February 4, 2025
Is President Trump really trying to eliminate the department of education? Here’s what he said today.
Ok but why?
Part of that is accurate. According to the United States census bureau, the US does spend the most per pupil. In 2024 the bureau reported that in fiscal year 2022 which is the most recent data — US public school spending in elementary and secondary schools was $15,633 per pupil. While that is the most that any country spends per pupil – it’s not the most that any country spends on their education system compared to their GDP. Now – when president trump says 40 countries I think he’s referring to the 37 developed nations involved in the organization for economic co-operation and development (OECD). So if we take those nations – according to the national center for education statistics the most recent data from 2019 found that Norway spent the most on their education system. They spent 6.6% of their country’s GDP on education, Chile spent 6.5%, Israel spent 6.2%, Australia spent 6.1% and the United States and the UK spent 6% of their GDP on education. And then there were a whole bunch of other nations who spent less of their GDP on education.
As for the US ranking dead last among those developed nations for education results– I could not find that anywhere. The fact is – we are definitely not number one in education but we’re also definitely not last. Rankings are difficult because they vary depending on what criteria you use and they depend based on if you’re talking about boys and girls. But generally when it comes to PISA rankings which measures 15 years olds in academics worldwide, in 2022 the united states overall ranked 18th in math, science and reading scores out of the 85 countries that participated. When you compare the United States to those 37 OECD developed countries the us ranked 6th in reading, 10th in science, and 26th in math. It’s also worth noting that all PISA scores for all countries were much lower in 2022 than in previous years because the education of kids around the world suffered tremendously during the pandemic.
Ok – now that we know the facts about the education system and how we compare to the rest of the world — let’s talk about whether president trump can actually eliminate the department of education. He addressed that today too.
Well – there are others who don’t want to see the department of education go away besides the teachers’ union. There are parents’ organizations and lots of members of congress who don’t want to see it go. But this isn’t the first time the president has talked about doing this. While congress created the education department in the department of education organization act of 1979, trump talked about getting rid of it during his first term and talked about it again on the campaign trail. You heard him today talking about empowering the states to run their own education systems and cut the federal government out of it. You also heard him mention school choice – that would mean taxpayer funds would be allocated to families to use on private education. Trump believes that would cost less than funding public schools that would be free to all kids and would have better outcomes. But reality is — according to the census bureau when it comes to k through 12 school funding, the federal government provides 14-percent of the funding for public schools and the state and local governments make up 86-percent of the funding for public schools.
So – the bottom line is this – trump has not done anything yet to shut down the department of education. Though it is being reported that he may sign some kind of executive order about it soon…if he does that – then we’ll have a better idea of how he plans to make it happen.
Read the PISA results from 2022 here.
Read about the per pupil spending in the US here.
Read about the GDP spending per country here.
