The Department of Education was founded more than forty years ago in an effort to improve the United States School system. But as contained Political leaders, including President-elect Trump, are considering dismantling the agency, and a Fox News digital review examines trends in test scores, graduation rates and federal funding since its creation. Below are the results of those results.
When former President Jimmy Carter was in office, Congress passed The Department of Education Organization Act of October 1979, which formally established the agency in 1980.
The department was created to determine, administer and coordinate federal aid policy for educational institutions across the country, but it has seen opposition since its founding — usually from Republican lawmakers.
Trump said he would dissolve the agency when he took office, questioning whether the department was crucial to advancing education or whether schools would benefit from a more localized education system.
The modern educational system looks very different from the agency's founding system. The decades-old debate over whether individual states should have more control over local school systems, rather than the federal government, has reignited as Trump prepares to take office.
Biden's Education Department spent more than $1 billion on DEI grants: Report
The Department of Education building on August 21, 2024 in Washington, D.C (Tierney L. Cross/Getty Images)
“The federal government’s efforts to improve education have been dismal,” Lindsay Burke, director of the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Education Policy, wrote of the current education system amid years of declining test scores. “Even if there were a constitutional basis for its participation — which there is not — the federal government is simply not in a position to determine the educational policies that will best serve diverse communities across our vast nation.”
It has been argued that having such a department allows people with appropriate expertise to make decisions about financing.
“There's a reason we created the Department of Education, which is to have this kind of in-house expertise and policy background on these (educational) issues,” Claire McCann, managing director for policy and operations at the Center for Postsecondary and Economic Research (PEER), told ABC News in November.
“The civil servants who work at the Department of Education are true experts in this field.”
Low test scores
Average test scores among students have declined significantly since the Department of Education was created more than 40 years ago.
Math and reading scores among 13-year-old students are at their lowest levels in decades, according to National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) data for the 2022-2023 school year.
A teacher in his 80s reads a book to a group of elementary school students. Average test scores for students in the past 40 years have declined significantly. (H. Armstrong Roberts)
While the Department of Education does not control how students perform on tests, it is responsible for issuing requirements for schools to administer standardized tests in schools — which have reached their lowest scores. in decades in 2024, according to NAEP.
Data from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) showed that the average ACT composite score in the United States in the 1990s was about 20.8. But since then, standardized test scores have declined.
According to 2024 ACT data, Nevada has the lowest test scores in the country, with an average score of 17.2, while Oklahoma follows with the second-lowest average score of 17.6.
“The results are alarming,” Peggy J. Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, told ABC News of today's test results.
Most schools have reopened after switching to an online learning environment during the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, but Carr said “this decline we're seeing was there in 2015, so you can't blame all of this on Covid.”
Average test scores in the United States are usually based on the standardized test average. Countries in Europe and East Asia, which do not use the ACT or SAT as required by the United States, are usually rated as having higher test scores, relatively speaking.
Finance
Proponents of creating a dedicated education agency say federal involvement helps the system, while many critics say it's a waste of taxpayer money.
In its early years, the department established specific requirements when allocating funding to schools, such as requiring institutions of higher education to offer a drug and alcohol abuse prevention program on campus under the Drug-Free Schools and Communities Act, passed in 1989.
A new report finds that the Biden administration has spent at least $1 billion on DEI grants for public schools. (Istock)
However, under President Bidensaw the Department of Education spending money on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts in K-12 schools across the country — an initiative that critics say diverts funding away from core educational goals.
Experts say Trump needs congressional approval to dissolve the Department of Education
A recent study found that the Education Department under Biden spent $1 billion on grants to promote DEI in hiring, Fox News Digital reported.
Since 2021, the Biden administration has spent $489,883,797 on race-based hiring grants; $343,337,286 on public DEI programming; and $169,301,221 for DEI-based mental health training and programming, for a total of $1,002,522,304.81, according to Parents Defending Education, a right-leaning nonprofit.
