Education

Education Department Layoffs and Program Transfers

In March 2025, Trump signed an executive order directing the dismantling of the Department of Education. Congress created the department and its programs by law, so it cannot legally be abolished without legislation. The administration has cut staff and moved programs to other agencies instead.

DOGE terminated 64 research contracts worth roughly $900 million, including studies on literacy instruction and special education transitions. The department’s headcount dropped from roughly 4,000 to about 2,000 employees through layoffs and buyouts.

The Office for Civil Rights was hit hardest. At least 240 OCR attorneys were laid off in March 2025, cutting the office by 40%. More than half of its 12 regional enforcement offices were closed.

In October 2025, during the shutdown, another 466 workers got layoff notices, including staff overseeing special education and Title I funding. The November 2025 funding law rescinded those notices, and in January 2026 the administration dropped its appeal of a court order against them (K-12 Dive).

A GAO report found the department spent over $28 million on its own firing process. A federal judge ordered the administration to reverse the layoffs in May 2025, but the Supreme Court stayed that order on July 14, 2025, which let the layoffs go forward. The appeals court dismissed the appeal on September 15, 2025, and the district court vacated its order on October 1, 2025, on the government’s motion.

Withheld Education Grants, 2025 and 2026

On July 1, 2025, the administration withheld $6.8 billion in federal education grants that Congress had already appropriated. The Office of Management and Budget said the seven affected programs were “under review” to root out a “radical leftwing agenda.” Twenty-four states sued, and ten Republican senators wrote a letter urging the administration to release the money.

About $5 billion was eventually unfrozen in late July 2025. By January 2026, the administration had disrupted more than $12 billion in education funding during its first year, targeting programs labeled as promoting “gender ideology” or “DEI initiatives.” As of May 2026, another $2 billion was still withheld.

Education Funding in the Federal Budget

Trump’s initial FY 2026 budget proposed a 15% cut to the Education Department, including a plan to merge 18 smaller programs worth $6.5 billion (teacher training, rural schools, school safety, and homeless student support) into a single block grant funded at just $2 billion.

Congress pushed back. In February 2026, lawmakers passed a spending package that maintained level funding for virtually every existing K-12 program, including Title I at just over $18 billion. The vote was 217-214 in the House.

Title I funding has been flat for two years running. IDEA special education funding got a nominal boost to roughly $14.9 billion, but once previously separate programs were folded in, districts’ actual special education funding is flat.

The FY 2027 proposal went further. Trump proposed billions more in K-12 cuts while maintaining the push to consolidate programs and reduce the department’s footprint. The maximum Pell Grant for low-income college students, currently about $7,400 per year, would be cut to $5,700 under earlier proposals.

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School Voucher Programs and Public School Budgets

Roughly 30 states now have some form of voucher or education savings account program. Eighteen of them are universal, meaning any family can use public money for private school tuition regardless of income. Six states passed universal programs in 2023 alone.

The Federal Tax-Credit Scholarship Program

The Educational Choice for Children Act (S. 292 / H.R. 833) was included in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which Trump signed on July 4, 2025. It creates a federal tax credit for donations to nonprofit scholarship organizations that fund private school tuition.

Here is how the program works:

• Donors get a dollar-for-dollar tax credit for contributions to scholarship-granting organizations
• The credit is up to $1,700 per taxpayer, starting with the 2027 tax year. An earlier version of the bill capped total credits each year; the final law has no such limit
• Families earning up to 300% of their area’s median income qualify
• Scholarships can cover tuition at private and religious schools, plus tutoring, transportation, and disability services
• States must opt in. The IRS launched the opt-in process in December 2025
• The federal program will bring private school choice to at least four new states that had no existing state-level program

This is a tax expenditure, not a direct appropriation. That means every dollar of credit claimed is a dollar of lost federal revenue. It does not appear in the education budget. It does not come with the accountability requirements that apply to public school funding.

Arizona’s Universal ESA Program Costs

Arizona expanded its voucher program to cover all students in 2022. ProPublica reported the costs, citing the Grand Canyon Institute, a nonpartisan fiscal policy group:

• The original cost estimate was $65 million. Actual cost in the first year: $332 million
• The program now draws roughly $1 billion per year from taxpayer funds
• Enrollment jumped from about 11,000 to over 90,000 students
• The state faced a $1.4 billion budget shortfall, much of which resulted from the new voucher spending, according to the Grand Canyon Institute
• ProPublica found that most voucher recipients were already in private schools, meaning the state was subsidizing families who had already left public education

Texas’s Education Savings Account Program

After years of failed attempts, the Texas legislature passed a voucher program in April 2025 and Governor Abbott signed it into law. The program launches in the 2026-27 school year with these terms:

• Most families receive $10,474 per student for the 2026-27 school year
• Home-schooling families receive up to $2,000
• Students with disabilities can receive up to $30,000
• The state budget cap is $1 billion for the 2025-2027 cycle
• The Texas Tribune reported a projection of $4.8 billion a year by 2030
• About 70% of participating families were already in private school or homeschool, the Texas Tribune reported in September 2026

Voucher Programs and Private School Tuition

A 2024 Princeton University study found that when Iowa expanded its voucher program to universal eligibility, private schools raised tuition by 21% to 25% on average. When eligibility was limited to certain grades, prices rose 10% to 16%.

NEA research found that voucher programs hit rural schools hardest. Rural districts lose funding when students leave but cannot reduce fixed costs like building maintenance, transportation, or minimum staffing.

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School Book Bans by the Numbers

PEN America’s 2024-2025 Index of School Book Bans recorded 6,870 instances of book bans across 23 states and 87 public school districts. Nearly 4,000 unique titles were affected, including works by almost 2,600 authors, illustrators, and translators.

