"The Department of Education is a big con job," President Trump said in a White House press conference. "We’re ranked number 40th, but we’re ranked number one in one department: costs per pupil," he said. Sending education funding to the states would be more effective, he told reporters.
At her confirmation hearing yesterday, his nominee for Secretary of Education, Linda McMahon, said key programs would not lose funding, even if they were moved to state control or to another department.
That includes "Title I money for low-income schools, Pell grants for low-income college students, and Public Service Loan Forgiveness," report Collin Binkley and Annie Ma for AP. McMahon added that closing the department entirely would require a vote in Congress.
Enforcement of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act might move to the Department of Health and Human Services, which already has oversight of disability issues, she said, while the Office for Civil Rights could fit better at the Justice Department.
"McMahon sought to reassure senators that politically popular programs were safe, yet at the same time she promised to cut federal money from schools and colleges that defy Trump’s demands, including his executive orders against transgender athletes, campus antisemitism and diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives," report Binkley and Ma.
The nominee said she was “not quite certain” whether the DEI ban would include teaching an "African-American History" class. “I’d like to look into it further.”
Hmmmm. It doesn't seem like a hard question to me.
The federal government provides about 10 percent of K-12 funding, much of it reserved for disadvantaged students and students with disabilities. The Education Department has tried to use grants to influence how and what to teach, but has no direct control. If that money is block-granted, the Education Department will have less clout to push patriotism in U.S. history class or to suppress America-is-evil narratives. We will not see America rising to #1 in international rankings.
Your unsupported claim at the end appears to assume that we need a federal education department to control U.S. history narratives, which would help us rise in international rankings, but there's no logic in that; Canada has a higher-ranked education system than does the USA, and gets those results while spending less money, because its constitution continues to respect the equivalent of our Tenth Amendment, reserving education to its provinces, while American "states" have had their educational sovereignty disrupted by congressional acts that were neither necessary nor proper, as 45 years of experience with the U.S. Department of Education (some of which I've had, including grant-making recommendations) has proved, especially now that the Biden-Harris disaster has ended.