How Would Razing the U.S. Department of Education Impact Teachers and Teaching?

While we don’t yet know how the Trump administration plans to stamp out the U.S. Department of Education, we do know that the president told Linda McMahon, his nominee to run the agency, that she should “put herself out of a job.” Whether it is slowly starved or parceled out to other agencies, dismantling this 45-year-old federal agency will unravel critical infrastructure supporting public schools and the children and families they serve.

It will also disrupt one of the largest worker populations in the United States—public elementary and secondary school teachers. What would the razing of the U.S. Department of Education mean for these 3.8 million teachers, and the 90 percent of children in our nation that they’re responsible for educating?

Here are just three ways the Department’s demise would wreak havoc on educators and the quality of instruction in our public schools:

1. Educators will have more responsibilities and less support from other staff.

Teachers are already under extraordinary pressure as they work to manage the lasting effects of the pandemic on student learning and behavior. Any loss of federal funding would mean cuts to school staffing, leading to more crowded classrooms and fewer support staff, such as teaching assistants, counselors, health staff, specialists for behavioral and learning interventions, and after-school program staff. Teachers and school leaders will have to wear even more hats than they do now, resulting in less time to plan engaging lessons or provide individualized attention to students. And while a strong Department of Education can provide schools with guidance and tools to efficiently and effectively use their available resources to serve students and support positive teaching and learning conditions, a weak or nonexistent one cannot.

2. Educators will struggle to get the information they need to do their jobs well.

The Department of Education does much more than just distribute funding to schools. Employees of the Department help ensure that school and district leaders are getting the training and resources they need to adequately support the educators and students in their schools, and maintain a strong pipeline of future educators. Because state and local education agencies are notoriously understaffed in many states and regions, they don’t have the ability to perform research or perform a national scan of best practices to see what’s paying off for students. And even if they did, having every state or local education agency attempt to do that individually instead of having a central entity do it would be the height of inefficiency. Instead, staff at the Department help ensure that state and local education leaders have access to the information and support they need to make smart decisions about staffing, pay, job responsibilities, advancement opportunities, and instruction. Sometimes this is done directly, via non-regulatory guidance, but usually it is more indirect, via the independent Institute for Education Sciences (IES) which provides access to high-quality research, data, and evaluations. For example, IES administers grants to 10 Regional Educational Laboratories (RELs) which provide research, training, and technical support to educators and policymakers in their jurisdiction to improve learner outcomes.

IES also houses the public What Works Clearinghouse that shares rigorous research about different instructional strategies and provides resources to help educators help students achieve better academic results (see example in Figure 2). While most individual teachers don’t access these materials on a regular basis, district-level staff and educator preparation programs leverage them when providing coaching and other forms of professional training.

Without these resources, schools will have difficulty finding the support they need to meet students’ learning needs or retain teachers and school leaders.

3. Teacher shortages will get worse.

The U.S. is already facing crisis-level teacher shortages in many areas, and without the Department, things will only get worse. Staff at the Department of Education administer programs that support improvements in educator preparation, ongoing professional development, career advancement, and loan forgiveness—all necessary for attracting and retaining a robust and talented educator workforce. For example, they administer the Teacher Quality Partnership Grant (funded by Congress at $70M last fiscal year), where colleges and high-need K–12 schools and districts compete for funding to develop high-quality educator preparation programs based on evidence of what helps novice educators feel confident, deliver effective instruction, and remain in the profession.

Through the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES)—responsible for collecting, analyzing, and reporting data on the condition of U.S. education since 1867—the Department also analyzes data about educator preparation and hiring, and surveys teachers and school principals. These data are critical to understanding the state of the educator workforce and to effectively addressing issues that undermine its stability and lead to shortages in educator quantity and quality.

These concerns are not unfounded.

The Trump administration has already moved to cancel over a billion dollars in IES contracts and grants, including to the RELs and NCES, with the chilling—and inefficient—effect of aborting research already underway about what helps students succeed in school, and halting educator preparation and development programs that were helping to strengthen the quantity, quality and—yes—diversity, of the educator workforce at a time when all three of these need to be strengthened. Attacks on the Department staff or its resources will disproportionately strike schools in rural and low-income districts, which are already under-resourced and rely heavily on federal financial and technical support.

But there is one thing that educators and families (and politicians) can’t expect to change should the Department be eliminated: the content taught in the classroom. That’s because public education is locally-controlled in the U.S. In most states, the local school districts decide on the curriculum and textbooks they will use, with the state only setting high-level standards for what students should be able to do by the end of each grade (the other 19 states curate a list of textbooks that districts can select from). Despite rhetoric about the U.S. Department of Education indoctrinating children in “woke” ideas, it has never had any control over what teachers are teaching. So this justification for destroying the agency is a red herring.

Eliminating or cutting apart the U.S. Department of Education will not achieve efficiency and quality in education. To the contrary, it will make the increasingly demanding job of teaching in or leading a public school even harder and even less appealing, creating a vicious cycle that decimates our public educator workforce and our public schools. Our public educators work tirelessly to make sure that students have the instructional and environmental support they need to be engaged learners, and already often have insufficient resources to do so. Now is the time to be stepping up our support for public schools, the educators who work there, and the students who attend them—not pulling back.

For more on New America's growing collection of posts and statements on defending the Department of Education, see here.