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

The Department of Education was established more than 40 years ago to improve America’s school system. But as the incoming As political leaders, including President-elect Trump, consider disbanding the agency, a Fox News Digital commentary examined trends in test scores, graduation rates and federal funding since the agency was founded. Here are the results of these findings.

When former President Jimmy Carter was in office, Congress passed the Department of Education Organic Act in October 1979, and the agency was formally established in 1980.

The department was created to set policy, manage and coordinate federal aid to educational institutions across the country, but it has faced opposition — often from Republican lawmakers — since its inception.

Trump said he would dismantle the agency upon taking office and asked whether the department was critical to the advancement of education or whether schools would benefit from a more localized education system.

The modern education system is very different from the one when this institution was founded. As Trump prepares to take office, a decades-old debate over whether states should have more control over local school systems rather than the federal government is reigniting.

Biden education department spending more than $1 billion on DEI grants: report

“The federal government’s efforts to improve education are frustrating,” Lindsey Burke, director of the Center for Education Policy at the Heritage Foundation, a right-leaning think tank, wrote of the current education system amid years of low test scores. “Even if there was a constitutional basis for federal involvement (and there is not), the federal government would not be able to determine which education policies would best serve the diverse local communities across our vast nation.”

It was argued that having such a department would allow people with appropriate expertise to make funding-related decisions.

“The Department of Education was created for a reason, to have this an internal organization. [education] question.

“The civil servants working in the Department of Education are the real experts in their field.”

test scores drop

In the more than 40 years since the Ministry of Education was founded, average student test scores have fallen significantly.

Math and reading scores among 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.

A teacher in the 1980s was reading to a group of elementary school students. Average student test scores have fallen significantly over the past 40 years. (H. Armstrong Roberts)

While the Department of Education has no control over how students perform on the tests, it is responsible for issuing regulations requiring schools to administer standardized tests in schools that have achieved minimum scores. By 2024, according to NAEP, this will be within decades.

According to data from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), the average ACT composite score in the United States in the 1990s was approximately 20.8 points. But since then, standardized test scores have declined.

According to 2024 ACT data, Nevada had the lowest test scores in the nation with an average score of 17.2, followed by Oklahoma with the second-lowest average score of 17.6.

“The results are sobering,” Peggy G. Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, told ABC News of today’s test results.

Most schools have reopened after moving to an all-online learning environment during the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, but Carr said, “The decline we’re seeing happened in 2015, so none of this can be blamed on COVID-19.” Virus.

Average test scores in the United States are typically based on standardized test averages. European and East Asian countries do not use the ACT or SAT exams as required by the United States and therefore generally rank higher.

funds

Supporters of specialized educational institutions say federal involvement 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 provide campus drug and alcohol abuse prevention programs under the Drug-Free Schools and Communities Act of 1989.

A new report finds that the Biden administration has spent at least $1 billion on DEI grants for public schools. (iStock)

However, under President Joe Biden, the Department of Education has directed funding toward diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts in K-12 schools across the country, a move that critics say diverts funds away from core education goals.

Experts say Trump needs congressional approval to dissolve Department of Education

According to Fox News Digital, a recent study found that Biden’s Department of Education spent $1 billion to promote DEI recruitment.

Since 2021, the Biden administration has spent $489,883,797 on race-based hiring grants; $343,337,286 on general DEI programming; and $169,301,221 on DEI-based psychology, according to the right-leaning nonprofit Parents Defending Education. Health training and programs, totaling $1,002,522,304.81.

Neal McCluskey, an education analyst at the libertarian Cato Institute public policy think tank, told ABC News in November that rethinking the department could be as simple as providing funding to states , and then let its leaders decide how to allocate the funds.

graduation rate

In the 1970-1971 school year, the high school graduation rate was 78%.

But these rates have declined, with the average graduation rate falling to 72.9 percent shortly after the Department of Education was established in 1982.

The rate remained as low as 70 percent until the early 2000s, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

Graduation rates in the United States have been rising in recent years. (Keith Bedford/Reuters)

However, data for the 2021-2022 school year shows that the average graduation rate for public high school students is 87%, an increase of 7 percentage points from a decade ago.

course

Technological advances have transformed the educational environment for students, with typing often replacing cursive writing classes, digital tools enhancing math instruction, and GPS technology reducing reliance on traditional map reading skills.

Today’s technology-driven workforce is also reshaping school systems, as computer and artificial intelligence classes take precedence over home economics classes like sewing or baking.

The Department of Education does not set curriculum requirements for schools, instead state and local school boards determine them.

Yet curriculum reform remains at the forefront of recent political conversations, particularly as it relates to parents seeking to be more involved in their children’s classrooms. Parents from across the country have spoken out against the inclusion of certain topics in their children’s curriculum, often related to sex and gender, and reportedly were not informed of the content before it was shared in class.

Third-grade students play math-related computer games on laptops at St. John Paul II Catholic Academy in Boston’s Dorchester neighborhood. (Scott Eisen/Getty Images)

Fox Digital News recently reported that an elementary school in a New York City suburb is teaching “gender lessons” to elementary school children in an effort to promote “inclusivity” in the school.

Meanwhile, in 2016, the Washington office of OSPI established 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 also adopted health education standards in 2016 requiring kindergarten and first-grade students to “recognize that there are many ways to express gender,” while the state’s third-grade students are expected to be able to do so in 2022, Fox reported Called, “Defining Sexual Orientation.”

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

students on the University of Rochester campus in New York. (Libby March/Getty Images)

However, the incoming Republican president is not the first to float the idea. Former President Ronald Reagan called for abolishing the department 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,” Reagan said in 1981, “and that is to eliminate unnecessary agencies that stand in the way of solutions.”

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

“The Department of Education ensures consistency and quality across schools, particularly in STEM education, which is critical to national security and global competitiveness,” Kanani told Fox News Digital in January. “We should not eliminate the department , instead the department should be cleaned up and reformed to work more effectively with state and local systems to make STEM a national priority.”

Andrew Clark, chairman of the advocacy group, yes. Every Child recently said Trump should build pathways to redesign the education system instead of tearing down entire departments.

President-elect Trump has said he will abolish the Department of Education upon taking office. (Evan Vucci/AP Photo)

“To make real change, you have to do it in a way that benefits people’s lives, so if you drop the hammer overnight, you’re going to cause people pain. [who] is dependent. So you have to figure out ways to make changes,” Clark told Ravi Gupta.

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Trump needs congressional approval to make any changes to the Department of Education.

Republicans currently hold majorities in both the House and Senate, which means lawmakers can pass new legislation to address the laws that established and sanctioned the department.

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