New Dept. of Education directives: How could students be affected by them?

WASHINGTON - Last week, the Trump administration announced a number of new actions aimed at dismantling the Department of Education.  

A series of six new agreements will shift major K-12 and higher education responsibilities and grant programs to federal government agencies like the Department of Labor, Health and Human Services, the Department of the Interior and the State Department.

The Department of Education will continue to oversee federal student loans and college accreditation, while also managing the country’s $1.6 trillion student loan portfolio and gathering data on school performance in the U.S.

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"The Trump Administration is taking bold action to break up the federal education bureaucracy and return education to the states," U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon said in a statement.

"Cutting through layers of red tape in Washington is one essential piece of our final mission. Together, we will refocus education on students, families and schools – ensuring federal taxpayer spending is supporting a world-class education system," she added. 

How students could be affected by these shifts 

Dig deeper:

The Trump administration has argued that these changes are necessary in order to ensure that American students recover from the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.

According to the Annie E. Casey Foundation, the pandemic "has had a wide-ranging and long-lasting impact on education in the United States." The sudden change to online learning, for example, proved difficult for students and teachers alike, as well as "dra­mat­i­cal­ly decreased instruc­tion­al time" and "hin­dered stu­dent understanding." 

John King, who served as secretary of the Department of Education during the Obama administration, told NPR's All Things Considered that the changes outlined by the Trump administration are "the opposite of focus" when it comes to bouncing back from the pandemic. 

"This is the wrong approach to what really is a very urgent crisis," he said. "Our performance today is below where it was before COVID. We should be doing more, not less." 

According to a report by the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE), a research team based out of Arizona State University, "the average American student in school during the pandemic is less than halfway to a full academic recovery." 

Big picture view:

King additionally told NPR that these changes are generally "going to be very confusing for schools, school districts and higher ed institutions." 

"The early evidence from one of their moves — which was to move some career and technical education programming over to the Department of Labor — is that it has slowed the distribution of money and made things more confusing for educators," he said. "It's not helping." 

He added that his colleagues are already seeing the results of dismantling the Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights – he says that regional offices have been closed and employees have been laid off. 

"If you are a victim of discrimination on the basis of race or sex or disability, you don't have anywhere to go," he said.

The other side:

In response to the Trump administration's announcement last week, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) released a statement calling it "an unprecedented move that undermines the department’s core mission and threatens students’ civil rights." 

"The Trump administration claims core education programs can be carried out elsewhere, yet it has offered no explanation for how agencies like Labor, Interior, Health and Human Services or State will uphold the education access requirements Congress explicitly entrusted to the Department of Education," ReNika Moore, director of the ACLU Racial Justice Program, said in a statement.

"By transferring these offices across agencies that lack the expertise to lead education policy, the administration is breaking the law, eliminating academic supports to close education achievement gaps, deliberately weakening civil rights oversight and putting millions of students at risk," Kimberly Conway, ACLU senior policy counsel and former attorney advisor with the ED's Office for Civil Rights added. 

Conway then called on Congress to "immediately intervene to halt this unlawful restructuring, safeguard the integrity of the department’s civil rights and education offices and demand that the department comply with the law and keep its central role in ensuring equal educational opportunity for every student."