What's Happening to Public Schools?

The One-Sentence Version

The Trump administration is dismantling the Department of Education, reducing civil rights enforcement in schools, rolling back sexual assault protections, threatening special education funding, and cutting school meal programs. Most parents don’t know it’s happening.

What Does the Department of Education Actually Do?

Before getting into what’s being cut, it helps to understand what the Department actually does. It doesn’t run any schools — it’s not a school district. But it touches nearly every student in the country through funding, oversight, data, and civil rights enforcement.

Money for schools

Title I: $18.4 billion/year for schools in low-income communities. About 25 million students in more than half of all public schools receive Title I services — extra reading specialists, math tutoring, after-school programs. Without it, high-poverty schools would have significantly fewer resources than wealthy districts in the same state.
IDEA: $15+ billion/year for 7.5 million children with disabilities. This pays for special education teachers, speech therapists, occupational therapists, school psychologists, assistive technology, and early intervention services for infants and toddlers. Federal law requires schools to provide these services. IDEA funding helps them actually do it.
Impact Aid: ~$1.6 billion/year for school districts near military bases, tribal lands, and other federal property. Because the federal government doesn’t pay local property taxes, these districts would lose a major revenue source without Impact Aid. About 1,100 districts serving more than 7 million students receive it.
Career and technical education: $1.4 billion/year for vocational programs — auto repair, nursing, welding, IT, culinary arts. These programs serve about 12 million high school and college students.
Magnet school grants and school choice programs within public education.
Teacher training grants: $600 million for recruiting and retaining qualified teachers, especially in rural and underserved areas.

Money for college

Pell Grants: ~$38 billion/year — the single largest source of federal grant aid for college students. About 7 million students receive them, and 40% of all undergraduates rely on Pell to afford school. Unlike loans, Pell Grants don’t have to be repaid.
Federal student loans: $1.6 trillion portfolio serving 43 million borrowers. The Department manages the FAFSA application system, sets repayment terms, oversees loan servicers, and handles forgiveness programs. If you’ve ever filled out a FAFSA, you’ve interacted with this department.
Work-study programs that help students earn money while attending school.
Accreditation oversight — the Department recognizes the accrediting agencies that determine whether colleges meet quality standards. Without this, there’s no reliable way to know if a degree is worth anything.

Civil rights enforcement

Office for Civil Rights (OCR) investigates discrimination complaints in nearly 100,000 public schools and 32,000 private schools serving 50+ million students. If a student is racially harassed, sexually assaulted, denied disability accommodations, or discriminated against based on sex, OCR is the federal office that investigates. It normally handles about 18,000 complaints per year.
Title IX enforcement — the law prohibiting sex discrimination in schools, including sexual assault and harassment.
Section 504 enforcement — protecting students with disabilities from discrimination.

Data and research

National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) collects and publishes the data that tells us how American students are performing — graduation rates, test scores, achievement gaps, school spending, teacher demographics. Without NCES, we lose the ability to measure whether schools are improving or declining. Policymakers, researchers, school boards, and parents all rely on this data.
Institute of Education Sciences funds research on what actually works in education — which teaching methods improve reading scores, which interventions help struggling students, which programs reduce dropout rates.

Other services

English language learner programs for approximately 5 million students whose first language isn’t English. These students need specialized instruction to access the same curriculum as their peers.
School safety and emergency preparedness grants.
Anti-bullying programs and school climate initiatives.
Homeless student support — the McKinney-Vento Act requires schools to identify and support students experiencing homelessness (about 1.3 million in a typical year).

Why this matters even if you think “education should be local”

About 90% of school funding comes from state and local sources. The federal government provides roughly 10%. But that 10% is not spread evenly. It’s targeted — it goes to low-income schools, students with disabilities, English language learners, rural districts, and military communities that would otherwise be left behind. Eliminating the Department doesn’t return control to states. It removes the funding and oversight that fills the gaps states can’t or won’t fill on their own.

If your child has an IEP (Individualized Education Program) for a learning disability, ADHD, autism, or any other condition — the federal office that ensures your school district follows through is part of this department. If your family filled out a FAFSA to pay for college, this department processed it. If your child’s school has a reading specialist funded by Title I, this department paid for it.

What’s Actually Happening to It?

