Last month, the Trump administration announced that it was taking action to “break up” the department of education by rehoming certain functions to the Departments of Labor, the Interior, Health and Human Services, and State. The move, the announcement says, is meant to “move closer to fulfilling the President’s promise to return education to the states.”
The merits of some of the changes, like a larger role for the Department of Labor in workforce programs, deserve some consideration. But here, we will focus on what has become the education mantra for the second Trump administration: sending education back to the states. It was one of the nine elements of the Republican platform on education, which promised to “close the Department of Education in Washington, D.C. and send it back to the States, where it belongs, and let the States run our educational system as it should be run”. Over the summer, Secretary of Education Linda McMahon announced the “Returning Education to the States Tour,” and last week she told Fox Business, “we are returning education to the states.”
The intent of the administration is clear. What is less clear is the administration’s expectations of how much this move will improve student performance outcomes. Will the share of fourth graders reading below NAEP Basic be cut by five percent? 10 percent? And by how much do they expect the shares reading at or above Proficient to rise? Do they have specific expectations for specific states? In other words, are there specific, achievement-oriented goals the administration is looking to achieve? And if so, what are they?
In its November 21-24 survey, The Economist/YouGov asked Americans to indicate how much trust they had in a variety of institutions, including public schools. Less than a third (32%) of respondents said they had “a great deal” or “a lot of trust” in public schools. Given the broad state of student achievement, it should not be surprising that public trust is low. But are states equipped to tackle this problem on their own?
Other observers have correctly noted that moving a function from one federal agency to another does not much seem like returning education to the states. But from our perspective, the larger critique is that it is unclear whether the administration has specific, student outcomes-oriented goals it expects to achieve by making these moves. These kinds of specific goals should be the north star of any education reform effort.
