resident Donald Trump has revived a longstanding Republican Party call to abolish the U.S. Department of Education. While the Cabinet-level department needs an act of Congress to be eliminated, the Trump administration is using its hiring and firing power to enact reductions in force that have gutted about half of the department’s employees, and executive orders to provide new guidance.
The fiscal year 2026 budget looms as well, with the Trump administration proposing a 15 percent funding cut to the Education Department and major changes to key K-12 and higher education programs as of this writing.
“Over the past 45 years, the Department has spent nearly $3 trillion while producing virtually no improvement in student outcomes,” Department of Education representatives wrote to CSBA in comments for this story. “This year’s National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) revealed a national crisis: 70 percent of eighth graders were below proficient in reading, and 72 percent were below proficient in math. The Department places significant regulatory burdens on state, local and higher education entities. For example, one organization found that the Department of Education puts more than 2,000 unique data reporting requirements on states annually. It is long past time the federal government get out of education and empower parents, students, teachers and local leaders to make decisions that are best for their students.”
While the administration proposes to keep Title I funds — federal money allocated to high-poverty schools to supplement their budgets — and Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) funding at previous levels, it is proposing to combine 18 smaller programs into a single block grant to states. The funding for those programs provides support for things like teacher training, at-risk students, literacy instruction, rural schools, arts education, school safety and students experiencing homelessness.
This proposal makes advocates nervous, including Kayla Patrick, a senior fellow at The Century Foundation, who shared her thoughts during a July 30 webinar hosted by the Campaign for Grade-Level Reading that examined how the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act affects public education in rural areas.
“This block grant would eliminate the targeted purpose, guardrails and accountability for each of those individual programs, which will particularly affect small and high-need districts,” Patrick said. “Block grants strip federal funding of its purpose, so those funds will no longer be required to be invested in rural areas. That means rural students can be easily overlooked, especially in states where education funding has been put on the back burner. States will have to weigh competing needs.”
In July, the bipartisan Senate Appropriations Committee rejected efforts to shrink the department and move its functions to other agencies and put forward for a full floor vote legislation that maintains all existing K-12 grant programs as separate funding streams. It also extends current year funding and staffing levels for Education Department offices the Trump administration has been downsizing, including the Office for Civil Rights, the Institute for Educational Sciences and comprehensive centers that provide technical assistance to states and local educational agencies.
Also included in the Senate Appropriations bill are new requirements for the Education Department to send funds to states and schools on time, maintain staffing necessary to execute tasks required by law and prohibit the department from offloading core functions to other agencies.
However, on Sept. 1, House Republicans proposed $12 billion in cuts to the Education Department budget, reflective of the President’s proposal. Importantly, the House bill contains a $5.2 billion cut, a 27 percent reduction, to Title I funding that supports schools serving low-income populations.
At the time of printing this magazine in early November, Congress still had not passed a continuing resolution to fund the government, and it has been shut down since Oct. 1.
To understand why many education advocates are fighting to preserve the department and its funding, it helps to have a historical view of the department and its current functions.
The first federal Department of Education was created in 1867 during Reconstruction by President Andrew Johnson and its primary function was to collect data about the education happening in each state. According to historian Jonathan Zimmerman, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Johnson signed the department into existence as a capitulation to the Republican Party (the party of Lincoln, that at the time, supported Reconstruction).
“The department was made small in order to get Johnson to sign it. It was just four people, but it was nevertheless so controversial among opponents of Reconstruction that a year later it went away,” Zimmerman said. “Part of the reason was that Henry Barnard, the northern educator that was selected to be in charge of it, asked to be able to hire more people. It only lasts a year because the same opponents of Reconstruction opposed the department. They saw, correctly, that part of the goal of involving the federal government in education was to assist African Americans and formerly enslaved people. And this was a very nascent, very tiny attempt to do so — but it was symbolic, and that’s both the reason it was created and the reason it went away.”