The timeline

January 2025: Linda McMahon confirmed as Secretary of Education. Trump told her: “I hope you do a great job and put yourself out of a job.”
March 2025: 1,378 employees laid off. Workforce went from 4,100+ to roughly 2,100.
March 20, 2025: Trump signed an executive order to dismantle the department, urging Congress to abolish it entirely.
June 2025: Lindsey Burke, author of the Project 2025 education chapter, hired as deputy chief of staff. Her chapter proposed phasing out Title I funding and stated that “the federal Department of Education should be eliminated.”
October 2025: ~460 more employees laid off, including nearly all staff in the special education oversight office — only 3 staffers remained. Staff were reinstated after the November 2025 shutdown deal, but the episode demonstrated how quickly the office could be gutted.
November 2025: Core functions announced for transfer to four other agencies.
March 2026: The $1.7 trillion student loan portfolio is being transferred to the Treasury Department.

Key detail: The National Center for Education Statistics — the office that collects data on how American schools are performing — was reduced from about 100 staffers to 3. By early 2026, the office had recovered to approximately 11 staff — still a 90% reduction.

Can the president actually eliminate it?

No. Only Congress can eliminate a federal department. The executive order can’t do that on its own. But the administration doesn’t need to formally eliminate it to make it nonfunctional. Cut the staff by half, fire the specialists, transfer the programs to agencies without expertise, stop answering the phones — and the department exists in name only.

School superintendents and parents are already reporting: unanswered calls, bounced emails, delays in grant processing, and confusion about who is responsible for what.

Special Education: What Parents Need to Know

This is the section that should concern every parent of a child with a disability.

What IDEA requires: Federal law (the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act) guarantees every child with a disability a “free appropriate public education.” Schools must create an IEP — a legally binding plan — and provide services like speech therapy, occupational therapy, assistive technology, and specialized instruction.

Who enforces it: The Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP), inside the Department of Education. OSEP monitors whether states and districts actually follow through on IEPs, intervenes when they don’t, and distributes $15 billion in annual funding.

What happened: In October 2025, nearly all OSEP staff were fired — only 3 remained. Staff were reinstated after the November 2025 shutdown deal, and the Department confirmed in early 2026 that OSEP was not subject to the next round of layoffs. But the episode showed how quickly the office could be reduced to nonfunctional levels, and the broader departmental cuts continue.

What this means for your child:

The legal requirement for an IEP hasn’t changed. Your child still has the right to services.
OSEP staff were reinstated, but the office operates with reduced capacity amid ongoing departmental instability.
Parents are already reporting that calls and emails to the Department go unanswered.
Without federal oversight, schools may delay or deny therapies and services — and there’s no federal authority to step in.

As Understood.org put it: “Without OSEP staff, there’s no longer a clear federal authority to step in when states don’t enforce IEPs or timelines.”

Civil Rights in Schools: 90% of Complaints Dismissed

What the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) does

OCR investigates complaints of discrimination in schools based on race, sex, disability, and age. It enforces Title VI (racial discrimination), Title IX (sex discrimination), and Section 504 (disability access). It normally processes about 18,000 complaints per year.

What happened

From March through September 2025, OCR received more than 9,000 new discrimination complaints. Roughly 90% were dismissed.

Staff was cut nearly in half — from 568 to 403
7 of 12 regional offices shuttered
247 staff placed on paid administrative leave for nearly 9 months — costing taxpayers between $28.5 million and $38 million (per GAO) to pay people to not work
Open investigations grew from 12,000 to nearly 24,000 — a backlog that keeps growing

Where the office was redirected

Instead of investigating racial harassment, disability discrimination, or sexual violence, OCR was redirected to:

Investigating schools that allow transgender students to use bathrooms matching their gender identity
Pursuing cases of alleged “anti-Christian bias”
Targeting universities with DEI programs

Complaints about racial harassment of Black students were deprioritized. Disability complaints went unreviewed. A GAO report found that education civil rights enforcement is “collapsing.”

Title IX: Sexual Assault Protections Rolled Back

What changed

The Biden administration’s Title IX rules required schools to investigate all reports of sexual violence, protected students from retaliation, and required supportive measures for survivors. Trump reverted to his first-term rules:

Live cross-examination of accusers reinstated. An accused student’s advisor can now directly question the survivor. Advocacy groups call this “one of the biggest things that deter students from engaging in the Title IX process.”
Schools no longer required to investigate all reports. The narrowed definition means more conduct goes unaddressed.
Off-campus assaults no longer covered. If it didn’t happen on school property, the school may have no obligation to respond.
Higher evidence standards. Schools can use stricter standards that make it harder for survivors to prevail.

The impact

Title IX coordinators at universities report a “chilling effect” — survivors have stopped reporting because they believe the system is no longer designed to help them.

