On March 20, President Trump signed an executive order aimed at dismantling the federal Department of Education (DoE). Since the announcement, critics have flooded social media and opinion sections with pessimistic projections: small universities will die, the state of public K-12 schooling will fall into even greater disrepair, and civil rights protections will be rolled back. However, this apocalypticism is unfounded. The federal DoE’s track record speaks for itself, and it shows that the status quo is clearly untenable. Student outcomes have worsened since the Department’s founding in 1979, while spending continues to ramp up. Education’s return to the States is not a political ploy, but a practical one. The impressive history of state-led initiatives (see: the extraordinary case of Mississippi’s bold phonics gamble) shows that a non-centralized education system might be exactly what America needs. To put it in academic terms, the federal DoE has been a 35-year experiment that failed to reject the null hypothesis: federalization of educational agencies does not ensure better (or even consistently acceptable) student outcomes. As any lab scientist will tell you, we are long overdue for a new methodology.
Some supporters of this large-scale change cite ideological capture in universities and the growing power of teachers’ unions as their reasoning for DoE abolition. I don’t buy this. Any institution full of the young and well-off will naturally be more progressive in today’s political climate; campus culture is not the DoE’s domain to regulate. Teachers’ unions, meanwhile, mainly negotiate at the state and local levels already, so abolition would do very little to curtail their efforts. My justification is less partisan and invigorating, but perhaps more prudent: spending per pupil has not demonstrated a direct relationship to student achievement for over fifty years. Restructuring education in the United States simply makes financial sense, reducing spending on administrative middlemen while funneling educational resources immediately to students and teachers.
Since its birth under President Carter, the Department of Education has steadily expanded federal influence over the content, structure, and funding of American classrooms. This federal presence ramped up dramatically with President Bush’s No Child Left Behind policy, then continued through Race to the Top and Common Core. The associated spending increases were enormous. I spent some time with the DoE’s annual performance reports and found that the budget increased from $57 billion in 1979 to a stunning $268 billion in 2024. That’s 4% of total federal spending; adjusted for inflation, the difference between the 1970s per-pupil rate and today’s is 154% – more than double, in real terms. Teacher wages have only risen 7% in the same time frame, meaning the vast majority of that extraneous spending is going not toward educators, but toward K-12 administrative overhead. In light of these figures, it is relatively unsurprising that American students continue to lag behind their international peer group.
The National Assessment of Educational Progress, often seen as our nation’s educational report card, paints a dismal picture of reading and math scores, which have barely moved since the 1970s. According to recent Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) results, American students end up 13th in reading, a deeply troubling 37th in mathematics, and 18th in science among developed countries. The achievement gap between advantaged and disadvantaged students is proving stubborn, and hasn’t narrowed despite the many billions poured into federal programs supposedly designed to address this inequality. The Department’s own data reveal that Title I programs, put in place to improve outcomes for disadvantaged and low-income students, have given vanishingly few positive results. Students in the world’s economic and educational powerhouse of the United States are capable of more than this – and they deserve better, especially after the existential disruption COVID delivered to K-12 education nationwide. States are better structured to come through on the promise of free, comprehensive public education upon which this country has long stood.
While federal initiatives wallow, some states have achieved remarkable jumps in student performance through locally-tailored approaches. Mississippi’s Literacy-Based Promotion Act (2013) offers the most compelling case. Prior to its implementation, Mississippi sat firmly near the bottom in national reading assessments – often at #49. This placement was so expected, and went unaddressed so long, past students from MS remember saying “thank God for Alabama” – a coy dig at state #50. The LBPA changed that standing for the better. Mississippi’s approach centered on returning to structured phonics instruction (“sounding out” words instead of learning to recognize their shapes), intensive teacher training, and targeted intervention for struggling readers. The state also allowed underperforming students to be held back until they demonstrated proficient literacy: not an unreasonable goal for any school system. These were implemented despite umbrella guidance from the DoE and federal government, which warned against having students repeat grades or classes, and abandoned phonics instruction in favor of the “whole language model”.
So what happened when a small, relatively underfunded state struck it out alone? The results are so extraordinary, I had to verify them at least three times. Between 2013 and 2019, Mississippi showed the largest gains in fourth-grade reading of any state on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. According to Mississippi’s Department of Education, students reading at or above grade level leapt from 32% in 2013 to 45% by 2019. Recent data from the state DoE show that Mississippi has since continued advancing, with especially notable improvements among disadvantaged students. The state leapt nineteen spots in national reading rankings from 2013 to 2022; today, over half of Mississippi charter kindergarteners are reading at or above grade level.
