President Donald Trump holds up an executive order reducing the size and scope of the Department of Education during a ceremony in the East Room of the White House on March 20, 2025. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
DONALD TRUMP IS ATTEMPTING to remake American public education by drastically reshaping the federal government’s role in our schools. “We’re going to be returning education very simply back to the states, where it belongs,” the president said in March. Linda McMahon, the secretary of education, echoed him in a Fox News opinion article the same month, describing how she would oversee the dismantling of the department she leads: “We will systematically unwind unnecessary regulations and prepare to reassign the department’s other functions to the states or other agencies.”
To be sure, all presidents influence the nation’s education agenda. But the Trump administration’s plans and actions demonstrate just how extreme its commitment is to changing our country’s K-12 education system from being one that prioritizes equity and federal protections for students to one with steadily expanding protections for private and religious schools. This fundamental change threatens the health of public schools—and future of the students who rely on them, especially from poor and middle-income families.
So what? Why is a robust public education system important? Public schooling is one of those common goods—like working infrastructure, a clean environment, and public health—that lifts all our prospects. Our public schools, free to all regardless of race, national origin, gender, and social status, provide foundations for a strong economy, a vigorous democracy, social cohesion, and, to borrow a phrase, the pursuit of happiness. Moreover, public schools require anti-discrimination protections. They have accountability measures for how public money is spent and how students perform. And they uphold the separation of church and state.
These are values worth defending at great cost. But the Trump administration seems intent on pulling the resulting benefits away from the public and pushing them toward a private, wealthier subset of the population.
THE PRESIDENT’S TEAM wouldn’t describe their goals in these terms, of course. What’s striking about their account of one of their chief purposes—to return control of education to the states—is that there is not a great deal to turn over: The governance of education is already a state matter, and the federal government contributes only around 10 percent of K-12 education funding.
However, the Department of Education still plays an important role in helping to make education available to all students irrespective of their unique learning needs, family backgrounds, or means. The department makes block grants available to states for a variety of purposes, including supporting students who come from low-income families or who have disabilities requiring special accommodations, funding after-school programs and teachers’ professional development, and supporting instruction for English-language learners. It also keeps states accountable for improving their public-school systems, and its Office for Civil Rights enforces civil rights laws.
That equity-and-rights–focused involvement in education makes the department a natural target for this president. In the first few months of the year, Trump issued executive orders to dismantle the department and end funding to schools that promote diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) or racial justice programs. Then, in July, Trump attempted to withhold over $6 billion of congressionally appropriated funds for teacher training, migrant education, community learning centers, and supports for English-language learners, disrupting planning for the 2025–26 school year. (Fortunately, bipartisan pushback resulted in the reinstatement of the money.)
Meanwhile, with the pretext of seeking efficiency, the Trump administration laid off more than half of the Department of Education’s workforce in March, gutting programs that support low-income, special-needs, and vulnerable students, making especially deep cuts to the department’s Office for Civil Rights. And it slashed funding for the Institute of Education Sciences, a part of the department that performs data collection that tracks student progress and researches what works best in K-12 classrooms.
Many of these actions are being challenged in the courts. Nonetheless, they have already caused confusion and fear. Moreover, they have reduced the federal government’s capacity to assist state and local education agencies while increasing the states’ financial obligations to provide quality education for all students.
Paradoxically, while committing to reduce the federal government’s role in education—a campaign promise—the Trump administration is expanding it to promote school choice more aggressively.
School choice programs let families use taxpayer money for private schooling. The mechanisms have evolved from using public funds to cover private school tuition (vouchers) to public funds being designated for additional expenses such as educational supplies, transportation, and homeschooling (education savings accounts [ESA]) to tax credits offered to individuals and corporations to offset their contributions to scholarship-granting organizations (SGO), which provide funds for students to attend the school of their choice, including homeschooling. It’s this last mechanism that Republicans under the second Trump administration have focused on to advance their school-choice goals.
THE REPUBLICANS’ ONE BIG BEAUTIFUL BILL (OBBB) established a federally funded tax credit scholarship program for K-12 students starting January 1, 2027. While tax credit scholarship programs have existed in some states since the late 1990s, this is the first such program at the federal level; it’s up to state governments to opt in to it. Under the law, individuals can have up to $1,700 in donations to an approved SGO in a given year covered by tax credits; the SGO then offers private-school scholarships—money that can be used for private and religious school tuitions, homeschooling, or other education-related expenses—to students whose families make less than 300 percent of the median income for their area.
The Joint Committee on Taxation estimated these tax credits would result in a $26 billion federal revenue shortfall between 2026 and 2035. Given that the majority of these costs would be incurred starting in 2028, the projected annual expenditure appears to come out to a little over $3.5 billion a year, although the law does not establish an annual volume cap for the tax credits. Importantly, it’s the secretary of the treasury—not the secretary of education—who is responsible for the program and for developing guidelines about reporting, oversight, and recordkeeping, as well as how state and federal choice programs will operate together, which takes an important area of education policy entirely out of the Department of Education’s portfolio.
