Block Granting Title I: Less Funding, Less Accountability

Despite repeated disavowals on the campaign trail, the Trump administration is working hard to turn many of Project 2025's policy proposals into reality. By some counts, the administration has already implemented nearly half of the ideas from the conservative playbook, and many of its top authors have joined the administration.

Actions over the past month have made clear that the administration intends to vigorously pursue a specific policy outlined in Project 2025: turning Title I, the roughly $18.3 billion per year program designed to help close educational achievement gaps, into “a no-strings-attached formula block grant.” In the past, block grants to states have often led to less funding and less accountability for how federal funds are spent, a potentially devastating outcome for schools serving low-income students.

Already, several conservative states are trying to take advantage of the administration’s willingness to consider block granting federal education funds. On March 7, Iowa submitted a proposal to the Department of Education asking it to waive a requirement in federal education law so that it can consolidate 10 sources of federal funding, including $100 million from Title I, into a single grant. Later that month, Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds penned an op-ed for The Hill that decried “federal micromanagement of education” and the “bureaucratic strings” that accompany federal funding.

Near the end of March, Oklahoma followed suit, sending a memo to the Department of Education that makes the case for a “strategic shift” to block grant funding for all federal ESSA funding allocated to the state. The recent request from Ryan Walters, Oklahoma’s state superintendent of education, makes clear just how high the stakes are when it comes to Title I funding. Walters is requesting block grants for all ESSA funding that will be used to benefit both public schools and “where permissible, private school choice programs, enabling parents to select schools that align with their religious values.”

Consider what an abrupt turnaround this would be for the Title I program if it becomes reality: rather than funding high-needs schools with a mission of closing achievement gaps, states would have the ability to distribute the money free of oversight and potentially to benefit private schools rather than the public schools the funds were originally intended to serve. And depending on the decision that’s reached in a pending Supreme Court case over Oklahoma’s funding of religious private schools, it’s conceivable that Title I funds originally designed to benefit high-needs public schools could be diverted to pay for vouchers to fund a religious education in a private school. This push is happening despite evidence that vouchers generally have negative or neutral impacts on student achievement.

To be clear, while the Secretary of Education has the authority to waive most accountability requirements under the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), she does not have the authority to unilaterally waive requirements concerning the distribution and allocation of formula funding. But questions of legality haven’t stopped the current administration so far. For his part, Rep. Bobby Scott (D-Va.), the ranking member on the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, has decried the possibility of sending federal education money to states in block grants as illegal and “extremely dangerous.”

Without federal oversight, states would be free to use Title I funds however they want, including in ways that aren’t focused on students from low-income families that are the very reason for the Title I program. Comments this week from Education Secretary Linda McMahon on the block grant issue didn’t do much to assuage such concerns. When asked about guardrails that might be put into place by the Department to ensure that federal funds are appropriately distributed by states if transformed into block grants, McMahon had only this to offer: “I don’t have a magic answer to that at this moment.”

Using history as a guide, we know that using block grants will likely lead to funding declines over time. Take the example of what has happened to the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) block grant since its inception in 1997, the main source of federal funding to help states provide cash assistance to low-income families with children. Since the annual block grant allocation has mostly remained unchanged since the program’s creation, the overall amount has declined in value by about 40 percent due to inflation.

More broadly, a 2017 report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities concluded that, “Since 2000, overall funding for the 13 major housing, health, and social services block grant programs in the federal budget has fallen by 27 percent after adjusting for inflation, and by 37 percent after adjusting for inflation and population growth.”

If the administration is serious about improving the Title I program rather than fundamentally changing its purpose, there is no shortage of ideas about how to achieve that. For example, they could consider revising the district eligibility thresholds to make sure funds are going to students with the greatest need. Or they could consider tweaking the four formulas used to distribute Title I funds to more effectively target federal dollars. Unfortunately, the administration has shown little interest in taking that sort of approach. Instead, the past few months indicate that it’s determined to take legally dubious actions that, if held up in court, would fundamentally reshape Title I and harm the families the program is supposed to serve.