Trump administration efforts to end DOE get failing grade from PA educators

When Andrea Fink, a 17-year public education veteran who leads the Pennsylvania State Education Association’s Southeastern region, heard about President Donald Trump’s proposal to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education – reassigning its programs and resources to other federal agencies – she immediately thought of all the services her district could lose.

They include her own role with the William Penn School District, in Delaware County – as a reading specialist for students struggling with text – as well as special education for children with learning disabilities; reading and math interventions for struggling students and those with diagnoses like autism and ADHD; English-language support for non-native students; nutrition offerings for hungry children; and even arts and cultural programs.

And that’s just at the K-12 level. Fink also worries about the students she’d nurtured over 14 years as a kindergarten teacher – and how those now heading to college might not be able to access the federal student loans currently administered by the DOE.

“It feels like an attack on teachers and communities,” said Fink, a 17-year public education veteran. Noting that the National Education Association has recently promoted the idea that protecting public education helps protect democracy, the union leader added: “I think that’s what’s at stake here. We know that when public schools thrive, communities thrive.”

Republicans have long spoken of their desire to abolish the DOE, claiming that it is bloated and inefficient – and, more recently, pointing to American students’ consistently declining math and reading scores to bolster their case. But while a federal department cannot be shuttered without the approval of Congress – an unlikely scenario – the Trump administration appears to be working around that proscription by effectively dismantling the department from within, with the stated goal of returning control of those policies and resources to the states.

Under the administration’s plan, the U.S. Department of Labor would be responsible for the DOE’s Office of Elementary and Secondary Education, which oversees the Title I funding that supports resources for economically disadvantaged students, as well as teacher training, charter schools, arts education and other programs. Many DOE resources currently support programs and services required under federal laws on disability accommodation and non-discrimination, and provide recourse for students who believe their rights have been violated.

Across Pennsylvania, educators were nearly unanimous in their condemnation of the plan, which they say would put non-educators in the position of evaluating critical educational resources and funding.

“The Department of Education was created nearly 50 years ago based on the idea that public education is a national priority – that students in every state and neighborhood should have opportunities to succeed, and that educators and support staff deserve our respect,” said PSEA President Aaron Chapin in a statement last week. “Instead, this administration is hacking away at the very protections and services our students need and our educators rely upon to do their jobs.”

Chapin also noted that the move, which is “deeply unpopular among Pennsylvanians,” is opposed by 67% of Pennsylvania voters, according to a Susquehanna Polling & Research survey conducted for PSEA in September.

However, the Department of Education has many critics, both within and externally. Many cite K-12 students’ declining performance as evidence that an entrenched Washington bureaucracy – and a growing cadre of non-instructor support positions at many schools – has not lived up to its promise. 

“The opposition is protecting a system that produces dismal results for our students,” said Madi Biedermann, a DOE spokesperson. “The Trump Administration demands better than the status quo.

“Breaking up the education bureaucracy in D.C. is a critical step in returning education to the states, but it is far from being done in a vacuum,” she added. Biedermann said the department has already taken steps to expand flexibility in the use of K-12 funding and to implement the student loan caps in recent tax legislation, which aim to make college more affordable. 

“Moving programs to better positioned agencies ensures grantees will coordinate with one less federal agency on programs specifically designed to support their communities,” she explained. “For example, transferring our Indian Education programs to the Department of Interior, which already has a Bureau of Indian Education, cuts duplication and waste.”

The potential for waste also underlies criticisms of growing support services in Pennsylvania schools, many of which are tied to DOE-related programs. According to a 2023 report issued by the Commonwealth Foundation, a conservative think tank, there are 9% more school employees today than in 2000 – including a 40% increase in administrative staff – despite an 8% decline in student enrollment over the same period.

Public education advocates say the expansion of school support staff is essential for education that is more inclusive of, and effective for, student populations that were traditionally marginalized, like immigrants and those with disabilities. “There’s no explanation to their actions beyond a very real desire to see at-risk and poor people remain at-risk and remain poor,” said state Rep. Peter Schweyer, a Lehigh Valley Democrat who chairs the House Education Committee. He called defunding the DOE “a fever dream of the right.”

