Department of Education through the years: A look at long-term trends in poor student achievement
The Department of Education was established more than 40 years ago in an effort to improve the US school system. But as incoming political leaders, including President-elect Trump, are considering dismantling the agency, a Fox News Digital review examines trends in test scores, graduation rates and federal funding since its inception. What follows are the results of those findings.
While former President Jimmy Carter was in office, Congress passed The Act on the Organization of the Ministry of Education from October 1979, which officially established the agency in 1980.
The department was created to set policy, manage and coordinate federal aid to educational institutions across the country, but since its inception it has faced opposition — usually from Republican lawmakers.
Trump said he would disband the agency when he takes office, questioning whether the department was instrumental in developing education or whether schools would benefit from local education systems.
The modern education system appears to be vastly different from the one at the time of the agency’s founding. And the decades-long 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.
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Department of Education building on August 21, 2024 in Washington, DC (Tierney L. Cross/Getty Images)
“The federal government’s efforts to improve education have been woeful,” Lindsey Burke, director of the right-leaning think tank Heritage Foundation’s Center for Education Policy, wrote of the current education system amid years of low test scores. “Even if there were a constitutional basis for its inclusion — which there isn’t — the federal government is simply not in a position to determine what education policies will best serve the various local communities across our vast nation.”
It is argued that the existence of such a department enables people with the appropriate expertise to make decisions related to funding.
Clare McCann, executive director of policy and operations at the Postsecondary Equity & Economics Research (PEER) Center, told ABC News in November: “There’s a reason the Department of Education was created, and that was to have this kind of internal expertise and policy background. about them [education] questions.
“Civil servants working in the Department of Education are real experts in the field.”
A drop in test scores
Average test scores among students have fallen significantly since the Ministry of Education was established more than 40 years ago.
Both math and reading scores among 13-year-old students are at their lowest level in decades, according to data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) for the 2022-2023 school year.
A teacher from the 1980s reads a book to a group of students. Average test scores for college students have fallen significantly over the past 40 years. (H. Armstrong Roberts)
Although the Ministry of Education does not control how students score on tests, it is responsible for issuing requests to schools to conduct standardized testing in schools – which scored the lowest in decades to 2024, according to NAEP.
The average American ACT score in the 1990s was about 20.8, according to data from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). But standardized test scores have fallen since then.
According to 2024 ACT data, Nevada has the lowest test scores in the nation, with an average score of 17.2, while Oklahoma follows with the second lowest average score of 17.6.
“The results are sobering,” National Center for Education Statistics Commissioner Peggy G. Carr told ABC News about today’s test results.
Most schools reopened after transitioning to an online learning environment during the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, but Carr said “this decline that we’re seeing was present in 2015, so it can’t all be blamed on COVID.”
Average test scores in the US are usually based on a standardized test average. Countries in Europe and East Asia, which do not use the ACT or SAT testing as required by the US, tend to rank higher on the test, comparatively.
Financing
Proponents of the special education agency say federal involvement helps the system, while many critics say it’s a waste of taxpayer dollars.
In its early years, the department placed specific requirements on school funding, 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 of 1989.
A new report found that the Biden administration spent at least $1 billion on DEI grants to public schools. (iStock)
However, under President BidenThe Department of Education has seen funds spent on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts in K-12 schools across the country — an initiative that critics say diverts funding from core educational goals.
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A recent study found that Biden’s Department of Education spent $1 billion in grants to boost employment DEI, Fox News Digital reported.
As of 2021, the Biden administration has spent $489,883,797 on race-based hiring subsidies; $343,337,286 for general 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 the right-wing nonprofit Parents Defending Education.
Rethinking the department could be as simple as giving the funding to states and letting their leaders decide how it’s distributed, Neal McCluskey, an education analyst at the libertarian public policy think tank Cato Institute, told ABC News in November.
Graduation rates
In the 1970-1971 school year, graduation rates were 78%.
But those rates fell, dropping to 72.9% of the average graduation rate in 1982, shortly after the Department of Education was created.
Rates remained in the low 70th percentile until the early 2000s, according to data from the National Center for Education Statistics.
Graduation rates in the US have risen in recent years. (Keith Bedford/Reuters)
However, data from the 2021-2022 school year shows that the average graduation rate for public high school students was 87% – a seven percentage point increase from a decade earlier.
Curriculum and program
Technological advances have transformed the educational environment for students, with typing often taking the place of cursive writing lessons, digital tools enhancing math instruction, and GPS technology reducing reliance on traditional map-reading skills.
Today’s technology-driven workforce has also reshaped the school system, as computer and artificial intelligence classes take precedence over household chores like sewing or baking.
The Department of Education does not set curriculum requirements for schools, leaving the decision up to state and local school boards.
However, curriculum changes continue to be at the center of recent policy conversations, especially regarding parents seeking greater involvement in their children’s classrooms. Parents across the country have spoken out against certain topics being included in their children’s curriculum, usually related to sex and gender, and allegedly not being informed about the content before it is shared in class.
Third-grade students play a math-related computer game on laptops at the Catholic Academy of St. John Paul II. in the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston. (Scott Eisen/Getty Images)
Fox News Digital recently reported about an elementary school in suburban New York that taught a “gender curriculum” to elementary school children in an attempt to promote “inclusion” in the school.
Meanwhile, in 2016, the Washington Office of Public Health (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, requiring kindergarteners and first-graders to “recognize that there are many ways to express gender,” while third-graders in the state are expected to be able to “define sexual orientation, ” Fox reported in 2022
Opponents of the Department of Education, such as Trump, have used such examples of the controversial curriculum to argue that parents should be given more authority over their child’s education.
Students on the campus of the University of Rochester in New York. (Libby March/Getty Images)
The future Republican president, however, was not the first to propose the idea. Former President Ronald Reagan called for the division to be abolished to “ensure that local needs and preferences, not the wishes of Washington, determine the education of our children.”
“There is only one way to reduce the size and cost of big government, and that is to eliminate agencies that are unnecessary and get in the way,” Reagan said in 1981.
David Kanani, president of Los Angeles ORT College, a non-profit Jewish education organization, suggested that the department be cleaned up rather than completely eradicated.
“The Department of Education ensures consistency and quality across all schools, particularly in STEM education, which is critical to national security and global competitiveness,” Kanani told Fox News Digital in January. “Instead of elimination, we should clean up and reform the department to work more effectively with state and local systems, prioritizing STEM as a national imperative.”
Andrew Clark, chairman of the advocacy group Yes. every child., recently said that Trump should establish pathways to redesign the education system, not destroy an entire department.
President-elect Trump has said he will abolish 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 just drop the hammer overnight, you’re going to hurt people [who] are dependent. So you’re going to have to figure out ways to make changes,” Clark told Ravi Gupta, a former Obama staffer turned school principal and host of the “Lost Debate” podcast.
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Trump would need congressional approval to make any changes to the Department of Education.
Republicans currently hold majorities in both House and the Senate, meaning lawmakers could pass new bills related to the laws establishing and sanctioning the department.
Fox News’ Kristine Parks and Jessica Chasmar contributed to this report.
