Unpacking the U.S. Department of Education: What Does It Actually Do?

The U.S. Department of Education has been a subject of political debate since its creation in 1980.

“It's the one whose status has been most tenuous from the inception. So the recent calls we've heard to eliminate the Department of Education have really been a constant feature of its history from the moment it was created,” says Professor Martin West, an expert in the politics of K–12 education. He explains that the DoEd, established in 1980 under President Jimmy Carter, was politically motivated but also aimed at consolidating federal education efforts. Despite its relatively small financial footprint — contributing less than 10% of K–12 funding — it plays a key role in distributing federal funds, enforcing civil rights laws, and conducting educational research.

In speaking with West, before news reports that the Trump Administration was drafting an executive order to eliminate the department, he noted that some view the DoEd as essential for ensuring equal access to education and enforcing federal education laws, while others see it as an unnecessary bureaucracy that interferes with state and local control.

“I think debates over the status of the department and speculation over the department status are largely a distraction from the real debates over the scope and substance of federal education policy,” West says. “The status of the department is largely a question of bureaucratic organization and is not particularly substantive. The real question is whether the federal government has a useful and valid role to play in K–12 education.”

In this episode, we discuss the Department of Education’s responsibilities, the misconceptions surrounding its influence, and the historical and political forces that have shaped its existence. We also explore the feasibility of eliminating the department and what such a move would mean for schools, educators, and students across the country.

Transcript

JILL ANDERSON: I am Jill Anderson. This is the Harvard EdCast.

Marty West knows the idea to eliminate the U.S. Department of Education is not a new one. He is a Harvard professor specializing in the politics of K-12 education and how educational policies shape student learning. I spoke to Marty about the federal state relationship in education prior to news reports that the Trump administration was drafting an executive order to eliminate the Department.

Since its establishment in 1980, the Department of Education has faced persistent scrutiny and public misconceptions about its role and influence. I wanted to better understand why the DoEd continuously faces calls for elimination and what that move could mean for schools, educators, and students across the country. First, I asked him, do most people even know what the Department of Education does?

MARTY WEST: Well, a few years ago, some colleagues and I conducted a survey where we asked a representative sample of Americans what share of total spending on K 12 education comes from the federal government. And they guessed that the federal government was responsible for one-third of spending on average, when, of course, the correct answer is less than 10%. So at least when it comes to finances, most people in the U.S. think the Department's role is far larger than it actually is. I'd also share that in my experience, our incoming master's students here at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, most of whom have considerable experience as educators will often admit to having only a vague sense of the Department of Education's role. I find that one of the things they most want to learn about is which policy decisions are made where so that they can become more strategic and effective in advocating for change. So both those experiences make me say no, most people don't really know the Department of Education's responsibilities and its role.

JILL ANDERSON: What is the role of the DoEd and why was it created?

MARTY WEST: Why it was created politically? It was created in an attempt — ultimately unsuccessful — by the late Jimmy Carter to win the 1980 presidential election. Carter had promised a cabinet level education department in his 1976 campaign. He did that in order to win the support of the National Education Association, the nation's largest teacher's union. And in fact, the NEA responded to that commitment by issuing its first ever endorsement in a presidential contest. So the first three years of Carter Administration, they faced some internal resistance, some resistance in Congress to the idea of creating the department, but ultimately he felt like he needed to follow through on that commitment. And in order to do so, they had to make a substantive case for the department's creation. So substantively, the argument was first that it made sense to bring together the different education related activities that the federal government was engaged in that were at the time scattered across the federal bureaucracy. So there was an office of Education within the Department of Health and Human Services, but other programs like the Head Start Early Childhood Program and education research and development activities were housed elsewhere. And the argument was that those activities could be better coordinated and perhaps operate more efficiently if they were brought together. The second part of the substantive argument that Carter and his allies made was that creating a cabinet level department was an overdue acknowledgement of education's increasing importance in American society.

JILL ANDERSON: It's still a fairly young department.

MARTY WEST: That's right. It's one of the newest cabinet level departments in the federal bureaucracy. And I would say it's the one whose status has been most tenuous from the inception. So the recent calls we've heard to eliminate the Department of Education have really been a constant feature of its history from the moment it was created. I mentioned Carter's attempt to use this as a way to win the election was unsuccessful. His opponent, Ronald Reagan, came into office committed to the goal of eliminating the department. He was ultimately unable to do so, but from the beginning, its status has been controversial.