Mississippi’s story is so relevant because it succeeded through state-led innovation, not federal mandate. The state’s Department of Education – receiving less funding than it would under a decentralized system – was able to identify specific challenges, discover an effective solution in phonics, and implement a coherent strategy that thoughtfully addressed civil rights concerns hand-in-hand with the contentious legacy of No Child Left Behind. MS established summer-long literacy camps which served a bevy of necessary purposes, from simple reading instruction to all-day childcare and food security for struggling community members. In short, the program was unabashedly local. It seems that state-specific education plans, especially ones unbound by the bureaucracy and one-size-fits-all approach favored by the federal DoE, are quietly doing the heavy lifting regarding student outcomes already.
The federal Department of Education also oversees American colleges and universities as a master and partner. This odd fraternity has seen exploding tuition costs leading to all-time high student debt, and the lowest trust in universities in recent history. What would a DoE rollback look like for Princeton and fellow institutions of higher education?
The compliance costs of navigating existing federal DoE regulations are massive. A study from Vanderbilt finds that $27 million of operating costs at the average research university are borne from regulatory compliance – $27 million that students ultimately pay. Like a hedge fund, universities now employ teams of “compliance officers” who exist simply to handle complex layers of federal regulations that threaten to keep schools inert and unproductive. These resources could be funding the actual processes and demands of student education – especially research – if regulatory burdens were reduced.
The thorny conversation surrounding the economics of higher education always returns to one sticky issue: financial aid. Pell Grants provide an average of $4,491 to about 34% of college students nationwide; about half of the recipients are from families making under $20,000 per year. Dismantling the federal DoE, critics argue, would be a profound blow to students requiring financial aid. Yet, allowing states a greater modicum of freedom in educational funding decisions will transform higher education by addressing the “Bennett Hypothesis.” Named after former Secretary of Education William Bennett, the theory suggests that federal financial aid allows universities to raise tuition, knowing students can access loans to cover increases. Research from the New York Fed supports Bennett’s conjecture: they find that each dollar increase in federal loan limits drives tuition up by about 60 cents. The current aid system is something of a predatory pyramid scheme, then, with DoE-based money driving up student debt and tuition cost for students who are not eligible for financial aid. At the K-12 level, circumstances are not much better. The federal Department employs over 4,000 staff and controls a budget exceeding $70 billion, much of which gets absorbed by administrative overhead rather than reaching classrooms. Heritage Foundation research suggests that for every federal education dollar, only about 70 cents reaches actual educational programs after administrative costs.
Restructuring federal aid will allow universities to compete on the price and value of the education they offer, which could potentially reverse decades of tuition inflation. The Bennett Hypothesis is empirically-driven, and confronts the realities of the markets. For students (especially those in the oft-abandoned middle class too affluent for financial aid and too poor to pay sticker), current tuition costs are a huge barrier to access; the university cannot function as an engine of socioeconomic mobility when there is a clear motivation in rising federal loan limits to continue raising the price of post-secondary education. A nonfederal structure for the DoE would incentivize schools to focus on efficiency and quality rather than administrative bloat. According to the New York Fed’s report, we stand a chance to reduce the crippling $1.75 trillion national student debt burden while better serving the nation’s future thinkers and educators.
The cost of university education aside, lingering discontent with higher education has reached a breaking point for nonfinancial reasons. Prominent voices have argued that in recent years, federal mandates – particularly around Title IX and DEI initiatives – have heavily influenced campus policies and restricted open inquiry and debate. A Foundation for Individual Rights in Education survey found that over 80% of American students report self-censoring their views on campus “at least occasionally.” This is an existential threat to the free exchange of ideas which makes America a nation of innovators, debaters, and coexisting viewpoints. Some states might consider diversity, equity, and inclusion policies a genuine boon to the intellectual environment, and they will have full license to establish those programs within their constituencies. Federal ruling, though, will no longer be able to exert the force of its iron fist on regions that are too small to have their voices heard in the massive national conversation around fair admissions and opportunity practices. Returning authority to states and individual institutions, as dismantling the DoE aims to do, would allow greater experimentation with different approaches to campus governance and intellectual climate. Universities in states with philosophical approaches as different as mainly public Oklahoma and the highly privatized New England region could develop aid and oversight plans befitting their distinctive regional identities. Some might emphasize classical liberal education, others practical career training, and others cutting-edge institutional research supported by state health plans – all competing in a marketplace of ideas rather than conforming to federal templates.
