WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump signed an executive order Thursday to significantly diminish the Department of Education, part of a promised dramatic shakeup of Washington that’s already led to the firing more than 1,300 department staffers, and heightened concerns among Western Pennsylvania educators over potential losses of critical funding that serves disadvantaged students.
The directive comes just two months into Trump’s new administration. While part of the Education Department’s mission since its 1979 founding is to support students and states, and make life easier for recipients of federal funds by reducing burdens and paperwork, the department has been a consistent target amid the administration’s sweeping efforts to purge agencies, regulations, grants and programs the president and his Republican allies claim are wasteful or “woke.”
Many of Trump’s actions remain embroiled in court challenges, and fully eliminating the Department of Education as he pledged during the campaign would require congressional approval.
“Today we take a very historic action that was 45 years in the making,” Trump said before signing the order, flanked by children at school desks staged in the East Room of the White House.
The president said his order begins the process of “eliminating the federal Department of Education once and for all,” and that he hoped Linda McMahon would be “our last secretary of education.”
“Everybody knows it’s right,” he said of the move. “We’re not doing well with the world of education in this county, and we haven’t for a long time ... The United States spends more money on education by far ... and spends likewise more money per pupil ... and yet we rank near the bottom of the list for success.”
But local educators, teachers’ unions and advocates across Pennsylvania and the U.S. warn the decision could have severe consequences, particularly for low-income and special needs students.
“It's great to have headlines and say that we're going to trim all the fat and do all of this work to eliminate waste, but these are real kids,” Randal Lutz, the Baldwin-Whitehall School District superintendent, told the Post-Gazette. “These are real kids, these are real families. How are we providing for them?”
The vast majority of public school funding in Pennsylvania comes from local and state sources. And states — not the federal government — already have control over K-12 curriculums.
Almost two-thirds of Americans reject the push to eliminate the Education Department, according to an NPR/PBS News/Marist College poll in February.
But White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters Thursday that the “return on investment” of $3 trillion since the agency’s founding has been “nothing.”
“This president is finally taking much-needed action to return education where it belongs,” she said. “Decisions are best made when they’re closest to the people.”
The administration cited low math and reading test scores for 13-year-olds, a severe lack of proficiency in math and reading among fourth and eight graders, and flat standardized test scores “for decades.”
The White House relied on the latest annual “report card” administered by the National Center for Education Statistics — which, under the Trump administration, has reportedly been slashed from 100 staffers to just three, “creating a critical emergency for our education data infrastructure,” Ron Wasserstein, executive director of the American Statistical Association, said Thursday.
Pell grants and student loans, and civil rights complaints, will still be handled by the department, according to the White House. But otherwise, the scale and scope of the department will be greatly diminished, Ms. Leavitt said.
Trump said programs supporting disabled and special needs students would be preserved, with many duties of the department shifted to other agencies “as quickly as possible.”
“We’re going to take care of our teachers,” he said. “And I don’t care if they’re union or not union ... I believe states will take better care of them.”
How local education leaders are responding
If Mr. Lutz had 30 seconds in an elevator with Trump, the Baldwin-Whitehall superintendent would ask just one question: “What’s your plan behind the plan?”
Like other area superintendents, Mr. Lutz is in limbo as he waits to hear how programs and funding run by the Education Department could be impacted if the agency is effectively abolished.
Baldwin-Whitehall, a district of 4,500 students, 52% of whom are economically disadvantaged and 14% who are in special education, receives around $1 million in Title I funds, which provide supplemental financial assistance to school districts for children from low-income families. At Baldwin-Whitehall, that money helps fund reading intervention programs.
He pointed to comments made by the Trump administration calling Education Department spending wasteful.
“To broad brush it and say it’s all wasteful, please come here to my district,” Mr. Lutz said. “Not some private school — let’s not extend the narrative around school choice and vouchers. Come here to my district and see how we’re spending Title I dollars to provide real services to real kids that come from real families and they get benefits every single day.”
The district also receives Title III dollars, which support English language learners. Any changes to those dollars could drastically impact Baldwin-Whitehall, which has one of the largest numbers of ELL students in the county.
The past few months for Cornell Superintendent Aaron Thomas have held a “level of uncertainty and chaos” as rumors spread about the fate of the department.
“It’s hard to stay ahead of it,” Mr. Thomas told the Post-Gazette Thursday. “Everything’s being reactive and then it’s also hard to know when these things are going to come. A lot of it’s rumored, a lot of it’s hearsay, so yeah, it’s very chaotic.”
A small district serving 550 students from Coraopolis and Neville Island, Cornell sees nearly 5% of its funding come from federal sources. Mr. Thomas noted that from what he’s read so far, it is unlikely the district would lose those federal dollars.
But in the worst case scenario, the disappearance of that money “would be devastating,” Mr. Thomas said.
Mr. Thomas said his district, where 100% of students are economically disadvantaged, also relies on a federal grant to pay for after school and summer programs.
“That’s a big question mark of would that funding still be there,” Mr. Thomas said. “Are the people that oversee that grant still working there?”
Deborah Gordon Klehr, executive director of the Education Law Center, told the Post-Gazette the impacts of gutting the department “will be widespread on a lot of children.”
“[It] will certainly mean fewer federal resources for our most underfunded schools across the state, and fewer supports for underserved students, including 26 million students impacted by poverty, 7.4 million students with disabilities, multilingual learners, students experiencing homelessness [and] students in rural schools,” she said.