JILL ANDERSON: Let's get a better understanding of what actually happens there because as you mentioned the funding is not enormous

MARTY WEST: In a narrow sense, the department's job as an executive branch agency is to enforce and implement laws passed by Congress. And so what does that mandate look like? It depends on what Congress has directed the Department of Education to do. And so in practice, that means that first of all, the department distributes funds in K 12 education. The two largest funding streams by far provide additional funds to school districts to serve economically disadvantaged students and students with disabilities. And then the department spends even more on higher education through Pell Grants and the Federal Student Loan Program. So first it distributes funds. Second, the department issues regulations on the use of funds. These regulations address how federal funds can and can't be used, but sometimes they also say what other policies must be in place for states school districts, institutions of higher education to accept federal funds at all? These regulations often give the federal government more influence than its limited financial role would imply. A third aspect of the department's role, it carries out through its Office of Civil Rights, which works to ensure that all schools receiving federal funds abide by federal civil rights laws. And then finally, the department has a long standing role in gathering official statistics on education and both conducting and supporting education, research and development.

JILL ANDERSON: So I just want to pick back up about the idea of something that even you mentioned, it's constantly faced efforts to be eliminated. Why is that?

MARTY WEST: In part that reflects the influence within the conservative movement of advocates and scholars who think the federal footprint in American life should be much smaller overall. They recall that the American Constitution laid out a limited set of responsibilities for the federal government and through the 10th Amendment reserved to the states and the people responsibilities for things not mentioned beyond those enumerated powers. And they note that education isn't mentioned anywhere in the U.S. Constitution. So they question whether the federal government should play any role at all. So for people of that persuasion, the department's prominence symbolizes a mistake that they think has been made throughout American history. I think the debates over the Department of Education in particular also reflect the enduring strength and appeal of the tradition of local control. So the American education system is famously and uniquely decentralized with control over the day-to-day operation of schools in the hands of roughly 14,000 locally elected or appointed school boards.

And those school boards are seen as our primary mechanism as citizens for exercising control over public education. And the federal involvement, which again is symbolized or emblem by the department, can be seen as inconsistent with that tradition. So I think for both those reasons, especially Republican candidates for offices like the President find some success, particularly in the primary stages of campaigns where the electorate is more extreme, they find some success in appealing to that tradition. The federal government's role in K 12 education has expanded over time, but it is the states within our system of governance who are the constitutionally responsible actors in education. While the federal constitution doesn't say anything about education, all of our 50 state constitutions do contain language directing the legislature to provide for the education of their citizens. And states tend to carry out that responsibility by delegating the control over the day-to-day operation of schools to local school districts.

JILL ANDERSON: Is it easy to eliminate a federal department? What would that look like?

MARTY WEST: Well, it would take an act of Congress--a law. The Department of Education was created in a 1979 law called the Department of Education Reorganization Act. And because it would require a law that means clearing the hurdle of a potential filibuster in the U.S. Senate, which currently requires 60 votes. And that's the main reason why it's been hard in the past, even when Republicans have had unified control of the Congress and the presidency. And it's why in my view, it remains unlikely that it would happen even today as we head into that situation, beyond the need to get Democratic votes to support the idea, it's also not clear to me that the Republicans would be unified in supporting the elimination of the department or that they would want to spend political capital in that way despite the appeal of the idea of eliminating the department among Republican primary voters among very conservative segments of the public. If you look at polling broadly, you see that the idea of eliminating the department is not very possible. It's opposed by quite large majorities.

JILL ANDERSON: And I hate to speculate about would it happen, would it not happen? Even though of course you just said that it doesn't seem like something that would gain enough traction. But let's just say, wow, this somehow manages to happen. What happens to that funding? What happens to all of those policies? Some of them I understand like Title IX and that kind of thing come from the DoEd.

MARTY WEST: Well, it depends on how it's done. Most proposals to eliminate the Department of Education that we've seen in recent years would simply shift the core activities of the department to other places in the federal bureaucracy. And if that were the case, I doubt schools and states and higher ed institutions would even notice the difference, much less struggle to continue to operate. Now, we did see in the context of the 2024 election campaign, some proposals that were more sweeping. So for example, Project 2025, which was much discussed over the course of the campaign, did propose eliminating many of the laws that the department is currently charged with implementing. So for example, it proposed gradually over a 10-year period phasing out what's known as Title One of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. That's that funding for economically disadvantaged students. And so that would amount to a pretty dramatic change. Many districts, especially those that serve large numbers of economically disadvantaged students do rely on that funding. And what would happen there would really depend on the extent to which states were willing to step up and replace that funding. That would also, if you eliminate those major federal funding streams, give the department less room to place rules on the use of federal funds and even more to place rules on what other policies need to be in place. So for example, right now the Elementary and Secondary Education Act requires that all states in order to receive funds under Title One, have to have pretty extensive systems of test-based accountability in place. This happened first with the No Child Left Behind Act in 2001. It was reauthorized and modified a bit with the Every Student Succeeds Act in 2015. If you no longer have those federal funds to attach conditions to, then the federal government wouldn't have the power or the authority to put those types of requirements in place. So one thing if you went in a more sweeping direction in eliminating the department and also eliminating some of the funding streams is that it would give states and school districts more autonomy in their policymaking.

