This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.
As far as most American families were concerned, schools’ post-pandemic reopening brought an end to an era of uncertainty in public education. In reality, the end of that era was never all that clearly defined. Now, as the Trump administration sweeps into office with reams of radical proposals, a new era of uncertainty for teachers and families has clearly arrived.
On Tuesday night, news broke that the U.S. Department of Education would purge nearly half its staff. Earlier, it was widely reported that the administration planned to ultimately go even further, and would imminently publish an executive order to wind down the U.S. Department of Education to the greatest extent possible — while calling on Congress to eliminate it entirely. The order hasn’t yet materialized, but, in addition to 1,300 jobs, the administration has already slashed $900 in education research funding, over $600 million in professional development for teachers, and $350 million in grants sustaining centers for studying and sharing best practices in schools. Its next steps aren’t clear, but they range from making significant cuts to core federal K–12 funding for high-poverty schools, English learners, and students with disabilities — to zeroing these funds out entirely.
These antics couldn’t come at a worse time. Schools were entering an era of significant financial pressures before Trump, DOGE, and new Education Secretary Linda McMahon began hurling wrenches into the federal government’s gears. Factors ranging from the expiration of the Biden Era’s pandemic recovery funds, public dollars increasingly flowing to conservative school voucher programs, falling birth rates, and heightened immigration enforcement mean that public schools’ finances are already hurting. Against that backdrop, the administration’s threat to evaporate federal education programs has become just the latest, broadest front in a comprehensive attempt to defund public schools.
Pandemic Recovery Funding Ending
This school year, $190 billion in federal pandemic recovery funds wound down — meaning that many school districts are going to have to make cuts to return to their pre-pandemic budgets. This one-time splash of federal K–12 cash was more than 10 times the size of the federal government’s annual budget for supporting schools in low-income communities. That public investment allowed many districts to maintain, expand, and/or enhance their offerings during an uncertain moment in U.S. schools and society. These funds sustained tutoring programs, afterschool programming, new technology, social-emotional learning programs, and much more. Many districts used these dollars to add staff. The coming fiscal year will likely be particularly painful in their communities.
Investments in Exotic Conservative School Choice Programs
As those federal funds neared their expiration date, conservative state policymakers have been seeking ways to shift public education dollars to private schools. States like Georgia and Wyoming have grown their school voucher programs, allowing families to divert public education funding to private schools of their choice. Texas is pushing in the same direction.
Meanwhile, other states are experimenting with novel school choice policies like “education savings accounts” that allow families to use public education dollars for a range of educational expenses, including technology, instruments, and vacations. Similarly, dozens of states offer “tax-credit scholarship programs” that allow individuals and organizations to garner tax benefits when they donate to non-profits subsidizing private school tuition.
While these programs appear to have mixed — at best — results for improving student achievement, they generally result in decreased funds available for public schools. Analysts at the Education Trust argue that Arizona’s expanded school choice program dramatically overshot its budget and reduced funding for public schools. The latter is a relatively common problem with these programs, particularly in rural areas where school budgets often cannot sustain the funding cuts that can come with the voucher-fueled reductions in student enrollment.
Flagging Birth Rates
That’s a key element often overlooked in school funding arguments: in general, local education budgets are tied to the number of children attending a particular school and/or district. States usually provide K–12 funding on a per-pupil basis, sending more money to larger schools and districts — particularly those enrolling larger numbers of students with special needs, English learners, low-income students, and other so-called “weighted” student groups.
In other words, local K–12 budgets generally go down when local enrollments shrink. In Michigan, for instance, where state per-pupil funding averages nearly $8,800 and local per-pupil funding averages around $5,300, a school’s enrollment drop of 23 children represents a future budget reduction of around a third of a million dollars.
This spells trouble for schools, because in many communities, there just aren’t as many kids as there used to be. U.S. birth rates have dropped for decades, which is producing drops in the number of school-aged children. Naturally, school enrollment is also dipping. The impacts of this longstanding trend were less visible while the aforementioned American Rescue Plan pandemic recovery dollars were still available to float school budgets. But fewer students means less state education money — which will be particularly challenging for schools in communities with dwindling economic opportunities to attract families to come, stay, and raise children.
Immigrant Detentions and Deportations And The Economic Headaches That Result
This population swoon isn’t unique to the United States — birth rates have been falling across the world, particularly in developed countries. But the U.S. has been uniquely effective at attracting and integrating immigrants, which has helped to sustain school enrollments and fill in labor market gaps. Federal estimates suggest that these new members of the U.S. community are producing trillions in economic growth and federal revenue.
Naturally some of that additional revenue will go to public schools so that school-aged children of immigrants — who number around 18 million in the U.S. — can learn, succeed, and grow into their own places in American society. From Kansas to Iowa to Michigan, immigrants and their families have been stanching, or even reversing, demographic decline in rural communities with small and aging populations. Their arrivals are stabilizing school enrollments — and budgets — in those communities. Their families are joining their communities as taxpaying workers and marketplace consumers.
The Trump administration’s immigration policy changes target that healthy feedback loop in multiple ways. First, many children will leave the country — and their schools — because members of their family are detained as part of the administration’s mass deportations efforts. It’s difficult to put a precise number on how many students will be affected, but there are hundreds of thousands of undocumented students in U.S. schools and at least six million children living in households with at least one undocumented family member. If even a fraction of those children leave school, that will produce K–12 budget crises in many communities.
Second, one of Trump’s first acts as president was to revise federal immigration enforcement guidelines to permit armed agents to conduct raids at churches, hospitals, and schools. And indeed, late last month, federal immigration officials arrested a father as he dropped his children off at school, alleging that he was in the country illegally, had prior criminal convictions, and had been previously deported.
Third, conservatives in states like Texas and Tennessee are pushing to unwind more than 40 years of legal precedent by charging undocumented immigrant children tuition for attending public schools. In its 1982 Plyler v. Doe decision, the U.S. Supreme Court concluded that the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause applies to everyone in the United States, and does not permit discrimination on the basis of national origin.
Finally, changes like these have produced a “chilling effect,” with children of immigrants’ attendance dropping in large numbers. In California, where schools’ funding is tied to enrolled students’ average daily attendance, state lawmakers are sufficiently worried that they’re proposing reforms to ensure that local K–12 budgets don’t crater.
A New Era Of Crisis For Public Schools
There’s never a good time to trim, let alone slash, education budgets. Public investments in children’s development and learning are amongst the most important things a humane society can do. But given the present context — expiring pandemic recovery funds, dropping enrollments, conservative lawmakers’ investments in private schools, and more — it’s time to call the administration’s Department of Education-slashing federal efforts what they are: the capstone of a comprehensive effort to defund public schools.
In the coming era of tight public school budgets, even relatively small changes to federal education funding would have produced extra heartburn in school districts across the country. But small reductions feel like a baseline minimum right now, so students, families, and educators should expect to feel much more punishing cuts.
