The Trump administration could enter office in January with proposals to cut, redirect, restructure, and even eliminate key streams of funding for K-12 schools, after four years when schools received more money from the federal government than ever before.
Trump and his advisers have also said in recent days that they believe the president should be able to choose not to spend money Congress has approved—potentially paving the way for priorities like withholding funds from schools that Trump says, without evidence, are “pushing critical race theory” and “transgender insanity.” Under current federal law, the president can’t override Congress’ spending decisions, and the federal government can’t control schools’ curriculum choices.
Trump’s administration will have to overcome political resistance, administrative hurdles, and longstanding legal precedent to accomplish some of its most ambitious goals. And roughly 90 percent of the $850 billion America spends annually on K-12 education comes from state and local sources, not the federal government. Trump and Congress have virtually no control over those funds.
Even so, after spending the last four years recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic, school districts are already bracing for a period of fiscal turbulence and whiplash that could strain their efforts to meet students’ complex needs.
“The education community feels like we are bracing for an attack on the value of federal investments in education,” said Sarah Abernathy, executive director of the Committee for Education Funding, a coalition of K-12 advocacy groups. “If there’s less money from the federal government, I don’t know that state and local budgets can expand to fill that need. You have fewer teachers, fewer opportunities, fewer services. There’s just no way around it.”
Schools are expecting fewer federal dollars for education in the coming years
The new presidential administration’s policy priorities have come into focus through the Trump campaign’s published materials, and through the widely circulated conservative policy document Project 2025, whose authors include Russell Vought, Trump’s choice to run the Office of Management and Budget.
A few key themes are clear: shifting federal responsibility for policy and funding to states and local districts, slashing investments that support vulnerable students, and eliminating regulations to promote competition in the education landscape.
If the education policies laid out in those documents were to take effect, federal funding for low-income students would fade out over the next decade; Congress would invest billions of dollars a year in tax credits for donors who support groups that award private-school scholarships; and the responsibilities for enforcing federal education laws and distributing money to states and districts would be scattered across the federal government.
The consequences would provoke existential anxiety for many of the nation’s 13,000 public school districts.
California’s superintendent of education, Tony Thurmond, has already said he would push state lawmakers to backfill gaps in federal funding for schools with state dollars.
But in states where funding is tight or lawmakers are focused on other priorities, many districts would have no choice but to raise taxes, cut services, and lay off staff.
That’s true even for districts that derive only a small share of their funding from the federal government. The 893-student Pocahontas County school district in rural West Virginia, for instance, gets about $1.05 million a year from Congress out of an operating budget of $21 million.
Losing even a portion of that would put the district in the red within the next two years, said Sherry Radcliff, the district’s treasurer and director of finance.
“It will hurt our children who need our help the most,” Radcliff said. “Then you’re going to have less people to help all the other students, so they fall further behind.”
After pandemic aid boosted budgets, Trump’s policies could deflate them
The Republican Party platform emphasizes that states and local districts should be the primary drivers of school policy and operations.
To that end, Project 2025 proposes reversing the recent trend of annual increases in funding that have boosted big-ticket federal programs like Title I, for low-income students; Title III, for English learners; and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), for students with disabilities. The policy document says most funding programs managed by the U.S. Department of Education should be converted to block grants or eliminated.
Districts have known for years that the infusion of federal money they got to help them recover from the pandemic—$190 billion in three rounds—would be running out around now, said Mark Weber, a lecturer and school finance expert at the Rutgers University Graduate School of Education.
“We were going to see this reversion anyway unless something was going to take its place,” Weber said. “Now we’re talking about doing that and then going further and cutting the funding that was sort of the baseline before the pandemic funding.”
The dollar amount for annual Title I allocations hovered between $14 billion and $16 billion until the last four years, when Congress bumped it up to more than $18 billion, spurred by President Biden’s lofty but unrealized goal of tripling the federal government’s annual Title I allocation.
During the last year of his first administration, Trump proposed to consolidate Title I and several other grant programs into a single appropriation of roughly $19 billion, roughly $4.7 billion less than the existing programs’ combined funding levels.
Earlier this year, House Republicans floated a proposal to shave the annual Title I allocation by 25 percent, from $16 billion to $12 billion.
But that proposal never made it to the House floor for a full vote. And close observers of the federal budget process think it’s unlikely Title I and other federal grant programs will face massive cuts that hit next school year.
That’s because the current federal fiscal year, FY 2025, is already halfway over. Congress still hasn’t passed a full budget for FY 2025.
Making big cuts midway through the fiscal year would mean that recipients of federal funds—schools and beyond—would have to scramble plans they’ve already been executing for months.
“If you tell us to buy 15 fighter jets and then in six months actually tell us to buy five, those 15 fighter jets are already ordered,” said Julia Martin, legislative director for the Bruman Group, an education law firm that represents school districts.
Schools “either have the choice to spend money they don’t have, or they don’t order anything because of projected cuts, and those jobs in their districts are lost,” Martin said.
Efforts to reduce federal support for key grant programs also will likely run afoul of the many members of Congress whose constituents expect and depend on the school services those funds make possible.
More than 60 percent of school districts receive Title I funds each year. In many rural parts of the country, school districts are the largest employers in their towns and regions.
The 10 states that depend on the federal government for more than 15 percent of their annual K-12 revenue are all states Trump won in the 2024 election—Alaska, Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Idaho, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, North Dakota, and South Dakota.
“You’re talking about not only affecting kids’ education but also the economy of these communities,” Abernathy said. “I don’t think that’s something that people have factored into what they may consider an easy catchphrase of eliminating the Department of Education or dramatically cutting education funding.”
