2006, known as Perkins V, provides $1.4 billion annually to support career and technical education in K-12 schools. Title II, Part A of the Every Student Succeeds Act provides schools with around $2.2 billion in funding for training, professional development, and support for new teachers. And Title III of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act is a nearly $900 million program that provides funding to support schools’ efforts to educate multilingual learners.

The federal Education Department has also stepped in to oversee supplemental funding for schools that Congress has approved in emergencies such as the Great Recession and the COVID pandemic.

The department distributed almost $190 billion to schools, approved through three acts of Congress in 2020 and 2021, to help them reopen from pandemic closures and support students’ academic recovery.

Even with these large federal grant programs, the U.S. Department of Education is not the primary funder of the nation’s schools. States and local governments provide the lion’s share of funding. In 2020-21, the most recent year for which federal data are available, the federal government was responsible for 10.6 percent of the nation’s spending on public schools, and that share was elevated due to the infusion of COVID-relief funds.

Two other major federal education initiatives fall outside the U.S. Department of Education. The Department of Health and Human Services oversees the Head Start program for preschool-age children from low-income families. And the Department of Agriculture oversees the National School Lunch Program, which underwrites school meals.

Many of the department’s functions have to do with higher education. It issues student loans; it oversee the Federal Application for Free Student Aid, which helps students qualify for college financial aid; and the Pell Grant, which supports college students with “exceptional financial need.”

“Do people know anything about the Department of Education? Maybe not. But have they ever heard of the Pell Grant? Probably so,” said former Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, who served under former President George W. Bush.

How does the Education Department enforce civil rights law?

The other central task of the federal department is to identify, investigate, and resolve school violations of civil rights laws through its office for civil rights, commonly known as OCR.

Federal laws prohibit schools from discriminating against students or staff on the basis of sex, race, religion, and disability status.

The office for civil rights receives complaints from students, staff members, parents, or other community members alleging that a school has violated one or more of those civil rights laws—commonly Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA).

The department then investigates the claim and determines whether the school has violated the law. If the department determines a school has violated the law, the school could be at risk of losing federal funding, but such a consequence is rare. Often, OCR will work with schools to help them come into compliance with civil rights laws before revoking funding.

The office for civil rights is a key function that affects how schools operate from day to day, Brookings’ Perera said.

“All of those enforcement efforts do a lot of work to ensure that all students are able to access education environments free of discrimination,” Perera said.

How the Education Department interprets civil rights laws has varied by presidential administration.

Most recently, the Biden administration issued revised rules to Title IX, which prohibits sex discrimination at schools that receive federal funding, to explicitly include gender identity and sexual orientation in the definition of sex-based discrimination. That rule is currently on hold in 26 states—and at individual schools throughout much of the rest of the country—after states and others argued in a series of lawsuits that the new rules represented an overreach of the administration’s power.

Going forward, administrations may not be as willing to change interpretations of federal law. In June, the U.S. Supreme Court overruled a 1984 decision that required courts to defer to federal agencies, like the Education Department, for “reasonable interpretations” of federal law. That means the office for civil rights could have limited latitude in how it interprets and enforces civil rights laws going forward.

What role does the Education Department have in facilitating educational research?

Another primary function of the Education Department involves funding education research. The agency includes the Institute of Education Sciences, which oversees education statistics, research, and evaluation.

The institute is made up of the National Center for Education Statistics, the National Center for Education Research, the National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance, and the National Center for Special Education Research.

Each center collects and analyzes data on student performance, well-being, demographics, and any other information that can help researchers better understand the current state of education. It’s best known for administering the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or the Nation’s Report Card, which provides a nationwide snapshot of students’ academic performance in reading, math, science, and social studies.

“We have a very local education system in the U.S. and without these functions, we wouldn’t understand the scale and scope of inequality, which means we wouldn’t be well positioned to develop policies and practices and programs to remedy that inequality,” Perera said.

How have different administrations used the Education Department?

Whether or not a president makes a difference for K-12 schools largely depends on how they use the Education Department.

Bush kick-started a new era in school accountability when he signed the No Child Left Behind Act in 2001, an update to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. The law, which had bipartisan support, aimed to close achievement gaps between poor and minority students and their peers by scaling up the federal government’s role in school accountability.

It required states to test students in reading and math in grades 3-8 and set a goal of bringing all students to the “proficient” level on those tests by the 2013-14 school year.

“President Bush’s philosophy and mine was that if we’re going to spend money, billions and millions of dollars on behalf of a kind of civil rights and opportunity agenda, that we ought to get something for it,” said Spellings, who served as education secretary from 2005 to 2009, during Bush’s second term.

Former President Barack Obama put his own spin on the main federal education law by signing the Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015, which replaced No Child Left Behind. And before that, he launched Race to the Top, a $4 billion competitive grant program that rewarded states that embraced uniform, national standards; revamped data systems; dramatic school turnaround strategies; charter schools; and teacher evaluations based in part on student test scores.

Since then, the Trump and Biden administrations have focused less on increasing the federal role in K-12 schools. The Education Department in the Trump era, led by former Secretary Betsy DeVos, focused much of its attention on expanding and advocating for school choice.

In 2016, Trump proposed a $20 million federal voucher program, which never came to fruition. He also called for cutting funding for or fully eliminating the Education Department, but by the end of his first term, his administration had increased education funding by $5 billion, to around $73 billion.

The Biden administration has focused its K-12 efforts on pandemic recovery and its revision of Title IX rather than an ambitious agenda to rewrite education policies. It also had ambitious plans for student loan relief, which Congress and courts ultimately shut down, and has overseen the bungled implementation of the new FAFSA form, which aimed to modernize the process for applying for student aid but was riddled with technical defects and delays in its first year.

With Bush and Obama, “essentially we had 16 years of a kind of steady-as-you-go policy agenda supported and spoken about by the presidents,” Spellings said. “Those laws are still on the books, but it’s more of an era of local control.”

How could the 2024 presidential election change the Education Department?

Assuming the Education Department remains in the next presidential administration, the agency would take on different priorities depending on who’s elected.

For Trump, supporting the expansion of private school choice would likely be a priority for the federal department. According to the 2024 GOP platform, the former president would also revoke federal funding for any school “pushing critical race theory, radical gender ideology, and any other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content.”

Harris, who hasn’t made K-12 issues a key part of her campaign, has promised to block efforts to eliminate the Education Department. The 2024 Democratic Party platform also calls for fully funding IDEA, raising teacher pay, and establishing universal free preschool for 4-year-olds.

Education Week has a full breakdown of the two campaigns’ K-12 agendas in its 2024 election guide.