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Will the Department of Education continue?
Donald Trump ran on a campaign promise to close the Department of Education, but will he fulfill that promise?
WASHINGTON - As the President-elect continues to announce picks for top administration jobs, there is a question of who will lead the education department – or if it will exist at all.
One of the campaign promises from President-elect Donald Trump included closing the Department of Education and allowing states to run the educational system.
"The United States spends more money per pupil on Education than any other Country in the World, and yet we are at the bottom of every educational list in terms of results," the campaign proposal reads. "Our Great Teachers, who are so important to the future wellbeing of our Country, will be cherished and protected by the Republican Party so that they can do the job of educating our students that they so dearly want to do. It is our goal to bring Education in the United States to the highest level, one that it has never attained before!"
The very first United States Department of Education was created in 1867, but it was reduced to an office a year later due to concerns with excessive control over local schools. Creation of the current U.S. Department of Education, as we know it today, was passed by Congress in 1979 and began operating in 1980.
Dr. Michael Feuer, dean of George Washington University’s Graduate School of Education and Human Development, said schools past and present have gotten funding mostly through property taxes at the local level. According to Dr. Feuer, the federal role in education became more significant in the late 1950s in the wake of global events such as the 1957 launch of Sputnik 1. That was a ‘wake-up call’ in terms of where the United States was a nation in terms of global competitiveness, Feuer said.
Schools then and now are largely funded through property taxes at the local level, but he noted federal aid is concentrated in problems more aligned with civil rights laws and funding for disadvantaged youths.
"It’s not as if we’re going to stop implementing those programs. So, then the question becomes, ‘Okay, if it’s not going to be done by the Department of Education, who’s going to manage these things?’ Title 1 programs, they would be renamed something. They would be turned into something like block grants," he explained.
Montgomery County Public Schools, Maryland’s largest school district, gets roughly $112 million a year from the Department of Education. David Stein, president of the Montgomery County Education Association, said that makes up 3% of the overall budget.
"But what you have to realize is that money is going to our most vulnerable students. It’s going to our IDEA, which is going to our special education. It’s going to Title 1, which funds our schools in higher poverty," Stein said. "These are students in programs that absolutely need the money. The reality is that all of programs, schools in general, but those programs are under resourced and underfunded. So taking more money out of them would be absolutely devastating."
Stein added, the money that comes from the federal government would have to be made up elsewhere.
"What I don’t foresee is us in Montgomery County abandoning those students. That means that money would have to come from somewhere else. If that’s county funding or state funding," he said. "If that federal funding went away, it would impact all of the students and everyone in Montgomery County, because we would have to figure out some sort of way to make up for that money."
Feuer said the dismantling of the department is possible but because the entire department in the executive branch was created by an act of Congress, it will require the same action to undo it.
"It’s not that it can’t be done but I think you have a lot of people on both sides of the aisle, current and about to be inaugurated who would have real misgivings about dismantling an agency that matters to so much to the popular masses who benefit greatly from public education," he said.
FOX 5 reached out to the Trump campaign for comment on the concerns surrounding the future of the Department of Education. We have not heard back as of this writing.