Trump’s Attack on the Department of Education, Explained

This week, the U.S. Department of Education (ED) released a statement saying it would cut nearly 50 percent of the department's workforce. These new layoffs occur at a moment when President Donald Trump has vowed to eliminate the ED and withhold funding from any other entity that incorporates diversity, equity and inclusion in educational practices and environments pursuant to civil rights laws. This move is part of the Trump administration’s attempts to dismantle the ED and repeal the federal government’s core responsibility of ensuring equal educational opportunity for all.

This reckless action strips students of vital resources and tears down statutorily-mandated functions that are essential to addressing racial and economic inequality in education. It also threatens decades of bipartisan progress toward educational fairness and reverses the commitment of previous administrations — Republican and Democrat alike — to ensure equal access to education. As the Supreme Court unanimously recognized in Brown v. Board of Education, public education “is the very foundation of good citizenship.”

The ED reportedly terminated all staff in seven of the Office of Civil Rights’ (OCR) 12 regional offices. Gutting the OCR severely weakens federal civil rights enforcement, leaving millions of students without crucial protections against discrimination based on race, color, national origin, ancestry sex, gender, disability, and age. It also suppresses students’ ability to seek justice when their rights are violated and allows discriminatory practices, including uneven and unfair targeting of students of color for school discipline, inequitable access to advanced coursework, the refusal to provide accommodations to students with disabilities, and discrimination against students with limited English proficiency or English learner status to persist unchecked.

By stripping ED of staff and resources, key federal grant programs are also at risk, including Title I funding, which provides critical support to schools serving low-income communities, and other federal student loan programs. Abandoning the long-standing federal commitment to ensuring that schools with the greatest needs receive additional resources will disproportionately harm students of color and exacerbate racial inequities in education.

Trump’s plans also threaten protections and funding provided under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), which guarantees that children with disabilities have access to a free and appropriate public education. Without these protections, millions of students who rely on IDEA for necessary accommodations, such as specialized instruction and assistive technology, are at risk of losing access to the education they are legally entitled to receive.

Without the ED, the federal government’s capacity to collect data is eviscerated, which is an essential resource for identifying and addressing disparities in education. Without this oversight, school districts won’t be held accountable for unjustified racial and disability disparities in discipline, academic performance, and access to resources. Policies based on data, which have helped reduce discriminatory discipline practices and promote equity for marginalized students, are now at risk.

The ED is also statutorily-mandated to enforce national student privacy laws and to provide students and parents an avenue to challenge abuses of their privacy. Without those protections, information about students’ grades, discipline, medical history and families’ income may be used for purposes they never agreed to — and even being weaponized in President Trump’s deportation machine.

For more than a century, the ACLU has been at the forefront of the fight for educational equity, including arguing in Brown v. Board that “segregation and equality cannot coexist. That which is unequal in fact cannot be equal in law.” Today, the educational landscape still denies marginalized students access to quality learning environments, undermining the very principles that Brown sought to establish.

Attacks on the ED are an attack on the progress we have made to advance educational equity. The ACLU is calling on Congress to act immediately to restore the federal government’s role in enforcing civil rights, maintaining transparency through data collection, and ensuring that students in low-income communities are not left behind.