Since 2021, PEN America has documented nearly 23,000 book ban instances across 45 states and 451 public school districts.

The most banned titles include A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess, books in Sarah J. Maas’s Court of Thorns and Roses series, and Jodi Picoult’s Nineteen Minutes.

PEN America’s research found a clear pattern: state laws are driving the bans. In Florida and Iowa, where state legislation created removal mandates or legal liability for librarians, the bans spread across a much higher percentage of districts than in states without such laws. In Texas, most bans came from just a few districts acting on their own.

The targets are consistent. Books about race, sexuality, and gender identity make up a disproportionate share of banned titles. PEN America calls this the “normalization of book banning”, a shift from controversy to routine.

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Religious Displays and Instruction in Public Schools

Three states have moved to bring religious instruction or displays into public schools, and the courts have ruled in both directions.

Oklahoma’s Bible Mandate

In June 2024, Oklahoma Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters ordered all public schools to incorporate the Bible into classroom instruction. This was not framed as comparative religion or historical study. The directive required every teacher to keep physical copies of the Bible, the Constitution, and the Ten Commandments as “source material” in every classroom.

Schools across the state responded unevenly, and several of the largest districts refused to change their curriculum. The Oklahoma Supreme Court blocked the Bible purchases and the new social studies standards. Walters resigned in September 2025, and his replacement, Lindel Fields, reversed the Bible mandate, so the court dismissed the case as moot.

Louisiana’s Ten Commandments Law

In 2024, Louisiana became the first state to require the Ten Commandments to be displayed in every public school classroom. A federal court blocked the law in June 2025. On February 20, 2026, the full Fifth Circuit ruled 11-7 that the challenge was premature and vacated the preliminary injunction, which let the law take effect. The court did not decide whether the law is constitutional and said its ruling does not bar future challenges once the law is carried out.

Texas’s Ten Commandments Law

Governor Abbott signed Senate Bill 10 into law in May 2025, requiring Ten Commandments displays in Texas public school classrooms. A federal district judge blocked it in 2025, and the full Fifth Circuit upheld the law 9-8 on April 21, 2026. On August 17, 2026, Texas families asked the Supreme Court to hear the case.

Lawmakers in North Dakota, South Dakota, Oklahoma, and Tennessee have also introduced Ten Commandments bills in their 2025 sessions.

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State DEI Bans in Colleges and Schools

Sixteen states restrict diversity, equity, and inclusion programs at public colleges by law, and two more do so by a governor’s order or a university board policy, according to the DEI state map. Texas has extended its ban to K-12 schools.

Texas Senate Bill 17

Texas Senate Bill 17, signed into law in 2023, prohibits public universities from:

• Establishing or maintaining a DEI office
• Hiring employees to perform DEI functions
• Requiring diversity statements in hiring
• Mandating DEI training for faculty or staff

Academic instruction, scholarly research, and student organizations are exempt. But the law’s author, Sen. Brandon Creighton, warned universities in March 2025 that they could lose millions in state funding if they were caught “renaming, relaunching or reauthorizing a DEI unit under the guise of a different name.”

UNT removed references to race and equity from course names. Faculty across the state report fear and self-censorship. Republican senators have threatened to withhold funding increases from universities they believe are not complying aggressively enough.

DEI Bans in K-12 Schools

In February 2025, the Texas Senate voted 20-11 along party lines to pass Senate Bill 12, extending the DEI ban to K-12 public schools, and the bill became law later in 2025. It restricts how schools address race, gender, and equity.

Florida’s 2023 DEI Law

Florida was the first state to ban DEI programs at public universities when Governor DeSantis signed SB 266 in May 2023. The law prohibits state funds from being used for DEI programs and restricts how race-related concepts can be taught.

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The Teacher Shortage and Pay Gap

The teacher shortage started before the policies on this page, and pay is one measured cause.

The NEA’s 2026 Rankings and Estimates report found that the average classroom teacher salary, adjusted for inflation, has decreased 4.6% since 2016-17. The teacher pay penalty (the gap between what teachers earn and what comparably educated workers earn elsewhere) has reached a record high.

The number of people entering teacher preparation programs is much lower than a decade ago. Retirements are not the main driver. Most teachers leaving the profession cite working conditions, not age. NEA research found that reducing attrition by half could virtually eliminate shortages.

Teachers also work under the policy changes covered on this page:

• In Florida and Iowa, book ban laws created legal liability for school librarians, according to PEN America
• Texas faculty report fear and self-censorship under the state DEI ban
• Voucher programs move per-student funding out of districts that lose students
• The Education Department, which runs Public Service Loan Forgiveness for teachers, lost about half its staff in 2025

When experienced teachers leave, districts fill positions with underprepared substitutes or leave them vacant. Rural districts, already struggling to recruit, are hit hardest by both voucher defunding and staffing shortages.

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Education Policy Timeline, 2023 to 2026

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What You Can Do About Education Policy

1. Know what your state legislature is doing. Voucher programs, book bans, DEI restrictions, and religious mandates all start at the state level. Find your state legislature’s website and look up pending education bills. Show up to committee hearings or submit written testimony.

2. Support your local school board. Book ban decisions are often made at the district level, so attend school board meetings, speak during public comment, and run for a seat if one is open.

3. Talk to a teacher. Ask what they need, what has changed, and what pressures they face that the public does not see.

4. Follow the money. Ask where your state’s voucher dollars are going. Are they reaching low-income families, or subsidizing families already in private schools? ProPublica’s Arizona investigation is a blueprint for the questions every state should be asking.

5. Check your district’s banned book list. If your school district has removed books, find out which ones and why. PEN America’s Index of School Book Bans is searchable by state and district.