Education funding is under threat and students of color are at risk

Donald Trump’s threats to education funding are real and threaten the upward mobility of millions of American students — and that’s the way the president and Republicans like it. The Department of Governmental Efficiency (DOGE) and his own executive orders put the Department of Education on the chopping block, with little or no regard to exactly how the changes will affect Americans.

His ploy is to allow states to run the schools, but if that happens, it is unlikely that there will be uniform educational standards across the nation. Florida, for example, bans more books than any other state.  But California passed a 2023 law that bans book bans. This means that while Los Angeles schools can have a useful book on reproductive health like It’s Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex and Sexual Health by Robie Harris & Michael Emberly, students in Broward County, Fla., cannot.

Legally, it would take an act of Congress to dismantle the agency, but Trump signed an executive order to weaken it. His plan to decentralize education governance was action presaged by Project 2025, the right-wing blueprint for governing, according to our partner Capital B. Meanwhile, he has nominated World Wrestling Entertainment magnate Linda McMahon as its secretary. She is currently being questioned in U.S. Senate hearings.

At the same time, DOGE moved to kill about $1 billion in funding for education research, eliminating critical information on learning in America, according to USA Today.

What it all means

Ending the Department of Education would wreak havoc across the country generally, but the effect on Black people and other diverse communities could be worse (as the saying goes, “when America catches the flu, Black people catch pneumonia).” Many of these children are from poor areas and federal subsidies support education.

If this changes, education funding could be sent to states to be managed, but the answer going forward would still be complex, Jack Schneider, head of the Center for Education Policy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, told WBUR.

“The main way that the Department of Education supports students from low-income families is through what’s called Title I funding,” Schneider said. “This is a part of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 that came out of the [former President Lyndon] Johnson administration. 

“Now that was an act of Congress,” he continued. “You can’t get rid of that. So if you get rid of the Department of Education, what you need to do is find a new place for the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 to live, and that’s going to be administratively challenging because we’re talking about $15 billion annually.”

It should be noted, though, that closure of the Department of Education would not eliminate Title I. Funding for that provision does have broad bipartisan support despite Trump wanting to put limits on it. The most that would likely happen is that education funding would flow through another department, according to The Hechinger Report.

Educators are alarmed.

The potential damage

They cite Pell Grants for college students, early childhood development programs to and special needs programs for students with learning disabilities among the programs that would likely be moved or altered, particularly in places where Title I provides education funding to schools that would otherwise not have it. 

“Without the Department of Education,  many of our already low-performing schools and districts would be stripped of Title I funding that affords schools the opportunity to improve student outcomes and raise academic performance,” Hope Hurst, an educator in the Columbus City School District told Afro.com. “Each school I worked in was a Title I school and with our funding, we were able to hire reading intervention teachers as extra support.”

“These reading intervention teachers worked with students who were most likely to fall behind or were already behind according to their diagnostic assessments. Without them, students would not receive a  well-needed double dose of support in reading and math,” she said.

That poor and nonwhite students may only be seen by the Trump Administration as collateral damage in their war on democracy is not lost on activists, who say data show the impact could be wider and do catastrophic damage to the nation’s hopes of educating its youth. About 21 percent of Black students, 33 percent of white students and 37 percent of Latinos attend schools receiving Title I funding. 

“This is, again, this administration’s focus on weaponizing race, because that program comes out of 1965 in the [Lyndon B.] Johnson administration as a tool to address poverty,” Patrice Willoughby, NAACP senior vice president of global policy and impact, told The Hill.

“What I think that this administration has successfully done is paint this as a picture of federal dollars going toward Black people, but in fact, they are working in a way that will disadvantage white students,” she said.