Donald Trump. / Reuters

One of the key promises President-elect Donald Trump made while campaigning for the White House was to abolish the US Department of Education. Eliminating the department of education will not eliminate education, said panelists at the Ethnic Media Services briefing. 

Ninety percent of the funding for education comes from the states; the federal role is relatively minor except in compensatory education that is compensating for poverty in urban and rural districts. 

The federal government plays a significant role in funding and oversight of special education through the ark of civil rights, in ensuring that the needs of children with disability are being met. 

“Those children come from Republican households and Democratic households. If they pull back on that oversight, they are going to find resistance and pushback coming from many quarters,” said Thomas Toch, Director, FutureEd, Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy.

Getting Congressional approval an uphill battle

In order to dismantle the US Department of Education, the incoming Republican President would need Congressional approval. That may prove to be an uphill battle.

“This is a Congress that despite Republican formal control is quite evenly divided in the House of Representatives,” said Toch. “It will be difficult for the Trump administration to enact anything that they cannot achieve unanimous Republican support for.”

The Senate majority is not a filibuster proof. They do not have the votes, even with every Republican aligned, to overcome a filibuster. To "filibuster" means to delay action on a bill or other issue by talking.

“They would have to change the filibuster rules which the Democrats attempted but could not do with regard to limited legislation in the last Congress,” said Toch. “They could not get 51 percent of the votes to change the filibuster rules.” Under Senate rules, a filibuster can only be stopped if 60 senators vote to end debate in a process called cloture. Neither party has achieved a 60-member majority since 1979 and Republicans' majority will fall well short of that.

Given this impotency, the panelists agreed that the Trump administration will attempt to create chaos.

Will they disturb and create chaos?

“We do know there will be a daily barrage of rhetoric. Part of that rhetoric would be to overstate the powers of the President,” said Toch. This is a calculated campaign designed to cause folks, including local school district officials, to act on their own in retrieving what is attacked by the President and his cabinet members, but that rhetoric cannot be made real in most cases without Congressional action.

We have huge gaps in educational achievement that were exacerbated by the pandemic. That should be our focus, said panelist Thomas A. Saenz, President and General Counsel, MALDEF, Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund.

“Our education has great needs and it is unfortunate if all the attention goes into politics and not into the substance of education. We have major challenges related to math and teaching children to read. Many Americans don’t understand science and climate change. A basic fundamental knowledge of how the constitution works and how the government should work is lacking for many Americans,” said Saenz. Higher education is in need of reform and change.

We are expecting declining enrollment even in public schools and that is going to lead to many educational institutions shutting down as they no longer have the students to be sustained, he said. Many changes are going to be necessary whether the government supports these changes is what is to be seen or instead will they merely disturb and create chaos? “They are not coming in with a clear understanding of how the system works therefore, they will most likely do the latter,” he said.

Many of our students are struggling academically. Even before the pandemic made things even worse 54 percent of the adults aged 16 to 74 in this country read below the sixth grade level, according to the US Department of Education. Given the rapidly changing nature of work, changing demographics we cannot afford to ignore education. Students left out of the nation's education equation have to be taken care of.

Federal leadership is critical, not only for the money it provides to students who have traditionally struggled as a level of equity, but also as a source of leadership, said Saenz.

“I fear we may not be getting the leadership we really need on the school improvement front.”