One in five women experience sexual assault during college. Weakening these protections doesn’t reduce the number of assaults — it reduces the number that get reported and investigated.

School Meals: Millions of Kids at Risk

The connection between SNAP (food assistance) cuts and school lunch might not be obvious, but it’s direct.

How it works

Children in families receiving SNAP benefits are automatically eligible for free school meals — no paperwork required. When a family loses SNAP, their child loses that automatic eligibility.

What the cuts do

The One Big Beautiful Bill cut $186 billion from SNAP through 2034 — the largest cut to food assistance in American history. The impact on schools:

832,000+ children would need to start filing school meal applications (many won’t — the paperwork barrier is real)
24,000+ schools could lose eligibility for the Community Eligibility Provision (free meals for all students in high-poverty schools) if the threshold is raised from 25% to 60%
12+ million children in those schools would face higher costs
16 million children affected by SNAP cuts overall

One in five American children lives in a food-insecure household. For many of those children, the school meal is the most consistent meal they receive.

School Funding: What’s at Risk

Program	Amount	What It Does	Status
IDEA (special education)	$15B/year	Services for 7.5M children with disabilities	Oversight temporarily gutted to 3; staff reinstated but department unstable
Title I (low-income schools)	$18.4B/year	Extra resources for high-poverty schools	17 smaller programs ($6.5B) being consolidated; 12 programs ($2.1B) cut
Pell Grants	~$30B/year	College grants for 7M low-income students	FY2026 budget proposed 23% cut (Congress maintained levels)
Teacher training	$600M	Grants for recruiting and training teachers	Terminated — told grants “no longer effectuate Department priorities”
SNAP/school meals	$186B cut	Automatic free meal eligibility for millions	Largest cuts in history

The $6 billion grant freeze: In July 2025, the administration froze $6+ billion in education grants the day before the disbursement deadline. After-school programs, English language learner services, migrant education, and teacher training were all affected. Twenty-four states sued. The money was eventually released weeks later, but the disruption damaged school planning for the year.

Vouchers: What’s Being Proposed

The administration is pushing school voucher programs that let families use public money for private school tuition. The One Big Beautiful Bill created a federal voucher program via tax credits — up to $1,700 per child, launching summer 2026.

What the research says

This is an area where the evidence is important to present honestly:

Brookings Institution (2023): “The introduction of a voucher-like program actually led to lower academic achievement — similar to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic”
Stanford/Economic Policy Institute: “Little evidence vouchers improve school outcomes”
Specific studies: Math scores were 10 percentile points lower for students using vouchers vs. those who didn’t
Some evidence of modestly higher graduation rates

The bigger concern: voucher programs drain funding from public schools. When students leave with voucher money, the public school loses that funding — but its fixed costs (building, heating, administration) stay the same. Research shows vouchers primarily benefit families whose children were already enrolled in private school — not families trying to escape underperforming public schools.

Curriculum: What’s Changing

Executive Order 14190 (January 29, 2025) — “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling”:

Prohibits federal funds from going to K-12 schools that teach “critical race theory” or “gender ideology”
Directs law enforcement to investigate schools suspected of teaching these subjects
Directs prosecution of teachers who “unlawfully facilitate” the social transition of a transgender minor
Re-established the 1776 Commission — whose previous report said slavery was “more the rule than the exception throughout human history” and was condemned by the American Historical Association

Important context: Federal law (Title 20, Section 1232a) explicitly prohibits the federal government from directing or controlling school curricula. Only about 10% of public school funding comes from the federal government. But the threat of losing even that 10% has a significant chilling effect — teachers report self-censoring on topics involving race and gender.

What This Means for Your Family

If your child has a disability

The legal right to an IEP hasn’t changed. Federal law still requires your school district to provide a free appropriate public education with all the services outlined in your child’s plan — speech therapy, occupational therapy, specialized instruction, assistive technology, whatever the IEP specifies.

The federal office that monitors whether districts follow through (OSEP) was gutted to 3 staffers in October 2025 before being partially restored in November. Staff are back, but the broader department continues to lose capacity. If your district delays an evaluation or denies a service, federal oversight may be slower and less reliable than it was before the disruption.

What you can do: Document every interaction in writing. Request meetings by email so there’s a paper trail. If your district isn’t complying, file a complaint with your state’s education department — state-level enforcement still functions. Know that the legal requirement hasn’t changed, even if federal oversight has.

