Cheered on by several Republican governors gathered at the White House, including Texas’ own Gov. Greg Abbott, President Donald Trump announced yesterday the effective dismantling of the Department of Education after 45 years.
He characterized it as a “failed experiment, a bloated bureaucracy,” and signed an executive order shuttering offices and firing large numbers of staff, though not eliminating the department altogether, which would require congressional approval.
The American Federation of Teachers has vowed a lawsuit to stop the dismantling of the education department, one of many legal fights expected. But what does all this mean for education in Texas going forward?
David DeMatthews, a professor in the Department of Education, Leadership and Policy at the University of Texas at Austin, joined Texas Standard to discuss the implications. Listen to the interview above or read the transcript below.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: Let’s talk a little bit about the impact on Texas from what you can tell. Too early to say? Or how could Texas potentially be affected by this decision from the Trump administration?
David DeMatthews: I think it’s going to be a long-term impact. It’s going to be really negative, in part because Texas is a state that struggles with implementing several federal laws. They serve a high concentration of low-income students, students who are experiencing homelessness.
The state has struggled to implement the nation’s federal special education law. There’s a number of civil rights complaints that have come out of the state through the years, and so these are all key things that the Department of Education has historically done.
And so closing the Department of Ed without a plan, it’s gonna have a big impact on Texas families, on Texas children, on Texas schools. And every Texan should really be concerned about seeing this news.
Well, let me ask you about this because a senior administration official was saying yesterday that Title I – which provides financial assistance to school districts for children from low-income families – and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act won’t be changed by this executive order… That essentially they’re talking about no real change in how monies are distributed.
And of course, longer term, they’re talking about distributing these activities to other agencies within the government.
Sure. So I would tell you that that person from the department or that spokesperson is doing one of two things. They’re either lying or they’re so new at their job that they don’t even recognize the significance of the cuts.
So the way that the federal government allocates Title I funds is, in part through, the regular ongoing collection of enrollment data, of census data, to understand the extent to which states’ demographics are changing and how there will be more or less needs for low-income students, for students with disabilities.
And so if the Department of Education doesn’t exist and it’s not collecting that data, and those recent cuts that we just saw of 2,000 department employees from last week – they’ve stopped collecting that actual data. They’ve also laid off their civil rights staff. And so there’s not complaints being filed that are tied to those laws.
And so I think we’re in big trouble in Texas based on these cuts. And I would expect to see lawsuits popping up almost immediately, a lot of the disability rights community taking up concern. So I don’t think that that information we’re hearing from the government is actually accurate, no.
You know, I think a lot of people who remember a time before the education department existed, there was [the Department of] Health, Education, and Welfare. And of course, they’re talking now about a lot of these services being shipped over to Health and Human Services.
So what is to stop things like, say, civil rights being farmed out to the Justice Department, or say, student loans going to Treasury? And for instance, you’re talking about the data – census department, for example.
Yeah, so that could be true. So aspects of the department could potentially be performed in other departments.
What’s happened, though, is that first the Trump administration laid off half of the only 4,000 workers, which makes up 0.2% of the entire federal employment. But they laid off that entire group and now they’re closing the entire department and there’s no plans. I’ve not seen any plans. It hasn’t been announced.
You have a secretary – who was the former CEO of the worldwide wrestling entertainment industry – in a matter of, what, two weeks is closing the agency that is responsible for insuring civil rights for 98,000 public schools serving 73 million children. It just doesn’t seem like a sort of strategy anybody who cared about civil rights would take.
Let’s do talk about Congress’s role. Obviously, the president, I think it’s widely assumed and agreed that the president can’t shut down the department on his own. I think that’s an acknowledgement that the White House is making.
But where does Congress step in? Will Congress step in? How do you see this playing out?
Yeah, you know, it’s really hard to say. I mean, it’s gonna come down to the Republican majorities in our Congress and also in our court systems.
So we’ve seen some of the other cuts made by this administration not be upheld by courts and people actually get hired back. And we’re gonna see if Republicans in Congress are actually gonna step up and, you know, do their job, which is to make laws and make sure that there’s agencies to implement those laws.
And if the agency needs to change, then it needs to be Congress’s job to do that. It’s not the job of the president.
Back when the Department of Education was first launched as separate from Health, Education and Welfare, there was a lot of concern that our educational standards were slipping and that this new Department of Education, by centralizing all these activities, that that would bring about better outcomes.
So, here we are in 2025, and I believe a lot of studies suggest that the United States is somewhere around a 14 or 15 ranking among world nations when it comes to educational performance. Has the Department of Education lived up to its promise?
Well, so the Department of Education’s role isn’t to fund public schools. It’s not to run public schools, right? Those are states’ responsibilities. And so that question really has to go to the states. And that’s what I think is problematic about the framing that I’ve heard from President Trump and from his secretary – that the Department of Education is responsible for test scores.
That’s absolutely not the case. The federal role only provides about 10% of funding for education. A lot of that is just for special education, for students experiencing homelessness, for students who are being served in poor rural and urban communities.
And so I think the department certainly could be improved. I think there’s a lot of work to be done in education at every level – at the local level, at the state level, and at the federal level.
But when the department was restarted in 1979, we were just getting started with a law for special education. We didn’t have high-stakes accountability and testing. We didn’t have laws and protections for students experiencing homelessness and a variety of other programs that I think if you made a referendum and you asked Texans or you asked Americans, “do you want to see these sorts of programs being funded by the federal government?” I think you clearly hear “yes” from people.
And the other thing is, since so much has changed over this time, it’s hard to compare and say, has the department done an effective job when Congress has added all of these additional laws over time?
And I do think there’s been some tremendous outcomes that have come out of the federal role and from the Department of Education. I also think that there’s room for improvement and I’m really fearful to see these rash haphazard cuts without any clear plan in sight for how we’re going to pick up civil rights and special ed.
You know, something I have to just ask on behalf of listeners who might be saying, “well, wait a minute, they’re not saying that there’s going to be a cut in funding for Title I or for special ed. What they’re saying is that this would be shifted to another agency for efficiency.”
And I understand what you’re saying. You’re saying that if that were sincere, it would be more deliberative over a longer period of time. But it’s not as if, like for instance, you think of school lunches – that’s already been covered and is covered by the Department of Agriculture.
Some people hearing this sort of wonder, “well, what is really going away other than positions?” Or, say, the way that we have done it for the past couple of decades.
One of the first things that has already gone away with the first cut was the National Center for Education Statistics, which is the way the federal government determines how to allocate money and how to ensure that there’s not waste, fraud, and abuse. And so without just having that data collection going on, Congress/the country is flying blind and we’re not going to know how to actually allocate money.
Now, if a new agency is going to do that, well, they need to be doing it right now, because it’s stopped at the Department of Education. And so the concern should be, for everybody, is you don’t want to stop collecting data that you use to make decisions and allocations before you have, in another agency, that capacity up and running.
