Education is one of the more contentious issues amongst legislators today. From executive orders, like President Trump’s March 20 order which is set to give more power over education to individual state governments and dismantle the Department of Education (DOE), to Democrat rebuttals to the Republican agenda, this issue likely hits home to you, the reader, and for good reason.
After all, you’re likely a Fordham student, and education is your current task, and this recent order pertains to you.
But just because this sensitive issue that is plagued with political polarization has the potential to affect you does not mean that you should immediately run for the hills. My best advice to you is that you should learn about the ideas being crafted in the Capital, and read what the documents produced by the federal government state before coming to a sweeping conclusion.
A good start to this would be reading the recent executive order that President Trump signed, entitled: “Improving Education Outcomes by Empowering Parents, States, and Communities.”
The order states in the first section that, “[T]he experiment of controlling American education through Federal programs and dollars — and the unaccountable bureaucracy those programs and dollars support — has plainly failed our children, our teachers, and our families.”
Chalking the DOE as part of the federal bureaucracy, the order adds that “Closing the Department of Education would provide children and their families the opportunity to escape a system that is failing them,” and cites that a national assessment that shows how 70% of eighth graders aren’t proficient in reading, and 72% below proficiency in math.
Regardless if you support the order or not, education has been faltering. Pew Research reported in 2023 that 82% of teachers, a more than comfortable majority, say that “[P]ublic K-12 education has gotten worse.” This compares to the 5% who say it has “gotten better.”
As far as post-COVID-19 concerns about education go, there are also plenty. A report from the non-partisan Center on Reinventing Public Education titled “The State of the American Student: Fall 2024,” states that “The achievement gap between the highest- and lowest-performing students is growing, with low-income students making a slower recovery than their affluent peers;” and that “Chronic absenteeism has nearly doubled since 2020, and college readiness is at a three-decade low, with many students failing to meet major benchmarks.”
Just on these reports alone, there is good reason to be concerned about the DOE’s ability to continue working in conjunction with state governments to promote holistic excellence in education in the institutions they oversee, but moreover that teacher concerns are mirroring the reality of United States Education.
To date, the DOE has $102.24 Billion dollars at its disposal in 2025 for “budgetary resources,” which covers grants, financial aid, and educational programs and research, according to USAspending.gov. Also, according to TIME, the DOE has roughly 4,200 employees at its disposal. But, with the resources allocated to the department, common sense says that U.S. education, specifically the aspects that the DOE works on with state governments or institutions, should be top notch.
However, that isn’t the case. The Associated Press reported in January how declining reading skills and stagnating math scores, which the DOE is chiefly responsible for, have people worried, including Peggy Carr, the commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, who succinctly stated: “The news is not good.”
Initially, the DOE was started by former President Jimmy Carter in 1980. In Carter’s words on its formation, he stated to the public: “Because of you … the voice of education, the concerns of education, the needs of education will now be more clearly heard and more clearly represented at the highest possible level of our government.”
Though Trump is the current critic of U.S. education, GOP criticism goes back decades before him; even to when the DOE was brand new.
President Ronald Reagan was the first critic of the DOE, having stated that “America can do better,” and “Instead, we must do a better job teaching the basics, insisting on discipline and results, encouraging competition and, above all, remembering that education does not begin with Washington officials or even State and local officials. It begins in the home, where it is the right and responsibility of every American.”
Not only is Trump’s order echoing Reagan, but also models Reagan’s pledge to abolish the DOE. Trump is strictly following through on what he promised Americans on the campaign trail in 2024.
Back to present day, Trump’s order piggybacks on other recent administrative actions relating to education, such as a Feb. 14 letter from the DOE Office for Civil Rights that threatened federal funding to schools who “[E]mbrace of pervasive and repugnant race-based preferences and other forms of racial discrimination [which] have emanated throughout every facet of academia.”
Or, take the example at Columbia University, where $400 million in contracts and grants have been canceled due to the university administration’s credited inaction on combating antisemitism.
The main takeaway with Trump’s recent orders isn’t that he hates education, but that he is responding to an education crisis. Not only is Trump acting, but representatives in the house are also pursuing options to legislate, govern and further enact similar directives.
But, the most important focus of this issue of the DOE shouldn’t be politicization, it should be achievement, excellence and knowledge or skill building. The order was just signed by President Trump, and legal battles are likely to challenge it. But, we shouldn’t knock a potential solution to the education crisis just because it comes from a Republican; instead we examine and discuss it because American students deserve the best education and any attempts to deliver such should be considered.
Michael Duke, GSB ’26, is a business administration major from Scottsdale, Ariz.
