The U.S. Supreme Court’s July 14 decision to allow President Donald Trump and his secretary of education, Linda McMahon, to proceed with dismantling the U.S. Department of Education came with no explanation from the conservative majority that issued the ruling. It didn’t need to.

Indeed, if the court’s conservative majority had provided an explanation, it would likely have been the kind of rhetorical sleight of hand that Justice Elena Kagan described in her dissent to the court’s Free Speech Coalition, Inc. v. Paxton ruling, which radically shifted legal precedent for free speech rules. In her dissent to that ruling, Kagan argued that the conservative majority’s explanations for its decisions were not based on legal precedent nor the U.S. Constitution, but on “these special-for-the-occasion, difficult-to-decipher rules. … needed to get to what it considers the right result.” And the “right result” regarding the fate of the Department of Education appears to be whatever Trump and the conservative majority want.

This case was, meanwhile, decided “using the ‘shadow docket’—usually reserved for emergency cases, but more and more used to quietly rule on controversial questions with brief, often unsigned opinions,” according to a newsletter by Michael Waldman, president and CEO of the Brennan Center for Justice.

The court’s ruling came on the heels of the Trump administration’s announcement to withhold nearly $6.8 billion in funding that was to be distributed to schools and districts across the country. The money allocated by Congress was supposed to be distributed to states on July 1, 2025. It was, by and large, funding that schools and districts were counting on to pay for programs and personnel, some of which, according to Education Week, are required by law. Now, with many schools set to open in a few weeks, districts are hard-pressed to find alternative sources of funding or cut services and lay off staff.

Twenty-four states have sued Trump over this “illegal” action. “The withheld money includes about 14 percent of all federal funding for elementary and secondary education across the country. It helps pay for free or low-cost after-school programs that give students a place to go while their parents work,” according to a July 2025 New York Times article.

That Trump administration edict was also issued with “little explanation,” according to the New York Times, with only some vague reassurance about being “committed to ensuring taxpayer resources are spent in accordance with the president’s priorities.”

The Trump administration later partially reversed its decision to withhold this amount after receiving a letter from 10 Republican senators “imploring” it to release the funds. On July 18, the administration announced it was releasing $1.4 billion in grant money meant for summer and after-school programs with “new conditions relating to the president’s executive orders,” Education Week reported. But the president’s proposed budget for the upcoming fiscal year does not include direct funding for these programs, according to NC Newsline.

Compounding the harm inflicted on public schools, Trump and his obsequious conservative majority in Congress also pushed through the One Big Beautiful Bill that will require staffing cuts and additional costs from public school budgets. The administration has also enacted the nation’s first federal school voucher program that redirects public tax dollars to private schools.

‘Harmful Risks for Students and Families’

Trump and his conservative allies justify these harms to public schools by insisting that the K-12 institutions, attended by 83 percent of students in 2021-2022, are “woke” indoctrination camps and that all decisions about school spending and operations should be “returned to states.”

But the federal government has never had the power to set school curriculum, woke or otherwise, and state governments already have primary authority over public education.

Where the federal government does have some influence in education is in its power to conduct research, fund special programs, and ensure, through civil rights enforcement, that students and families have access to education services.

In allowing the Trump administration to dismantle the Department of Education, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority is giving the go-ahead to abdicate these responsibilities.

The nonprofit education news site The 74 reported that in the initial round of employee firings and voluntary departures “the hardest hit” offices included the Office for Civil Rights, which enforces civil rights laws in schools; the Institute for Education Sciences, which conducts research and collects and analyzes education statistics; the National Center for Education Statistics, which administers the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the so-called Nation’s Report Card; and Federal Student Aid, which helpsstudents pay for college.

A disempowered Department of Education will “create harmful risks for students and families,” according to a February 2025 analysis by the think tank Century Foundation. “Millions of Americans rely on federal support from the Department of Education to open doors along their educational journeys.” These “millions of Americans” include students with disabilities, whose access to education services is protected by the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, low-income students, whose schools receive extra federal funding through the department’s Title I program, and students and families who’ve requested federal government intervention because they’ve faced discriminatory treatment in schools due to their national origin, immigration status, sexual identity, disability, race, or religion.

“The Trump administration is widely expected to turn civil rights enforcement on its head in ways that harm historically marginalized communities,” the Century Foundation analysis stated.

Trump’s other education policies will have equally harmful impacts on the most vulnerable students and families.

The decision to withhold congressionally allotted funds to schools specifically targets federal grant programs that serve high-needs populations, such as migrant students, English learners, students who need access to academic enrichment programs, and after-school and summer learning programs, according to an analysis by New America, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank.

