Posted on 03/21/2025 4:26:48 AM PDT by Libloather
President Trump took dramatic action Thursday to inch closer to fulfilling a four-and-a-half-decade-old conservative dream of abolishing the Department of Education, which was created in 1979 under the late former President Jimmy Carter.
While the Department of Education has one of the smallest staffs of cabinet-level departments, conservative critics have long ripped it as an unnecessary bureaucracy with an oversized budget.
Still, the Trump administration has acknowledged that the Education Department has some important responsibilities such as its work on student loans and administering Pell Grants that it wants to retain.
“The Department of Education will be much smaller than it is today,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters Thursday. “This president is finally taking much-needed action to return education to where it belongs — and that’s to educators closest to students in their classrooms.”
Last year, the Department of Education had a $268 billion budget, which amounted to about 4% of federal outlays. There are 17 offices in the department. When Trump took office, it had about 4,133 workers, now the administration claims there are about 2,183 on staff.
Here’s what the Department of Education does:
Financial aid The most expensive responsibility of the department is to oversee financial aid to students pursuing higher education, which is done primarily via the Office of Federal Student Aid (FSA).
FSA oversees Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA), the form used by prospective students to apply for aid. The Biden administration overhauled FASFA but botched the rollout in late 2023 and early 2024, which led to significant delays for applicants at the time.
Last fiscal year, FSA doled out over $120.8 billion worth of various grants and loans to some 9.9 million students.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
If it weren't for the DOE/Office of Civil Rights, many students wouldn't even be getting an education. If you think public school performance is bad now, just wait until you eliminate the DOE/OCR.
Mine did. They were called BEOG grants back then. Mine went straight to dorm cost.
Rolls eyes
“If it weren’t for the DOE/Office of Civil Rights, many students wouldn’t even be getting an education. “
BS. ALL students have had schools for decades and long before the DOE even existed in 1979.
Take your racist screed someplace else.
Yes, and those schools fell under the federal laws enforced by the DOE/Office Of Civil Rights. Their foremost responsibility is making sure that a free and appropriate public education is made available to all students. Many schools/districts are often dragged kicking and screaming into compliance by the DOE/OCR while state authorities turn a blind eye.
Take your racist screed someplace else.
You seem to have a problem identifying what a racist is. A racist is one who shows detrimental treatment of one individual over another based upon race or beliefs. You should try looking into the mirror.
That division then has failed since most black schools are extremely poor performers. There is nothing to celebrate about the results of the DOE/Office Of Civil Rights. Blacks had far better school systems before 1979 and the DOE.
I agree with you in some cases regarding minority students. However, that boat doesn't float when dealing with special needs students. I've personally spent many hours in administrative hearings watching school districts being taken to task over their denial of services for special populations. All the while, the attorneys for the State stared at the ceiling declaring they didn't know anything about the districts' unlawful acts.
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