Just after his presidential inauguration, incoming president Donald J. Trump signed many executive orders and made many promises to his voters, one of which was the idea of completely removing the U.S. Department of Education in order to give all educational control and power to the states. This is a very difficult thing to do, as Congress has to be the one to approve or reject the abolishment of any cabinet-level agencies, including the Education Department.
Removing the Department of Education would change some policies and budgets that would impact schools nationwide. For example, people who’d want to get government financial aid to get into college wouldn’t be able to. Also, students with special needs could no longer get services the way they do now.
Reasons for this abolishment idea include arguing that education doesn’t need to be handled at a federal level, and also that the states should have control over their way of educating students. In fact, dismantling the department has been an idea that’s been around since its creation in 1979, and Trump isn’t the first one to try executing it. In 1979, Jimmy Carter was President, and during that time, there was a Department of Health, Education and Welfare. Carter broke up that department, and then his successor, President Ronald Reagan, called for the Education Department to be removed, but it stayed.
Although education isn’t specifically mentioned in the Constitution, the federal government has established a role for itself in making sure students have “access to excellent educational opportunities”. But other than that, theoretically, even if the Department was eliminated, its components, such as programs for funding low-income schools and disabled students, would stay largely intact, meaning that they could actually go to and be taken over by other cabinet agencies (most possibly the Department of Health & Human Services or the Department of Efficiency), like it was before President Carter formed the department.
Now the question is, how would the removal of the Education Department affect schools in California and LA County, specifically Rosemont? For one, LA County, with its numerous low-income and special education students, relies heavily on federal funding to support programs for these. However, if the Department of Education was abolished, it would cause a lot of budget cuts and reduction in services to students. For Rosemont, this means less school supplies and extracurricular activities, until the California government would possibly step in to replace federal funding or find alternative funding sources. Right now, the issue hasn’t changed much, but progress towards this Department’s removal is continuing forward.