“The impact [of the withheld funds] will be much greater on students and families in certain school districts—particularly high-need districts,” New America said.

In North Carolina alone, the expected impact of withholding these funds will amount to nearly 1,000 full-time educators losing their jobs and the potential shuttering of 99 after-school and summer programs for kids that employ 1,371 full-time equivalent positions, according to a report by the state’s Department of Public Instruction.

When Kris Nordstrom of the North Carolina Justice Center combed through the data, he found, “These cuts will disproportionately fall upon rural districts and districts with the greatest share of students experiencing poverty.”

Nationwide, “[s]tudents from low-income backgrounds are especially at risk of losing education resources,” according to New America. “Districts serving high-poverty student populations (those where over 25 percent of children live in poverty) will lose over five times as much funding per pupil as low-poverty school districts.”

English learners are also disproportionally harmed by these cuts, New America found, as are students of color.

The sprawling budget reconciliation bill that Trump and Republicans passed, with its cuts to Medicaid and food assistance programs, will also add to the costs of schools’ student health services and free meals programs, which are essential to low-income communities.

‘The False Narrative’

How the Trump Administration Wields the Federal Government’s Power Over Public Education

Jeff Bryant

The fact that these devastating education cuts are being made during a time when conservative Republicans control the White House, Congress, and the Supreme Court, with little to no explanation, should surprise no one.

Anyone who’s been paying attention has long known that the primary role conservative Republicans feel the federal government has in public education is punitive and controlling. They have rarely done anything to support schools and educators and address the needs and interests of students.

This has been clear ever since former President Ronald Reagan called for abolishing the Department of Education and then used the department’s resources and clout to form a commission that issued a scathing report, “A Nation at Risk,” now widely discredited, which education historian Diane Ravitch has said “launched the false narrative that American public schools were failing.”

Conservatives continued their campaign to use federal agencies to punish public education when William Bennett, Reagan’s secretary of education in his second term, weaponized the NAEP. According to education psychologist David Berliner and James Harvey, an author of “A Nation at Risk,” who became a prominent critic of it, Bennett changed the standardized test’s intent, “from its original purpose of measuring what students at various grade levels actually know to a new goal: judging what students at various grade levels should know,” and created a “proficiency” benchmark that “the vast majority of students in most nations cannot clear.”

Conservative Republicans drew a straight line from changing the purpose of the NAEP to enacting, with the complicity of most Democrats, No Child Left Behind (NCLB) during the presidency of George W. Bush. NCLB set in motion a policy agenda, largely still intact today. This includes using test score data, like the NAEP, to label public schools as failures and closing them down or privatizing them. (Although cutting funds to the NAEP would appear to undercut its weaponization, the Trump administration has vowed to continue administering the tests.)

Trump’s first presidential term continued to weaponize federal involvement in education with the hiring of Betsy DeVos as his secretary of education. DeVos was openly hostile to the mission of public education, and she loudly advocated for redirecting government funds from public education to private schools.

Inequality Is the Point

Democrats, for their part, are currently voicing their opposition to these cuts.

Even before the Supreme Court cleared the way for Trump to dismantle the Department of Education, 11 Democratic senators, in March 2025, called for an investigation into the massive layoffs and spending cuts McMahon carried out.

The injunction that temporarily blocked the cuts, which the Supreme Court overruled, was brought by “New York and 20 other Democratic-led states, two Massachusetts school districts, and the American Federation of Teachers,” Education Week reported.

“More than 175 Democratic members of Congress,” according to ABC News, filed an amicus brief supporting a lawsuit brought by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People to block the dismantling of the department. But all of that was before the court’s ruling.

In response to the withholding of billions in federal funds, more than 100 Democratic House Representatives sent a letter to McMahon and Director of the Office of Management and Budget Russell Vought asking why the funds were being withheld in July. In a separate letter, 32 Democratic senators demanded “an immediate end to the illegal withholding.”

As New America explained in its analysis, “School districts represented by Republicans in Congress will lose more per-pupil dollars. … the average school district represented by a Republican stands to lose 1.6 times as much funding per pupil as the average school district represented by a Democrat. The 100 school districts that would see the worst losses per pupil are heavily concentrated in Republican-represented Congressional districts (91, compared with nine in Democrat-represented Congressional districts).”

But for the Trump administration, and a majority of conservative Republicans serving in Congress and on the nation’s highest court, the only constituents that seem to matter are white, wealthy ones. And the nation’s system of public education should be bent to ensure they get what they want out of it first.

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