Staff Editorial

President-elect Donald Trump is continuing a nearly 45-year-old Republican tradition by promising to cripple American education. Like every harebrained idea conservatives have, this too is being done in the name of states’ rights.

One of the proposals in Trump’s campaign platform, Agenda47, is to close the U.S. Department of Education, which, according to the department’s website, “establishes policy for, administers and coordinates most federal assistance for education.”

The department doles federal money out to high-poverty schools through Title I (around $18 billion per year), education subsidies to states (around $14 billion per year) and Pell Grants (around $28 billion per year), which help low-income students pay for higher education.

Agenda47 doesn’t go into much detail about how a second Trump administration will go about closing the department. All it says is that he plans to “send it back to the states” and laments that America “spends more money per pupil than any other Country in the World,” despite being at the “bottom of every education list in terms of results.”

But that’s not true. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has been assessing the performance of 15-year-old students in reading, mathematics and science literacy every three years since 2000.

Compared to 37 other OECD member nations, the U.S. ranked 28th in math as of 2022, but we also ranked 12th in science and 9th in reading, far from the bottom of the list.

That’s not to say the U.S. education system doesn’t need help. The National Center for Education Statistics found that math scores among 13-year-olds have both declined back to levels last seen in 1990. Reading scores among students have fallen back to 1971 levels.

The solution isn’t austerity. Public schools in the U.S. are mainly funded through state government aid and local property taxes, which means the amount of money a school receives, and therefore the quality of education they are able to supply, depends on how wealthy a state is and how affluent the residents living in the school district are. Some of the worst performing schools in the country are also the least funded. According to a 2018 working paper by C. Kirabo Jackson for the National Bureau of Economic Research, “all but one of the several multi-state studies found a strong link between spending and outcomes — indicating that money matters on average.”

The department has been under threat since its inception in 1979 when former President Jimmy Carter spun it off from the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, a bad omen for Trump’s anti-education agenda.

Republicans have been vowing to achieve a balanced budget via, in-part, shuttering the department since its inception, but they’ve yet to do it. Trump’s chances of achieving this long-time goal are probably just as slim as they’ve been for any other Republican president. So maybe there’s nothing to worry about.