JILL ANDERSON: But it sounds like that could have a serious impact on the ground, at least in some places.

MARTY WEST: I think it would depend a lot on how states responded to the change.

JILL ANDERSON: It's all an unknown and it is all speculative because no one knows what's going to happen. I think what is difficult for maybe the general public to understand is how this could potentially impact schools and higher education institutions if the Department of Education doesn't exist in its current state, knowing that there's a huge window of what this could look like.

MARTY WEST: Well, here's what I'd say, I think debates over the status of the department and speculation over the department status are largely a distraction from the real debates over the scope and substance of federal education policy. The status of the department is largely a question of bureaucratic organization and is not particularly substantive. The real question is whether the federal government has a useful and valid role to play in K 12 education. As I think about it, as a scholar who focuses in that area in higher education, you could ask the same question as well. And my own view is that the answer is a qualified yes that the federal government has an important role to play in enforcing Civil Rights protections in producing high quality data and research that wouldn't be invested in adequately by states and school districts if left to their own devices, that it has a role to play in redistributing funds to support the education of low income students and students with disabilities, and also a broader role in supporting improvement efforts and innovation to try to drive higher and more equal levels of achievement.

The reason my answer is a qualified yes is that I think at times the federal government has not paid attention to those core responsibilities and has perhaps had an exaggerated view of its potential to be effective as a policymaker. We often say that it's easy in the role of the federal government to make states and school districts do something in order to comply with a federal requirement, but it's much harder to make them do that thing well. And that's why ultimately I think the engines of improvement in American education need to be the states and school districts. With the federal government playing a supportive role.

JILL ANDERSON: Is there data that exists showing the validity of the DoEd after it was created versus what education looked like before 1980?

MARTY WEST: Here's the interesting thing: If I were telling the long-term story of Federal Education Policy and the U.S., and if I were also trying to tell the story of what has happened with respect to American Student Achievement, I would not have a significant moment on my timeline for the creation of the Department of Education.

The Elementary and Secondary Education Act first passed in 1965. That was the first significant federal funding for K 12 education, the first real source of significant federal regulatory activity in K 12 education. And I think that is a much more important milestone than the creation of the department itself. If I look at the long-term trajectory of student learning as measured by the National Assessment of Educational Progress, for example, I don't see a shift in the trend line in 1980 when the Department of Education opened its doors. I rather see it evolving over time in response to desegregation efforts. First in response to the adoption of test-based accountability systems in states and eventually as a federal requirement under No Child Left Behind. And really none of that is about the Department of Education per se. So I think it's a much more interesting conversation to say, what has the federal government done and what has it done constructively to support progress in American education? Rather than focusing on what is really a question of how we best organize the federal bureaucracy.

JILL ANDERSON: So as we move through this next year, what do you think we need to be thinking about and looking for as folks talk about education at the federal level?

MARTY WEST: Well, we're obviously entering a new presidential administration and administration that has come into office with a commitment to eliminate the Department of Education, not the first time that that has happened, but I will be curious to see whether they decide to prioritize that to expend the type of political capital I would think would be needed in order for it to have any possibility of happening. And then in particular, to go back to the distinction we've been making throughout this conversation, to see whether any effort to do that would essentially just move its activities elsewhere or actually significantly change the federal role. My guess is that we will not see much of an effort that the incoming administration will realize that now that we have the ability to have our own person in place as the Secretary of Education, it may be Linda McMahon, President Trump's nominee. They'll want to see what they can do when they're in charge of the Department of Education. So obviously, I'm most interested in seeing what that agenda will look like in the K 12 space. The one clear commitment that President Trump has made is to support the expansion of school choice programs. That's a difficult policy goal to advance from Washington, in part because of the federal government's limited financial role in K 12 education. I also would imagine that were the president to really push for that idea, it might make support for school choice, which has been typically a bipartisan matter in the States, a bit more complicated. Oftentimes, when a president comes out for an idea, members of the opposing party decide they're against that idea, regardless of what they had thought before. But I'll be interested given that reality and how the department tries to pursue its goal of supporting the expansion of school choice, does that mean limiting their efforts to the use of the bully pulpit to cheer, lead, and call attention to things they like in states, or does it mean really trying to put federal resources towards that effort?

JILL ANDERSON: Marty West is an academic dean and a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. I'm Jill Anderson. This is the Harvard Ed cast produced by the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Thanks