Ms. Klehr urged Congress to “stop the abuse of executive authority and ensure that the federal funding [that] our schools depend on continues to flow.”
AJ Jefferson, executive director of The Homeless Children’s Education Fund in Pittsburgh, said Trump’s executive order threatens to dismantle protections and resources that ensure students experiencing homelessness can access a stable education.
Nationwide, 1.2 million children experience homelessness. In Allegheny County, the number reached a record high last year, with about 3,500 children identified as homeless.
“This is going to impact every student that's receiving a public school education, but really the impact is going to be felt in students who are impoverished or who are experiencing unstable housing,” Ms. Jefferson said.
Several federal funding streams that directly support homeless youth are at stake, and among the most significant fall under the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act.
For decades, this federal law has guaranteed homeless students’ rights to stay enrolled in school and receive transportation without delay, even when documents normally required are missing, such as immunization records or proof of residence.
Grants from the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act staff social workers and liaisons in every school district who are dedicated to supporting homeless students and making sure they get the resources they’re entitled to under the law.
While these are in-school resources, the support goes beyond academics. These workers, Ms. Jefferson said, ensure kids have what they need to enter the classroom ready to learn, including food, transportation, clothing and stable housing.
These are also often the people who refer children to the HCEF’s services. Without them, Ms. Jefferson said kids could slip through the cracks.
“We're not necessarily in the schools every single day,” she said. “Those staff to have a watchful eye over the students to ensure that, even if they're not verbalizing that they're experiencing housing instability, they're picking up on the signs that say something’s going on.”
She said moving oversight to agencies without the expertise, infrastructure or mandate to support student success will lead to gaps in services and increased dropout rates among homeless youth.
“I can't tell you what's going to happen, but what I can assure our community is that the Homeless Children's Education Fund and organizations like ours are always going to be here for students,” she said. “We are raising money to ensure the students we care for have some measure of support.”
Lack of federal funding could impact disadvantaged students
Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, said earlier this month that he’d do everything in his power to work with other governors to help halt the elimination of the department.
Mr. Shapiro recently told comedian Bill Maher that the state has “kids who are coming from poor families who rely on this funding from the federal government.”
But he noted that some government institutions have waste or fraud that “should be rooted out.”
Less than 14% of Pennsylvania’s public school funding in the 2021-22 school year came from the federal government. That amounts to almost $1 in every $7 dollars, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
The $5 billion-plus that Pennsylvania public schools received in federal funds that year amounted to $3,070 per student — 21% higher than the national average of $2,536.
Federal funds made up almost a quarter of Philadelphia’s schools’ funding sources, and 10% of the Pittsburgh School District’s. Pittsburgh’s federal funding per student was at $4,000, third-most in the state but less than half of Philadelphia’s, according to NCES.
About $1 billion in federal programs help boost state and local funding for disadvantaged students, those learning English and teacher education, Carrie Rowe, the acting state education secretary, said during a recent appropriations hearing. Another $600 million in federal funds through the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act helps cover special education services across the Keystone State.
Nearly 20% of Baldwin-Whitehall students have individual education plans supported by IDEA funding.
Without federal funding, Mr. Lutz said, “it would be a near impossibility” to keep those programs running. “Those programs would pretty much be shuttered,” he said.
"This harms students,” Pittsburgh Federation of Teachers president Billy Hileman told CBS News earlier this month. “It's anti-worker, and it's really reprehensible the way the Trump administration is handling it.”
The Pittsburgh union joined the American Federation of Teachers and others across the country on March 4th in calling on federal lawmakers to protect public education and say “no to defunding and abolishing the Department of Education, yes to investing in kids.”
The Pennsylvania State Education Association, which represents almost 180,000 teachers, support staff, nurses, higher education staff and others, said earlier this month that more than 6,800 public educators and support professionals could find their jobs on the line if federal funding from the Education Department dries up.
“Everybody has a different learning process and we need to make sure that all of our students are getting the delivery of education that they need," Jeff Ney, PSEA vice president, told CBS News. "School districts are going to have to make some very difficult decisions because they don't have the resources that are coming down because of the cuts that were made to those staff.”
The education department, through its Office of Civil Rights, also works to enforce federal civil rights laws in schools. The office conducts investigations and issues guidance on how the laws should be applied, including for students of color and LGBTQ+ students.
Ms. Leavitt indicated such cases would still fall under the Department of Education’s more limited role.
Only Congress can officially shut the department down for good.
But Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s conservative playbook that Trump distanced himself from during the campaign, details how the department could be broken apart by shifting its operations throughout other agencies including Health and Human Services.
Project 2025 proposed that the Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights to the Justice Department. OCR is investigating at least 330 pending cases in Pennsylvania ranging from sexual violence to bullying, racial harassment, antisemitism and other discrimination.
Another question for administrators like Mr. Thomas, the Cornell superintendent, is the potential impacts to the federal requirement for assessments and testing.
“If there's no more department of education, then do you have to follow these testing mandates?” he said. “And again, that would probably then ultimately be a state decision so then it's just kind of you're waiting on the Pennsylvania Department of Education to kind of communicate some things,” Mr. Thomas said.
He noted that PDE has been communicating with districts as the situation evolves.
“We’ll manage,” Mr. Thomas said. “We’ll bob and weave as it happens.”
First Published: March 20, 2025, 9:35 p.m.
Updated: March 21, 2025, 3:44 p.m.
