How Trump Is Changing the Federal Government’s Role in Schools

In April, the fight over a Long Island school district’s mascot caught the attention of President Donald Trump.

The Massapequa district had refused to abandon its “Chiefs” logo under a New York state policy prohibiting schools’ use of Native American imagery without local tribes’ permission. Its legal challenge to the state mandate was coming up short. So, it sought the Trump administration’s help.

What followed had all the hallmarks of the federal government’s involvement in public education during Trump’s second term so far.

The president himself waded into the local affair with a social media post, and the U.S. Department of Education swiftly launched a civil rights investigation—not of the Massapequa district but of New York’s state education agency.

Within a month, the Education Department—which has traditionally taken years to complete many civil rights probes—determined that the Democrat-led state’s mascot policy violated a 60-year-old civil rights law meant to protect racial minorities from discrimination. The federal agency ordered New York to change its policy or face possible legal action and the loss of federal education funds.

Trump returned to office in January on a pledge to “move education back to the states” and eliminate the Education Department—essentially promising a dramatic contraction of the federal role in schools.

Yet, here was the president taking a special interest in the affairs of a single district, unleashing the full force of the federal agency he wants to shut down to compel a state to change its own policy, and using a civil rights law not to protect a racial minority but challenge a rule meant to eradicate stereotypes directed at a minority group.

And so just as the Trump administration pares back the Education Department and invites states to seek relief from “burdensome” federal regulations, it’s also inserting itself more forcefully into state and local school affairs, particularly to fight what it’s characterized as a leftward lurch in K-12 education (which others defend as an effort to ensure schools welcome all students and boost the performance of those who have traditionally struggled).

The Trump administration has launched investigations into districts, state education departments, and athletic associations to compel them to bar transgender girls from girls’ sports. It tried to force every state and district to sign a certification disavowing “illegal DEI” (diversity, equity, and inclusion).

It withheld nearly $7 billion from schools for weeks this summer in an effort to root out a “radical, left-wing agenda.” And it’s continued to terminate dozens of education grants midstream with little notice, often because it claims the projects advance DEI.

The administration has backed off some of these moves and others under public pressure and court orders. But local and state education leaders, who likely anticipated less intervention from the Trump administration, have instead been forced to keep the federal government top of mind when making decisions.

At any moment, the office for civil rights could announce an investigation into a program the administration says promotes “DEI” or “gender ideology extremism.” A district could discover a previously awarded grant has suddenly been terminated. Or schools could learn they won’t receive long-expected federal funds due to a spontaneous freeze. There’s also the potential for funding cuts that would force districts to rethink how they pay for basic services going forward.

“We have this moment where federal intervention in education arguably hasn’t been higher, and it has absolutely nothing to do with legislation, and it’s not grounded in some sort of major, critical court case like we saw with Brown v. Board,” said Jonathan Collins, a professor and co-director of the politics and education program at Columbia University, Teachers College.

A forceful federal role

The federal government’s place in the nation’s public schools has always been unsettled and the subject of debate, as there’s long been wide agreement that education is primarily a state and local affair—a principle that’s even written into the 1979 law that formed the U.S. Department of Education.

Through its first seven-plus months, however, the second Trump administration has pushed that persistent and unresolved debate into a new chapter. While it’s sold the idea of dismantling the Education Department and entrusting states with more authority (though it’s done little to move these ideas forward legislatively), it’s simultaneously thrust itself into school operations and, as in the Massapequa case, tried to use its authority to override state and local decisions to which it’s politically opposed.

Will the reaction to this stepped-up intervention—through state resistance, court orders, and even congressional pushback—result in a new set of guardrails defining the government’s relationship with schools? Or is this the start of a newly aggressive federal role in schools?

It’s impossible to answer these questions now. But one thing is clear: For the moment, the administration has opened the doors to a more muscular and politically motivated form of federal involvement in schools—and a simultaneous retreat from the more traditional role of providing a baseline of resources to serve students who require additional support.

Over the past century-plus, a “push-pull mechanism” involving the three branches of government and the states has led to a major expansion of the federal role in education, followed by actions from those same players to contain it, said Laura Schifter, a lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education who is also a senior fellow with the Aspen Institute’s Energy and Environment program and a former congressional staffer.

That tug-of-war is very much at work in the first several months of Trump’s second term, as the administration takes unilateral action and states and courts respond, slowing the president’s policies and stopping some.

“What has been happening with the administration currently on a lot of these things are much more extreme circumstances and really pulling things in one direction,” Schifter said. “And the question is whether Congress is going to step up and establish its authority.”

This historical back-and-forth—played out over the course of decades—has resulted in the advent of federal funding worth billions of dollars annually that touch virtually every district. But it has also simultaneously narrowed the purposes of those funds so they must be used to supplement state and local spending and support specific student populations.