Rethinking the department could be as simple as giving states funding and then letting their leaders decide how to distribute it, Neil McCloskey, an education analyst at the libertarian Cato Institute's Center for Public Policy Research, told ABC News in November.
Graduation rates
In the 1970-1971 school year, high school graduation rates were 78%.
But these rates declined, falling to an average graduation rate of 72.9% in 1982, shortly after the Department of Education was established.
Data from the National Center for Education Statistics showed that rates remained in the low 70th percentile until the early 2000s.
Graduation rates in the United States have risen in recent years. (Keith Bedford/Reuters)
However, data for the 2021-2022 school year shows that the average graduation rate for public high school students was 87% — an increase of seven percentage points from a decade ago.
decided
Technological advances have transformed the educational environment for students, with writing often replacing cursive lessons, digital tools enhancing mathematics instruction, and GPS technology reducing reliance on traditional map reading skills.
Today's technology-driven workforce has also reshaped the school system, with computer and artificial intelligence lessons taking precedence over home economics, such as sewing or baking.
The Department of Education does not set curriculum requirements for schools; it is left to state and local school boards to decide.
However, curriculum changes continue to be at the forefront of recent policy conversations, especially with regard to parents seeking more involvement in their children's classrooms. Parents from across the country have spoken out against the inclusion of certain topics in their children's curricula, usually related to sex and sexuality, and are said to have not been informed of the content before sharing it in class.
Third graders play a math-related computer game on laptops at St. John Paul II Catholic Academy in Boston's Dorchester neighborhood. (Scott Eisen/Getty Images)
Fox News Digital recently reported An elementary school in the suburbs of New York City was teaching a “gender curriculum” to elementary school children in an attempt to promote “inclusion” in the school.
Meanwhile, in 2016, OSPI set health education standards for all public schools, requiring children in kindergarten and first grade to learn that “there are many ways to express gender.”
In Oregon, the state Board of Education adopted health education standards, also in 2016, that require kindergartners and first graders to “acknowledge that there are many ways to express gender,” while third graders in the state were expected to be able to do so. “Determining sexual orientation” Fox reported In 2022.
Education Department opponents, like Trump, have used such examples of controversial curriculum to argue that parents should be given more authority over their children's learning.
Students on the University of Rochester campus in New York. (Libby Marsh/Getty Images)
But the next Republican president was not the first to propose this idea. Former President Ronald Reagan called for eliminating the department “to ensure that local needs and preferences, not Washington's desires, determine the education of our children.”
“There is only one way to reduce the size and cost of big government,” Reagan said in 1981, “and that is by eliminating unnecessary agencies that stand in the way of the solution.”
David Kanani, president of ORT College in Los Angeles, a nonprofit Jewish educational organization, suggested cleaning up the department rather than eliminating it entirely.
“The Department of Education ensures consistency and quality across schools, particularly in STEM education, which is critical to national security and global competitiveness,” El-Kanani told Fox News Digital in January. “Instead of abolition, we must clean up and reform the Department to collaborate more effectively with state and local systems, prioritizing STEM as a national imperative.”
Andrew Clark, Chairman of Advocacy Group Yes. He recently said that Trump should create pathways to redesign the education system rather than tearing down the entire department.
President-elect Trump has said he will eliminate the Department of Education when he takes office. (Evan Vucci/AP Photo)
“To make real change, you have to do it in ways that benefit people's lives, so if you drop the hammer overnight, you're going to cause pain to the people (who) depend on them. So, you're going to have to come forward,” Clark told Ravi Gupta, a former administration employee. Obama, school superintendent and host of 'Lost Debate' podcast: 'We have paths to make changes.'
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Trump will need congressional approval to make any changes to the Department of Education.
Republicans currently hold majorities in both the house and the Senate, which means lawmakers can pass new legislation addressing laws that create and sanction the department.
Fox News' Kristin Parks and Jessica Chasmar contributed to this report.