In comments for this story, California Department of Education (CDE) Chief Deputy Superintendent of Public Instruction David Schapira said the state receives about $7.9 billion in federal funding annually for preschool through college education, representing about 6 percent of the state’s education budget. He noted though, that “federal funding may represent a more significant percentage of the budget in some districts, especially those in rural areas.”
“In spite of divisive and disruptive actions from Washington, CDE has remained steadfastly focused on moving the needle for student achievement,” Schapira continued. “To that end, State Superintendent Tony Thurmond and CDE leadership have maintained communication with local educational agencies through meetings, webinars, social media and a dedicated webpage to address our responses to these federal actions. This page includes letters to the field as well as news releases to help educators and families understand any impact on California’s public schools and students, or lack thereof, resulting from federal actions and communications.”
In 1868, the department was downgraded to the Office of Education and remained so, even through the passage of major education legislation, such as The Elementary and Secondary Education Act (1965), Higher Education Act (1965), and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (1975).
“After Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, you see a much greater engagement of the federal government at every level in education, especially the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965,” said Zimmerman. “That’s the one that Lyndon Johnson signs, which is really the first major incursion of federal dollars into the system. But for the next decade and a half, all that money went through an agency that was called Health, Education and Welfare. And the argument in the mid-70s was that the federal government was now so deeply engaged in education that it needed a separate department for it.”
When Jimmy Carter ran for president in 1976, he pledged to increase education access and create an education department — a move that earned him the endorsement of National Education Association. In 1979, Congress passed the Department of Education Organization Act to place all the separate educational arms under one department. President Ronald Reagan expressed wanting to abolish the Education Department, but was derailed by his choice for education secretary.
“Reagan chose a guy named Terrel Bell to be secretary of education who commissioned a report called The Nation at Risk, about how our schools were underperforming. And it resonated so deeply with the public that it became politically impossible for Reagan to get rid of the Department of Education,” Zimmerman explained.
The department would see its biggest changes under President George W. Bush, when in 2002 No Child Left Behind was instituted. “No Child Left Behind represented the biggest incursion of federal power into American education ever. It wasn’t just the Feds giving money, it was the Feds saying things like, you’ve got to test all the kids in grades 3 through 8. You have to design all kinds of remedies. All the schools have to be proficient by 2014.”
The current Education Department oversees the distribution of funding for major initiatives, conducts civil rights investigations, collects data and conducts research, and distributes loans for college students.
The biggest funding streams are Title I, an $18.4 billion program that sends funds to low-income schools, and IDEA, a $14.2 billion initiative that helps schools pay for special education services. Other funding is intended to support career technical education, teacher training and support for multilingual learners, among other funding streams. These grant programs amount to about 10 percent of the nation’s school spending.
The department’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) is charged with investigating and resolving civil rights law violations in schools. In the 2022–23 school year, there were nearly 62,000 state dispute resolution requests filed in the U.S. and its territories, including due process complaints, written state complaints and mediation requests. The Office for Civil Rights had about 12,000 open cases — half of them involving disability discrimination — when the Trump administration fired about half its staff and closed seven of its 12 regional offices. For fiscal year 2026, the White House’s proposed OCR budget is $91 million, a 35 percent drop. In the meantime, a federal judge in June ordered the department to bring back hundreds of civil rights enforcement staff. The administration began bringing back staff in September, according to a court filing.
The OCR already had a backlog issue, and the current administration is not keeping publicly available records of the new cases it is investigating. The pending cases webpage has not been updated since Jan. 14, 2025.
“There already were backlogs with folks waiting months to get some sort of resolution or update, and it’s just going to increase exponentially,” said Julie Marsh, professor of Education Policy at the Rossier School of Education and Sol Price School of Public Policy at the University of Southern California. “I think the longer-term impact is that it’s going to leave fewer opportunities and avenues for families to go to, particularly folks who don’t have the funds to support private legal support. And the whole idea of OCR was to help, especially folks who either couldn’t afford private legal representation or hadn’t been making progress within their local or state arenas; the federal government was meant to be this backstop.”
