The Department of Education through the years: A look at long-term trends of pitiful student performance

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Trump eyes education reform as math, reading scores hit lowest level in past decade

Former Education Sec. Bill Bennett joins 'Fox & Friends' to discuss the decline in math and reading scores among 13-year-olds since 2012 and offers ways President-elect Trump could reform the U.S. education system.

The Department of Education was established more than 40 years ago in an effort to refine the U.S. school system. But as incoming political leaders, including President-elect Trump, consider dismantling the agency, a Fox News Digital review examines the trends in test scores, graduation rates and federal funding since its inception. What follows is the results of those findings. 

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

The department was created to determine policy for, administer and coordinate federal assistance to educational institutions around the country, but has seen opposition since its founding – commonly from Republican lawmakers.

Trump said he is going to dissolve the agency when he assumes office, asking whether the department is crucial in the development of education or if schools would benefit from a more localized education system. 

The modern-day educational system appears vastly different to that of the agency's founding. And a decades-long debate on whether individual states should have more control over local school systems, rather than the federal government, has been reignited as Trump prepares to take office.

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The Department of Education building on Aug. 21, 2024, in Washington, D.C. (Tierney L. Cross/Getty Images)

"Federal government efforts to improve education have been dismal," Lindsey Burke, director of the right-leaning think tank the Heritage Foundation's Center for Education Policy, wrote of the current education system amid years of low test scores. "Even if there were a constitutional basis for its involvement – which there isn’t – the federal government is simply ill-positioned to determine what education policies will best serve the diverse local communities across our vast nation."

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

Clare McCann, the managing director of policy and operations at the Postsecondary Equity & Economics Research (PEER) Center, told ABC News in November: "There's a reason the Department of Education was created, and it was to have this kind of in-house expertise and policy background on these [education] issues. 

"The civil servants who work at the Department of Education are true experts in the field."

Falling Test Scores

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

Both 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 1980s teacher reading a book to a group of grade school students. Average test scores for students in the past 40 years have dropped significantly. (H. Armstrong Roberts)

While the Department of Education doesn't control how students perform on tests, it is responsible for issuing the requirement for schools to conduct standardized testing in schools – which have reached their lowest scores in decades in 2024, according to NAEP.

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

According to 2024 ACT data, Nevada has the lowest test scores in the country, with an average score of 17.2, while Oklahoma follows with the second-lowest average score of 17.6.

"The results are sobering," National Center for Educational Statistics Commissioner Peggy G. Carr told ABC News of today's test scores. 

Most schools reopened after shifting to an all-online learning environment during the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, but Carr said that "this decline that we're seeing was there in 2015, so all of this cannot be blamed on COVID."

Average test scores in the U.S. are commonly based off the standardized testing average. Europe and East Asian countries, which don't use ACT or SAT testing as required by the U.S., usually rank as having higher test scores, comparably.

Funding

Proponents of a dedicated education agency say federal involvement aids the system, while many critics say it is a waste of taxpayer dollars. 

In its early years, the department made specific requirements when allocating funding to schools, such as requiring higher education institutions to offer a campus drug and alcohol abuse prevention program under the Drug-Free Schools and Communities Act, passed in 1989. 

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

However, under President Biden, the Department of Education has seen funds spent on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts in K-12 schools across the country – an initiative critics say diverts funding away from core educational objectives.

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A recent study found that Biden's Department of Education spent $1 billion on grants advancing DEI in hiring, Fox News Digital reported. 

Since 2021, the Biden administration spent $489,883,797 on grants for race-based hiring; $343,337,286 on general DEI programming; and $169,301,221 on DEI-based mental health training and programming, totaling $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 allowing its leaders to decide how it is dished out, Neal McCluskey, an education analyst at the libertarian Cato Institute public policy think tank, told ABC News in November.

Graduation Rates

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

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

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

U.S. graduation rates have been up in recent years. (Keith Bedford/Reuters)

However, data from the 2021–2022 school year shows that the average graduation rate for public high school students was 87% – an increase of seven percentage points higher than a decade earlier.

Curriculum

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

Today's technology-driven workforce has also reshaped the school system, as computer and artifical intelligence classes take precedence over home economics, such as sewing or baking. 

The Department of Education does not establish curriculum requirements for schools, but rather it is left to the state and local school boards to decide. 

However, curriculum changes have still been at the forefront of recent political conversations, specifically as it relates to parents seeking more involvement in their child's classroom. Parents from all around the country have spoken out against certain topics being included in their child's curriculum, usually related to gender and sex, and reportedly not being informed about the content before it was shared in class.

Third-graders play a math-related computer game on laptops at St. John Paul II Catholic Academy in the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston. (Scott Eisen/Getty Images)

Fox News Digital recently reported on an elementary school in the New York City suburbs that was teaching a "gender curriculum" to elementary-level children in an effort to promote "inclusion" in school. 

Meanwhile, in 2016, the Washington Office (OSPI) set 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 adopted health education standards, also in 2016, requiring kindergartners and first-graders to "recognize that there are many ways to express gender," while third-graders in the state have been expected to be able to "define sexual orientation," Fox reported in 2022.

Opponents of the Department of Education, such as Trump, have used such examples of controversial curriculum to argue that parents should be granted more power in their child's learning.

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

The incoming Republican president, however, was not the first to propose the idea. Former President Ronald Reagan called for the department to be abolished to "ensure that local needs and preferences, rather than the wishes of Washington, determine the education of our children."

"There's only one way to shrink 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 Los Angeles ORT College, a Jewish education nonprofit, suggested the department be cleaned up rather than completely eradicated. 

"The Department of Education ensures consistency and quality across schools, particularly in STEM education, which is critical for national security and global competitiveness," Kanani told Fox News Digital in January. "Instead of elimination, 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, president of advocacy group yes. every kid., recently said Trump should establish pathways to redesign the education system rather than bulldozing the entire department.

President-elect Trump has said he is going to abolish the Department of Education when he takes office. (Evan Vucci/AP Photo)

"To make real change, you have to do it in ways that benefit people's lives, and so if you just drop the hammer overnight you are going to cause pain for people [who] are dependent. So you're going to have to come up with pathways 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 in order to make any changes to the Education Department. 

Republicans currently have the majority in both the House and the Senate, meaning lawmakers could pass new legislation addressing the laws establishing and sanctioning the department.

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