The Department for Education through the years: A look at long-term trends in poor student performance

The Department of Education was established more than 40 years ago in an effort to refine the US school system. But as an entry political leaders, including President-elect Trump, consider 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 these findings.

When former President Jimmy Carter was in office, Congress approved the Department of Education Organization Act of October 1979, which officially established the agency in 1980.

The department was created to determine policy, administer and coordinate federal assistance to educational institutions across the country, but has faced opposition since its founding, usually from Republican lawmakers.

Trump said he will disband the agency when he takes office, questioning whether the department is crucial to the development of education or whether schools would benefit from a more localized education system.

Today’s education system looks very different from when the agency was founded. And a decades-old 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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“The federal government’s efforts to improve education have been woeful,” Lindsey Burke, director of the education policy center at the right-leaning think tank Heritage Foundation, wrote of the current education system amid ‘years of low test scores. “Even if there were a constitutional basis for their participation, which there is not, the federal government is simply ill-positioned to determine what education policies will best serve the diverse local communities of our vast nation.”

It has been argued that having such a department allows people with the right expertise to make decisions regarding funding.

Clare McCann, the managing director of policy and operations at the Center for Postsecondary Equity and Economics Research (PEER), told ABC News in November: “There’s a reason the Department of Education was created, and it was to have this kind of internal work experience and political background on these issues (education).

“The officials who work in the Department of Education are real experts in the field.”

Declining test scores

Average test scores among students have dropped significantly since the Department of Education was created more than 40 years ago.

Both math and reading scores for 13-year-old students are at their lowest levels in decades, according to data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) for the 2022-2023 school year.

Although the Department of Education does not monitor student performance on the tests, it is responsible for issuing the requirement for schools to administer standardized tests to schools, which have achieved their lowest scores. in decades by 2024, according to NAEP.

The average US ACT composite score in the 1990s was about 20.8, data from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) show. But since then, standardized test scores have dropped.

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 troubling,” National Center for Education Statistics Commissioner Peggy G. Carr told ABC News about today’s test scores.

Most schools reopened after transitioning to a fully online learning environment during the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, but Carr said “this decline we’re seeing was in 2015, so you can’t blame of all this to COVID.”

Average test scores in the US are usually based on the average of standardized tests. Countries in Europe and East Asia, which do not use the ACT or SAT tests as required by the US, tend to rank higher, by comparison.

financing

Advocates of a dedicated education agency say federal participation helps the system, while many critics say it’s a waste of taxpayer money.

In its early years, the department established specific requirements when allocating funds to schools, such as requiring higher education institutions to offer an on-campus drug and alcohol abuse prevention program. in accordance with the Drug-Free Schools and Communities Act, approved in 1989.

However, under President Bidenhas seen the Department of Education pour funds into 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 advance DEI in hiring, Fox News Digital reported.

Since 2021, the Biden administration spent $489,883,797 on race-based hiring grants; $343,337,286 in general DEI programming; and $169,301,221 in DEI-based mental health training and programming, for a total of $1,002,522,304.81, according to Parents Defending Education, a right-leaning nonprofit.

Rethinking the department could be as simple as giving states the funding and then letting their leaders decide how it’s distributed, Neal McCluskey, an education analyst at the libertarian public policy think tank the Cato Institute, told ABC News in november

Graduation rates

In the 1970-1971 school year, high school graduation rates were 78%.

But those rates fell to an average graduation rate of 72.9% in 1982, shortly after the Department of Education was created.

Rates remained in the low 70th percentile until the early 2000s, data from the National Center for Education Statistics show.

However, data for the 2021-2022 school year show that the average graduation rate for public high school students was 87 percent, an increase of seven percentage points from a decade earlier.

Curriculum

Advances in technology 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 reading skills of maps

Today’s tech-driven workforce has also reshaped the school system, with computer science and artificial intelligence classes taking precedence over home economics, such as sewing or baking.

Curriculum requirements for schools are not set by the Department of Education, but are left to the discretion of state and local school boards.

However, curriculum changes have still been at the forefront of recent policy conversations, specifically regarding parents seeking more 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 gender and sex, and are reportedly not being told about the content before sharing – him in class

Fox News Digital recently reported at an elementary school in the suburbs of New York City that taught a “gender curriculum” to elementary-level children in an effort to promote “inclusion” in the school.

Meanwhile, in 2016, the Office of Health Education in Washington (OSPI) established health education standards for all public schools, requiring that children in kindergarten and first grade learn that “there are many ways to express gender.”

In Oregon, the state board of education adopted health education standards, also in 2016, requiring that children in kindergarten and first grade “recognize that there are many ways to express gender,” while expecting that third graders in the state could do so. “Defining sexual orientation”, Fox reported in 2022.

Opponents of the Department of Education, such as Trump, have used examples of this controversial curriculum to argue that parents should have more power over their children’s learning.

The incoming Republican president, however, was not the first to propose the idea. Former President Ronald Reagan called for the department’s abolition to “ensure that local needs and preferences, rather than 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 by eliminating agencies that are not needed and are getting in the way of a solution,” Reagan said in 1981.

David Kanani, president of ORT College in Los Angeles, a Jewish nonprofit, suggested cleaning up the department rather than eradicating it entirely.

“The Department of Education ensures consistency and quality in schools, particularly in STEM education, which is critical to national security and global competitiveness,” Kanani told Fox News Digital in January. “Instead of eliminating, we should clean up and reform the department to collaborate more effectively with state and local systems, prioritizing STEM as a national imperative.”

Andrew Clark, chairman of the advocacy group yes. all children., recently said that Trump should establish ways to redesign the education system rather than destroy the entire department.

“To make real change, you have to do it in a way that benefits people’s lives, and so if you drop the hammer overnight, you’re going to cause pain to the people (who) depend on it. So you’re going to have to come. with 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 the majority in both the House and the Senate, meaning lawmakers could pass new legislation that would address the laws that establish and sanction the department.

Fox News’ Kristine Parks and Jessica Chasmar contributed to this report.