If your child attends a Title I school

About 25 million students in more than half of all public schools receive Title I services. These are the reading specialists, math tutors, and after-school programs in high-poverty schools. Title I funding is currently maintained at $18.4 billion, but the administration has proposed consolidating 17 smaller K-12 programs worth $6.5 billion into a single block grant, and cutting 12 programs totaling $2.1 billion entirely. The July 2025 grant freeze — when $6+ billion in education funding was held the day before disbursement — disrupted planning at schools across the country, even though the money was eventually released.

If your child is in college or headed there

Pell Grants are maintained for now, but the FY2026 budget proposed cutting the maximum by 23% — from ~$7,400 to $5,700. Congress blocked that specific cut, but it signals the direction.

The SAVE Plan — the income-driven repayment plan that capped student loan payments based on earnings — is being eliminated. Borrowers must switch to a different plan by July 2026. Grad PLUS loans are blocked for graduate students starting 2026. Parent PLUS loans are capped at $20,000 per year. Deferments for unemployment and economic hardship have been eliminated.

The entire $1.7 trillion student loan portfolio is being transferred from the Department of Education to the Treasury Department. What this means for loan servicing, repayment options, and borrower protections is still unclear.

And FAFSA — the application that determines financial aid eligibility for nearly every college student in the country — is managed by this department. If the department is eliminated, someone has to process those applications. Transferring that function to another agency means new systems, new staff, and likely delays.

If your daughter is in college

Sexual assault protections under Title IX have been weakened. Accused students can now have an advisor cross-examine the accuser directly. Schools are no longer required to investigate all reports. Off-campus assaults may not be covered. Higher evidence standards make it harder for survivors to prevail. Title IX coordinators report that students are simply not coming forward because they don’t believe the system will help them.

If your child relies on school meals

The connection between SNAP cuts and school lunch is direct. Children in families receiving SNAP are automatically eligible for free school meals — no paperwork required. When a family loses SNAP, that automatic eligibility disappears.

The One Big Beautiful Bill cut $186 billion from SNAP. An estimated 832,000 children would need to start filing school meal applications, and many won’t — the paperwork barrier is real. Changes to the Community Eligibility Provision could make 24,000 schools serving 12+ million children ineligible for universal free meals. Check with your school district about applying directly if your family’s SNAP status changes.

If you live in a rural area

Teacher training grants ($600 million) were terminated. Rural areas already face the worst teacher shortages in the country — high-poverty rural schools need to replace 28% of their teachers every year, compared to 19% in high-poverty urban schools. The terminated grants specifically targeted recruitment in these underserved areas.

Impact Aid — $1.5 billion for districts near military bases and tribal lands — is managed by this department. About 1,200 districts serving 10 million students depend on it. If the department is restructured and Impact Aid gets lost in the shuffle, these districts lose funding they can’t replace locally because the federal government doesn’t pay property taxes.

If your child is an English language learner

Approximately 5 million students in U.S. public schools are English language learners who need specialized instruction to access the same curriculum as their peers. The Department manages grant programs for bilingual education, teacher training for ELL instruction, and data collection on how these students are performing. As the department shrinks, oversight of these programs shrinks with it.

If your child is experiencing homelessness

The McKinney-Vento Act requires schools to identify and support students experiencing homelessness — about 1.3 million in a typical year. The Department coordinates this program, including ensuring homeless students can stay enrolled in their school even if they move shelters, providing transportation, and waiving enrollment requirements. The staff handling this coordination has been cut along with the rest of the department.

If your family lives near a military base

Impact Aid exists because the federal government doesn’t pay property taxes. School districts near military bases, tribal lands, and other federal property lose out on the tax revenue that funds local schools. Impact Aid fills that gap — $1.5 billion per year for about 1,200 districts. These aren’t optional extras. For some districts, Impact Aid is 20-40% of their operating budget.

If you care about whether schools are improving

The National Center for Education Statistics — the office that collects graduation rates, test scores, achievement gap data, and school spending figures — was reduced from about 100 staffers to 3 before recovering to approximately 11. That’s still a 90% reduction. Without adequate staff, data collection slows, reports get delayed, and the ability to measure whether schools are improving degrades.

The Pattern

The Department of Education hasn’t been formally eliminated — that requires Congress. Instead, it’s being made nonfunctional:

Cut the staff by half
Fire the specialists (special education, civil rights)
Freeze the grants
Redirect enforcement to culture war priorities
Transfer programs to agencies without expertise
Propose vouchers that drain public school funding

The legal rights still exist on paper. But the staff, the offices, and the institutional knowledge needed to enforce them are disappearing.