In Lancaster City, public school enrollment has been on a consistently downward trend – but “our special ed and ESL populations are going through the roof,” said Christina Rojas, a 20-year educator who currently leads the Lancaster Education Association. With a growing immigrant community and diagnoses for autism, ADHD and other disabilities on the rise, she explained, “we can’t open up enough classrooms to support those populations.”

Title I is crucial, she added, to pay not only for additional classrooms and specialized instructors, but also for the professional development that keeps those instructors up-to-date with the latest research on best educational practices. Faced with pressure to trim budgets, Rojas isn’t sure that decision-makers without relevant educational experience at, say, the Department of Labor would realize how crucial – and expensive – these programs are.

“How are people who aren’t rooted in education going to be making decisions about education?” she asked rhetorically. “This is breaking down the Department of Education into bits and pieces. I think we run the risk of never being able to put it back properly … That’s my main concern.”

At the Capital Area Education Association, President Cassie McCabe seconded that anxiety about the downstream impacts of short-term decisions. The special-education teacher worries that fewer Pennsylvanians will enter the field if opportunities are winnowed not only by lost funding and programs, but also by the increased difficulty of borrowing for school if the federal loan program is dismantled.

“We’ve already seen a decrease in people going into those specialized professions,” the union leader noted, citing declining rates of state teacher certification. “I think we certified maybe four biology teachers last year for the whole state – that’s not sustainable … As people are facing those borrowing caps, these higher interest rates, they’re going to decide that it’s not worth the hard process of going into a hard profession.”

Schweyer cited student loan servicing as one of his main concerns with the DOE proposal. “Candidly, it’s already too complicated and too confusing for folks to access higher education,” he said, speaking from recent experience as the father of a first-year college student.

He is concerned about the transfer of student loan servicing to the Small Business Administration, which lacks expertise in the complex education finance system. “And No. 2, it looks like a straight-up outsourcing to private banks, which is going to make college less accessible,” added Schweyer, himself a first-generation college graduate. “Having those opportunities being ripped away from working-class folks is really concerning.”

Schweyer also questioned whether, and how effectively, funding would actually reach  local schools if the federal bureaucracy were to be dismantled. While conservatives have long argued that decentralizing funding gives states more options to tailor financing to their own schools’ needs, the Education Committee chair was skeptical.

“The talking point from the right wing was, ‘We’re going to send the responsibility, but also the resources, back to the states – so they can make their own decisions.’ But they have never returned any of the resources back to us. And it’s going to be that much harder to learn without those supports from the federal government.”

But Rachel Langan, the Commonwealth Foundation’s senior education policy analyst, noted that less than 9% of Pennsylvania’s total education funding comes from the federal government. Even if Congress were to abolish the cabinet-level department, she added, that federal money would not disappear.

“State and local governments are the true arbiters of what transpires in our kids’ classrooms,” she noted, pointing out that the federal agency neither operates schools nor sets curricula. “The Department of Education, while overseeing important roles such as information-gathering and anti-discrimination, mainly operates as a bank – issuing federal funding that comes with red tape and strings attached.”

But local educators worry that DOE resources could be jeopardized by transferring them to the purview of fractious state legislatures. “As we’ve seen, the budget is not so easy to allocate,” said McCabe, who teaches at Capital Area Intermediate Unit #15, alluding to the state legislature’s recent four-month-long delay to agree on Pennsylvania’s latest budget.

She warned that if services ranging from free school lunches to speech therapy and math intervention are potentially eliminated from federal allocation, it would be a dicey proposition to expect states to make up the difference. 

McCabe also views the proposed DOE dismantling in the larger context of an administration that has displayed a broad disdain for expertise. She cited the similar dismantling of the federal Department of Health & Human Services under Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has dismissed many of the experts that once populated its medical advisory panels.

Cutting funding for peer-reviewed programs, McCabe noted, “just kind of kicks the can down the road further … If you don’t invest in education now, you end up with adults who have lower reading rates, who maybe don’t speak the language as well, who have lower success in executive functioning – things like planning, organizing, impulse control … Those people tend to be more likely to commit crimes or to burden systems.”

“I think really the bottom line is here that the federal Department of Education is there to supervise the things that we all have agreed are priorities,” she added, “not only for education, but in general for the good of the country.”