With NIH funds frozen and universities chafing against their newfound position as a political battleground, a legitimate worry about the function of the university has arisen: would dismantling the DoE threaten research funding? Not obviously. Most federal research money flows through other agencies like the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, and the Departments of Defense and Energy, not Education. Liberating universities from excessive compliance requirements makes research more productive by allowing scientists to focus on the concrete necessities of the discovery at hand instead of attacking a nigh-insurmountable volume of paperwork. A National Academy of Sciences study found researchers spend about 42% of their time on administrative tasks rather than actual research—a figure that could be reduced with streamlined oversight. The institution of the research university, from Ivy League schools to state university systems, is one of our country’s great strengths. From these schools came quantum computing, T-cell therapy, and advanced cancer detection methods.
The main fear concerns smaller or less prosperous states, which theoretically benefit from a federal DoE. The federal system, though, has consistently failed these very states – our most vulnerable and our most underutilized. Current federal funding formulas already shortchange many small states on a per-pupil basis, according to a 2019 Congressional Research Service report. Wyoming receives significantly less Title I funding per eligible student than California, despite having similar needs, which is exactly the kind of discrepancy a federal Department of Education is intended to avoid. Without the DoE, small states could gain more direct control over education policy and funding allocation tailored to their particular challenges, like the wide dispersal of pupils in rural areas. The transition can, and probably will, include safeguards such as mutually beneficial interstate compacts and baseline funding guarantees to ensure that small states are supported as the nation moves toward a decentralized model.
States serve as what Justice Brandeis called “laboratories of democracy,” allowing experimentation with different educational approaches. When successful, these innovations can spread to other states; when unsuccessful, the damage is contained. Without Mississippi’s bold step against the DoE grain, for example, the national conversation surrounding phonics education might not have begun at all, and certainly not with the fervor we’re seeing now.
One key note of caution regards the timeline on which we should expect to see reform implemented. The Trump administration’s handling of border concerns, reduction of the federal workforce, and tariffing have all been slap-dash, poorly thought out, and rife with mistakes that victimized innocent people and 401(k)s. The transition from a federal education system to a state-based one must be relatively slow, with measured goalposts to be reached in a matter of years instead of weeks. Supporting young Americans means much more than signing a few executive orders; maintaining consistent, ordered schooling and curriculum at the student level should be priority number one throughout the adjustment process.
Rather than abrupt dismantling, President Trump’s plan would probably be best conceived and implemented as an incremental approach that gradually transfers responsibilities without interrupting the essential functions of schools. This might include: turning categorical federal programs into block grants with broad guidelines (but significant state flexibility), interstate compacts for data collection and research, and transition mechanisms for civil rights enforcement. The federal experiment’s failure doesn’t mean we haven’t structured complex educational systems around a national DoE, and the administration has a responsibility to give states the appropriate time to radically reimagine what schooling could look like, instead of what it must.
The case for dismantling the Department of Education is not about opposition to public education, but about an empirically driven vision for improving it. Clearly, centralized federal control has failed despite massive investment of taxpayer money. Meanwhile, state initiatives like Mississippi’s reading program demonstrate the incredible potential for successful locally-tailored approaches. Dismantling DoE is a strong step toward educational reforms that serve the needs of local communities first and foremost. The federal role in education has expanded dramatically over fifty years, but student achievement remains stagnant while higher education costs have indebted generations of brilliant middle-income Americans.
I’ve taken two laboratory sciences here at Princeton, and both classes instructed students to, above all, be honest with our results. Our numbers are grim at the moment, but American education need not put away the micropipettes and head home in shame. We owe it to our children, our national budget, and our wonderfully different “laboratories of democracy” to trade the failed DoE experiment for a better procedure. The question is no longer whether we can afford to dismantle the Department of Education, but whether we can afford not to.
Image Credit: Das Schulexamen, Albert Anker (1862), Wikimedia Commons
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