The version of the program enacted in the OBBB drew several of its elements from another bill, the Educational Choice for Children Act (ECCA), which was reintroduced in the House in January after earlier versions died in committee during prior Congresses. This proposed legislation goes further than the OBBB did: It would set up a 100 percent federal tax credit for not just individuals but also corporations that contribute to private SGOs, which qualify for inclusion in the program based on basic criteria set out within the bill rather than through a state-level approval process. Individual donors can receive tax credits covering up to either $5,000 or 10 percent of their annual income, whichever amount is larger, while corporations can receive tax credits for donations equaling up to 5 percent of their taxable income. The SGOs receiving these donations would then distribute scholarships to participating families, with an identical limit on the recipient’s annual household income.
The ECCA’s tax credits would cover up to $10 billion in its first year with annual 5 percent increases thereafter, a sum that is not far off the $15.5 billion the federal government spent in fiscal year 2024 related to the Individuals with Disabilities Act. If the bill were to become law, taxpayers would be redirecting those amounts to private schools, including religious and homeschools, and the generous tax credit structure could create what some experts characterize as a tax shelter for the wealthy.
THE WATERED-DOWN VERSION of the ECCA included in the OBBB abandons our nation’s traditions of anti-discrimination, accountability for use of taxpayer funds, and the separation of church and state. Let’s look at each of these in turn.
First, while private schools receiving public funds through tax credit scholarship programs cannot discriminate based on race or disability, they can legally do so based on other characteristics, such as religion, gender, sexual orientation, class, and income. Moreover, illegal discrimination in admission practices is frequently hidden. One example: Private schools sometimes discriminate against students with disabilities by claiming that they lack the necessary infrastructure to provide those students with a quality education and denying them admission on that basis. Things can get legally murky, requiring investigations to identify and prove lapses, but there is little hope that this sort of discrimination will be identified and rectified given the meager oversight of SGOs and the dismantling of the Office for Civil Rights within the demolished Department of Education.
Second, Treasury-administered tax credit scholarship programs, such as the proposed ECCA and the smaller version in the OBBB, lack robust transparency and accountability measures when it comes to both how money is spent and the quality of the educational programs, opening the door to waste and fraud. The requirements for SGOs set out in the ECCA are particularly paltry: Essentially, a qualifying organization must be a non-private nonprofit that exists to facilitate the scholarships and undergoes annual financial and compliance audits; it must grant scholarships to at least two schools, vet participating families’ income levels, and provide scholarships for only qualifying expenses. (The conditions for SGOs contained in the relevant section of the OBBB are not much more extensive than this.) But beyond the way those organizations qualify to participate in these programs, the private and religious schools that receive the SGOs’ scholarship money are under no statutorily defined obligation to report on how it is spent or how students who receive scholarships perform—in the OBBB, reporting requirements for SGO qualification are left to the discretion of the secretary of the treasury.
Moreover, there is little oversight into the quality of the educational programs that take in the scholarship program’s money. Though it varies from state to state, private school teachers are often not required to hold teaching certifications. Nor are private schools always required to administer statewide assessments. Moreover, in many states, private schools are not bound by curricular guidelines and have a great deal of leeway to teach the subjects and content they choose.
Third, tax-credit scholarship programs will widen the gap between the rich and the poor. Vouchers and scholarships rarely cover full tuition costs. Wealthier families can make up the difference; often, poorer families cannot. Further, these funds frequently end up going to families whose children are already enrolled in private schools. Arkansas’s statewide school choice program provides a stunning example of this disparity: Ninety-five percent of voucher recipients were not in public school the year before they received the voucher, meaning they were either enrolling in kindergarten when their parents applied to receive the voucher, or they were already attending a private school.
Finally, despite the Supreme Court’s 2022 ruling that public money can be used for religious school tuition, the Establishment Cause of the First Amendment makes clear that the government must refrain from either supporting or limiting religious practices. How will that be ensured here? The OBBB’s provisions for the federal tax credit scholarship program specify that the states that opt into the program will determine which organizations within their borders qualify as SGOs. Will all religious groups be treated equally? Or will states favor certain religious groups over others? (The situation would be even more concerning under the ECCA proposal, which would give the secretary of the treasury the authority to determine what organizations qualify to receive donations as SGOs across the whole country.)
THERE IS NO DOUBT that many public schools are not providing quality education for all students. And there is a powerful argument to be made for families demanding the best schools for their children. But the solution is not simply to shift money from public to private schools. Despite their flaws, public schools are lawfully bound to serve the common good in ways that private schools are not: They are open to all, they have legal protections for the rights of students against whom private schools are permitted to discriminate, they include robust accountability systems for reporting student outcomes and how taxpayer money is spent, and they uphold the separation of church and state.
But rather than strengthening and improving the promise of these extraordinary institutions, the Trump administration’s education-focused actions and the school choice–focused aspects of legislation passed by the current Congress do not tackle our most pressing problem: ensuring that every child has access to high-quality teachers, fully resourced and safe schools, appropriate learning materials, and supportive learning environments for all students.
Instead, under the guise of getting the federal government out of education and parental rights, Trump’s plan risks worsening educational opportunities for rural families and the poor, creates needless opportunities for the further enrichment of the wealthy, and drastically cuts support for public education. It does nothing to maintain and protect the institutional system of free, high-quality public education for all students upon which for centuries this country has relied.
