Title I Under Threat

The Trump administration has been in power for just over two months, but hardly a day passes without news of another attack on public education. Last week, President Trump issued an executive order directing Education Secretary Linda McMahon to “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education.” Even before that executive order was issued, the administration fired over 1,300 civil servants serving in various roles within the Department, essentially cutting the staff size in half (some have since been reinstated and put on paid administrative leave due to a court order).

Just this week, in a legally dubious move that could fundamentally change how the nation’s 7.5 million students with disabilities are served, President Trump declared that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) would take over from the Education Department when it comes to overseeing special education services. This blizzard of near-daily initiatives and provocations is part of an intentional “flood the zone” strategy designed to keep the administration’s opponents reeling.

Amid such an onslaught of daily attacks, it’s easy to miss a very real threat that is emerging to the nation’s public schools in the form of potentially decimating the Title I funding that serves as a financial lifeline for schools that serve students from low-income families. Title I refers to the first title of a landmark education law, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. Title I was established by Congress to provide federal funding to preK-12 schools in low-income communities to assist them in helping to close educational achievement gaps.

As a reminder, the Project 2025 playbook recommends transferring Title I to HHS (an agency losing 10,000 jobs in the near future), administering the program as “a no-strings-attached formula block grant” as well as phasing out Title I funding entirely over a ten-year period and making it the responsibility of individual states. It’s worth noting that, despite repeated disavowals on the campaign trail, the administration has already implemented almost half of the Project 2025 proposals and installed key authors in leadership positions. At a time when achievement gaps between high-poverty and low-poverty districts are holding steady or even widening, the current administration seems intent on executing a plan that would make it even harder for high-poverty districts to catch up.

Title I funds, which total more than $18.3 billion in the current fiscal year, play an outsize role in helping high-needs schools, including thousands of elementary schools responsible for the education of some of our nation’s youngest learners. In the 2021-22 school year, 63 percent of public schools and 62 percent of public charter schools were Title I-eligible.

Title I enables schools to fund pre-K, hire extra teachers to reduce class sizes, create academic intervention programs for struggling students, provide tutoring during or after school, and fund many other interventions. For example, at Deane Elementary School in Lakewood, Colorado, Principal Megan Martinez uses Title I money to hire extra teachers to keep class sizes from getting too large. She’s also used the funds to hire two specialists to help teachers with reading and math instruction as well as hire an additional social worker. “They might support with setting lessons around behavior expectations, they might pull a friendship group or lunch bunch or another targeted group working on relationship skills, or do crisis response,” Martinez said in an interview with Colorado Public Radio. “We wouldn’t be able to do that without Title [I] funding.”

Since Title I is designed to assist schools with large populations of students from low-income families, the impacts of reduced Title I funding would be felt mostly by schools with greater needs. Consider a comparison of two districts in Ohio, one made up predominantly of higher-income households and the other mostly lower-income families. Both Hudson City School District and Youngstown City School District educate almost 5,000 students in all, but Hudson receives only $0.2 million in Title I funding compared to $6.6 million for Youngstown. Clearly, a loss of Title I funding would much more negatively impact poorer districts like Youngstown compared to wealthier districts.

With many states already facing tough budget decisions, partly due to the expiration of federal pandemic relief funds, it’s unclear how they would meet the funding shortfall caused by the end of federal Title I funding. It’s hard to imagine how a relatively poor state like Mississippi could make up the more than $200 million it currently receives in federal Title I funding. The options it would face would be either to raise taxes (politically unpopular), cut other state programs, or reduce school spending (the most likely outcome). Without a way to replace these funds, the loss of Title I could lead to the loss of up to 180,000 teaching positions nationwide. And it’s actually more conservative states that would be hit hardest by a phase-out of Title I since the six states in which federal dollars make up more than 20 percent of the overall education budget are Alaska, Arkansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, Montana, and South Dakota.

The future of Title I has already been cast into doubt as a result of the Trump administration’s far-reaching cuts to the Department of Education. According to NPR, the cuts mean that “nearly all the statisticians and data experts who work in the office responsible for determining whether schools qualify for that money will soon be out of jobs, making it unclear how such grants would remain intact.” With staffers either fired or locked out of their computers and on administrative leave, it’s easy to understand why there is confusion over who in the Department is left to determine Title I eligibility and provide guidance to state and district leaders.

Perhaps even more disturbing is the news this week that many Republican-led states are asking the Department of Education to consolidate its federal education aid into a single block grant with few spending requirements. One of the problems with transforming Title I into “a no-strings-attached formula block grant” is precisely that no strings will be attached concerning how states spend those funds. Without federal oversight, states will be free to use Title I funds however they want, including in ways that aren’t focused at all on students from low-income families. Amid the daily onslaught of alarming news out of this administration, the very real threat to Title I is one area that deserves enhanced attention before it’s too late.