It’s resulted in intensified testing and accountability requirements and rules that prohibit the government from dictating curriculum or usurping local school boards’ authority. And it’s also led to the relaxation of those same accountability requirements, years after Congress passed them.

Influence through leverage

Although its footprint in schools has gradually expanded, the federal government still accounts for a distinct minority of spending on public K-12 education—8% to 10% in a typical year. But the reach of the feds’ spending arguably extends much further.

That’s because as states and districts have accepted funding, they’ve had to agree to a growing list of conditions.

They’ve had to put up matching funds. They’ve had to ensure that boys and girls have equal athletic opportunities and that children with disabilities can access school buildings. They’ve had to test students annually and intervene in underperforming schools. Even though Congress never provided as much funding to pay for special education as it originally promised, schools are still required to provide special education services regardless of the cost.

“Anybody that gives a grant becomes tempted to use the leverage implicit in it for whatever purposes they now have, and elections matter,” said Paul Hill, the founder of the Center for Reinventing Public Education, whose decadeslong career in education research included leading a major review of Title I as part of its 1977 congressional reauthorization.

It’s that leverage that the federal government has used to ensure students have equal access to schools and the services they provide.

That leverage has also given local leaders less latitude to make decisions—but there’s been no drastic, universal, or sustained improvement in student performance to show for it, said Rick Hess, a senior fellow and the director of education policy studies at the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute and a frequent contributor to Education Week Opinion.

“The federal government doesn’t run schools. It doesn’t hire teachers,” he said. “What it can do when it comes to schools is basically spend money and write rules, and so it’s done those things.”

The Trump administration is now using this leverage to add its own conditions to funding—trying to eradicate DEI and ban transgender athletes from school sports. So, even as the administration speaks of “returning education to the states,” it’s holding onto that leverage and growing it. States, of course, can decline the funding and relieve themselves of federally imposed requirements and conditions. But no state has done that.

After efforts to improve academics, a smaller federal role

Trump’s dueling directions for federal involvement in schools follow an era during which an earlier expansion of the federal role was met with strong pushback—and new limits.

The No Child Left Behind Act of the early 2000s, passed under President George W. Bush, marked an ambitious attempt to use federal leverage to boost achievement—not simply to provide schools with supplemental resources, enforce civil rights, and facilitate education research and data collection. It required annual state testing, set ambitious proficiency goals in math and reading, and prescribed penalties for schools that continually fell short.

But years later, No Child Left Behind “was becoming an unattainable goal and one that was putting a lot of strain on state agencies and school districts,” said Anne Hyslop, who served in the Education Department during the presidency of Barack Obama.

When the Obama administration used an infusion of one-time federal education funds along with waivers from No Child Left Behind’s requirements to push its own school improvement agenda, bipartisan backlash ensued. Eventually, that led to the scaling back of the federal role through the Every Student Succeeds Act. The law, which Hyslop helped pen, returned more authority to the states and reined in the education secretary’s power—while retaining annual testing requirements.

Ever since, “the federal government hasn’t had significant influence over education,” said Collins of Columbia University. “And nothing that happened during the Biden administration and the first Trump administration did anything to reclaim federal authority.”

What’s next?

Trump is unlikely to launch another academic improvement effort on the scale of No Child Left Behind. But will he succeed in expanding the federal government’s role (in spite of the administration’s messaging), so schools have to bend to his political will?

In the Massapequa mascot case, the Education Department referred New York state to the Justice Department after state officials refused to change the mascot policy; the federal agency could now sue over it. The Education Department has already sued two other states controlled by Democrats—California and Maine—to get them to abandon their transgender-athlete policies.

There’s little indication the Trump administration will let up on these and other efforts, even as he and his education appointees extol the virtues of entrusting states with more authority.

But there is potential for outside forces to intervene and codify a different federal role in schools from the one that the Trump administration appears to be envisioning. And that could come from the courts or Congress, even though neither branch has consistently pushed back on the administration.

To date, Trump’s policies have drawn more than 50 education-related lawsuits that have often slowed—and sometimes stopped—the president’s agenda. And while the Republican-controlled Congress has generally been hesitant to challenge the administration, the Senate’s appropriations committee in late July took a decisive, bipartisan vote rejecting the president’s proposed budget cuts to education programs and resisting his efforts to shrink the Education Department and move its functions to other agencies. (Granted, that was only one committee vote months before a budget deadline.)

In terms of answering the big question—what the federal role in education will look like after the Trump administration—it’s still anybody’s guess. But if history is a guide, some elements of Trump’s aggressive intervention could stick while a subsequent president reverses others. And the response to it all from states and districts, the courts, and Congress will also determine what’s next for the nation’s schools.