Fixed costs for schools are only growing, even if funding slows
Federal law requires schools to offer services, regardless of cost, to students with disabilities and to English learners. Those obligations remain even when federal funding to meet those requirements shrinks or goes away.
Instead, districts either have to lobby their states for more money to cover those gaps, convince property owners to let them raise local taxes, or cut programs and staff that aren’t mandatory to make room for those fixed costs.
The first two aren’t an option for the Pocahontas County district in West Virginia, Radcliff said. The state doesn’t have surplus funds to spare, and residents haven’t supported a tax increase for schools there in more than a decade.
Meanwhile, the district’s share of students with disabilities has grown in recent years from 16 percent to 20 percent. The district has to pay for any services they need or risk lawsuits from parents and advocates.
If the district’s federal funding drops or goes away, the district would struggle to fund much more than the essentials, given its high percentage of students with disabilities who will require mandatory costly services.
“All we will have then are classroom teachers,” Radcliff said. “We won’t have additional support in the classrooms.”
Smaller federal grant programs could also end up on the chopping block under Trump’s watch.
Nicole Russell, executive director of the National Association for Federally Impacted Schools (NAFIS), said she’s “nauseously optimistic” that the new Congress will keep up with support for Impact Aid, a lesser-known federal grant program that offers funding support for the roughly 10 percent of U.S. school districts that are partially or entirely located on land owned by the federal government, which doesn’t pay property taxes.
Some of the program’s biggest federal champions, Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) and U.S. Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.), will be in leadership positions in the new Congress. Two of Trump’s choices for high-ranking positions—South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem for secretary of homeland security, and Rep Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., for U.S. ambassador to the United Nations—have previously earned “Friend of NAFIS” awards from the organization for their concerted efforts to support the grant program.
Russell also believes neglecting the funding needs of schools that support students from military families would be self-defeating.
“Military-connected students are far likelier than their sibling peers to serve in the military, so when we talk about our Impact Aid school districts, we’re talking about educating our future fighting force,” Russell said. “To even consider taking funding away from our public schools is doing a disservice to those military kids.”
The Trump administration wants to prioritize private school choice and flexibility for states
Private school choice programs like vouchers and education savings accounts have been a top priority for Republicans at the state level for the last couple years. With a Republican trifecta at the federal level, the party is hoping to advance a similar agenda nationwide.
House Republicans have already been moving on a bill that would invest $5 billion in tax credits each year for individuals and corporations who donate to organizations that grant scholarships to private schools.
Project 2025 also floats the idea of allowing parents to use Title I and IDEA money for private education options, instead of sending that money to states for distribution to public school districts.
To some observers, that plan seems to contrast, at least philosophically, with the widely publicized proposal to close the U.S. Department of Education and disperse some key functions to a slew of other agencies.
“This administration is sending out signals that it wants to expand school choice, but taking away the lever from itself in order to do that,” Weber said. “If you’re not going to use federal funds to move policy, well, you can’t move policy federally.”
Another plank of the Project 2025 agenda is to convert key federal grant programs, including Title I and IDEA, to “block grants.” That model dates back to the 1940s and 1950s, when scholars and public officials wanted to rein in what they saw as unmitigated chaos in federal policy.
Right now, Title I and IDEA flow to districts via complex formulas that aim to steer the money toward the states, school districts, and students with the greatest needs. They also come with strings attached—districts have to use those dollars for specific purposes.
Block grants, by contrast, are simply large chunks of money that recipients can use at their discretion within broad parameters.
“Suddenly some schools might decide they’re going to use all of it for one purpose,” Abernathy said. “So some schools might decide it’s more important to keep paying teachers, but now they have no after-school programming.”
Advocates also worry they’d lose the ability to make a strong case for making a certain funding issue a national priority if states and schools get federal money through unrestricted block grants. It would be virtually impossible to make comparisons that track the same metrics across all the states.
“Without the evaluation showing how this money was used, it’s harder to make a case that it’s important,” Abernathy said.
Trump could upend decades of education policy precedent
The second Trump administration is striving for its federal education policy to mark a distinct break from recent decades.
Block grants and private school choice could have the effect of undoing the accountability regime that has been a bipartisan priority of education policymakers since the turn of the century with President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind Initiative, according to Nora Gordon, a professor of public policy at Georgetown University.
If the requirement for nationwide standardized testing went away, some states would likely keep offering the same exams, some states would make changes that could be positive or negative, and some states would likely do away with standardized testing altogether, Gordon said.
“If you were doing any of those things and innovating, you would need to be locked in your outcomes to know, is this an innovation? What happens as we iterate this?” Gordon said. “When you don’t have the data for internal use, you don’t have public accountability.”
Similarly, giving money to states without requiring them to spend it on the neediest students and the neediest school districts would be a rejection of federal education law that arose in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s.
Trump’s desire to circumvent congressional spending decisions would mark an even more significant break from the tradition of checks and balances enshrined in the U.S. Constitution that keep any one of the three branches of the federal government from attaining outsized power, constitutional experts have said.
Trump hasn’t specified exactly how he would use what he believes is his rightful authority to impound congressional appropriations that contradict his priorities. But the U.S. Supreme Court, currently tilted heavily in conservatives’ favor and with a record of giving presidents additional power, could give him the opportunity to introduce a new front in the wars over education policy and much more.
“It’s more than just a spending issue. That’s a constitutional crisis,” Abernathy said. “I think it’s unlikely that the president would refuse to spend money that the Republican Congress has provided for him for a particular purpose, particularly spending that directly benefits American citizens at home.”
But, she adds, “I could be wrong.”
2024-11-27 20:46:35
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