According to the Mercury News, as of July 2025, the Trump administration has opened more than 111 investigations into colleges and universities, including at least 18 investigations into California universities and two investigations into the California Department of Education. Most of these cases are investigations into antisemitism and allowing transgender athletes to play on the sports teams they identify with.
The administration has also issued Dear Colleague letters prohibiting the use of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) in providing targeted services for historically underserved student racial and ethnic groups. The California Department of Education has repeatedly responded to the administration, stressing that “a Dear Colleague Letter is not law and cannot by itself be an enforcement mechanism.” As of the writing of this story, the latest update on Aug. 14, in one of the lawsuits challenging the federal administration’s recent actions relating to DEI, a federal court permanently enjoined the Education Department from enforcing the Feb. 14, 2025, Dear Colleague letter and the April 3 Education Department’s request that states sign and return a certification that each state and its LEAs “comply with ED’s unsupported and incorrect interpretation of Title VI with respect to diversity, equity and inclusion practices,” according to an Aug. 15 letter from Schapira.
Another deep area of concern for Marsh and much of the education research community is the canceling of research contracts and the dismantling of the Institute of Education Sciences. “I think it’s a very serious threat to informed education policymaking and I think we all recognize that reliable data and rigorous research can help us improve. Sound policy depends on data,” Marsh said. “The [National Assessment for Education Progress] which is part of that, is the only common yardstick that we have to measure the progress of our students in reading and math, and it helps us identify disparities, make comparisons, track progress.”
Marsh went on to cite the loss of longitudinal studies midstream, the pulling of university research grants, and the loss of a “common core of very important data on schools, teachers, funding, student dropouts — and those data are used to allocate the federal funds.”
In a time marked by shifts in federal policy, declining enrollment and rising costs, the board’s role as stewards of local education finance is more critical than ever.
In response to concerns from board members around the state, CSBA hosted a webinar, “Maximizing Impact: Prioritizing investments for students’ long-term success,” featuring education researchers from WestEd sharing the current budget landscape and strategies on navigating uncertain budget scenarios.
School boards have a critical role in being stewards of the LEA budget. In times of fiscal uncertainty, it is important to enact strategies for prioritizing investments that center both student need and student outcomes, explained WestEd Education Finance and Systems Planning Director Kelsey Krausen.
“Why is it important to take a systematic approach to prioritizing investments?” Krausen asked. “We know that most schools and districts offer a really wide range of programming and services for students beyond just the core curriculum — after-school programming, summer school, tutoring, [social-emotional learning], edtech, just to name a few — but many of those programs don’t have clearly defined objectives and metrics for measuring whether or not they’re having their intended impact on student outcomes.”
Krausen shared some high-level considerations for budget decisions. She recognized that LEAs have made great progress in using student data to understand needs in the system.
“Some districts are using data not just to look at student needs but also student outcomes to understand the effectiveness of programs,” Krausen said. “It’s the next step districts can take in really understanding what are those programs that are providing a real value-add for students, schools, for teachers, and then pairing that data with data on costs to understand for every dollar spent, what is the return on investment we’re seeing?”
That information needs to be used with the available budget data in thinking about how to prioritize and make decisions about the budget. This approach is known as Academic Return on Investment. Using all this data together allows LEAs to look at programs in a more holistic way including non-monetary resources like the time invested.
Krausen outlined basic steps to begin the process of evaluating programs to prioritize investments:
- Determine which programs to focus on — usually high priority and aligned with Local Control and Accountability Plan goals — then inventory those programs. Are there clear objectives aligned with
- Pairing that impact data with data on costs and budget constraints.
- Determine which of these programs might need to be sustained over time due to their impact on improving student outcomes and which are ready to sunset because they aren’t having the intended impact.
CSBA Research and Education Policy Development Senior Director Mary Gardner Briggs outlined member concerns about the challenge of handling budgets during an uncertain period. “The bottom line is thinking about how you as a governance team can approach your role in the school budget process with an impact on student outcomes in mind,” she said.