The Damage One Year Later
When the federal government dismantles the infrastructure of educational equity, Black students pay the highest price. Here is what is happening, why it matters, and what we must do about it.
On March 20, 2025, President Donald Trump signed Executive Order 14242, directing Secretary of Education Linda McMahon to begin the systematic dismantling of the United States Department of Education. One year later, the damage is not theoretical. It is real, it is measurable, and it is falling hardest on the students who could least afford it: Black children, low-income students, and every young person whose educational future depended on a federal government that was willing to protect their rights.
The National Black Parents Association stands firmly opposed to this assault. We are not alarmists. We are parents, advocates, and witnesses. And what we are witnessing is the deliberate unraveling of the only federal institution tasked with ensuring that the color of a child’s skin does not determine the quality of their education.
This Is Not an Accident. This Is a Plan.
To understand what is happening today, we have to understand where it started. The Southern Poverty Law Center’s education scholar Dr. Bettina L. Love has documented extensively how the conservative campaign to dismantle public education did not begin with Donald Trump. It began in earnest as a direct response to Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, when the unanimous Supreme Court decision to end school segregation enraged large portions of white America.
The resistance did not stay in the streets. It moved into think tanks, media organizations, and political networks with a single long-term mission: to dismantle the federal infrastructure of public education. By 1980, when the Heritage Foundation published its blueprint for the Reagan administration, that infrastructure was fully assembled. The document called for repealing the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, ending federal support for programs the foundation labeled as tools of liberal social change, and abolishing the Department of Education altogether.
The current administration is not creating the playbook; it is following one created by meticulous and determined individuals who want to control public education, and, therefore, the minds, bodies, movements and aspirations of children of color. — Dr. Bettina L. Love, Southern Poverty Law Center
Forty-five years and six editions of that same manifesto later, the final act is underway. Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s 2025 update, demanded the elimination of the Department of Education by name. It called for moving civil rights enforcement from the Department of Education to the Department of Justice, converting Title I funding into unaccountable block grants to states, and ending every federal diversity initiative in schools. Trump did not deviate from that playbook. He has followed it step by step.
One Year of Destruction: What Has Already Been Done
In the twelve months following the executive order, Secretary McMahon declared her department’s mission to be what she called its ‘final mission’: to eliminate itself. What followed was a systematic campaign of institutional destruction that would have been almost unimaginable under any prior administration.
The Department fired nearly half of its total staff. The Office for Civil Rights, the division specifically tasked with investigating discrimination complaints and enforcing civil rights law in schools, lost 90 percent of its workforce. That gutting left more than 30,000 pending discrimination complaints with no one adequately positioned to investigate them. The office that once stood between Black students and the school systems that discriminated against them has been reduced to a shell.
The administration struck nine interagency agreements, redistributing 118 programs away from the Department of Education and into other federal agencies that lack the expertise, the staff, and the institutional knowledge to administer them. In March 2026, the administration announced that the Department’s nearly 1.7 trillion dollar student loan portfolio would be transferred to the Department of Treasury, an agency with no history of managing a program of that scale and complexity.
The administration also revoked nearly 900 million dollars in education research contracts, eliminating critical federal data on school safety, early childhood education, special education, and literacy. Without that data, the government cannot identify disparities. Without identifying disparities, it cannot address them. This is not an administrative inconvenience. For Black students, who have historically been among the most at risk for underfunding, over-policing, and unequal discipline, the erasure of this data is the erasure of the evidence that justifies their protection.
The Direct Harm to Black Students
The NAACP has been clear in its formal resolutions: the Department of Education is not an abstraction for Black families. It is a lifeline. It enforces the civil rights laws that protect Black children from discriminatory discipline. It monitors student achievement across all fifty states. It administers the Pell Grants and federal student loans that make higher education accessible to first-generation Black college students. It funds the Title I programs that send additional resources to the high-poverty schools where a disproportionate number of Black children are enrolled.
The NAACP Legal Defense Fund has documented in detail how the dismantling of the Department threatens each of these protections. Black students are already suspended from school at rates that exceed their white peers for similar, and sometimes identical, behavior. The Civil Rights Data Collection revealed that Black students experience higher rates of school discipline for largely subjective reasons, are referred to law enforcement at greater rates, and are diverted from schools toward the criminal justice system at alarming frequencies. The Office for Civil Rights existed specifically to hold school systems accountable for that pattern. With 90 percent of its staff gone, that accountability has been dismantled with it.
The threat to higher education is equally severe. Historically Black Colleges and Universities are among the most important institutions in American life. They represent just three percent of colleges and universities nationwide, yet they produce 80 percent of Black judges, 50 percent of Black doctors, and 50 percent of Black lawyers. Federal programs like Title III funding, the Minority Science and Engineering Improvement Program, Federal Work-Study, and the Second Chance Pell program are essential to the financial sustainability of these institutions and to the students they serve.
The HBCU Campaign Fund has warned that reductions in the Department’s authority will limit the federal government’s ability to enforce the safeguards that protect HBCU students from predatory or discriminatory practices and ensure accreditation standards are upheld. One student from Howard University described it plainly: the Trump administration’s war on DEI is not abstract. It is a direct attack on the lives and futures of HBCU students who have already been excluded from mainstream institutions and now face the erosion of the institutions built specifically for them.
The DEI Attack and the Erasure of Black History
Alongside the institutional dismantling, the administration launched an aggressive campaign against diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in schools and universities. On his first day in office, Trump signed executive orders ending federal DEI programs, terminating government partnerships with DEI-focused organizations, and threatening any educational institution that continued DEI activities with the loss of federal funding.
A February 2025 directive from the Department of Education warned schools from kindergarten through graduate programs to abandon DEI programming or lose federal dollars. The administration co-opted the language of civil rights law, claiming that programs designed to remedy racial inequality were themselves acts of racial discrimination. A federal court in New Hampshire ultimately and permanently struck down that directive in early 2026, calling out the administration’s overreach. But the damage done during the year that directive stood, the chilling effect on educators and administrators across the country, cannot be undone by a court ruling alone.
At the same time, the administration moved to erase Black history from public education. Dr. Love writes that this is not a new strategy. A century ago, white segregationists were banning books about Black history and punishing educators who taught it. The current administration has relabeled that same project as opposition to ‘divisive ideology.’ If Black history is erased from the curriculum, the harm that justified federal civil rights protections is erased with it. Children cannot demand what they cannot name, and they cannot name what they were never taught.
The NAACP Has Called This What It Is: Unconstitutional
In July 2025, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Trump administration could proceed with mass layoffs at the Department of Education. The NAACP formally and publicly opposed that ruling, filing resolutions, lawsuits, and public demands for congressional hearings into the civil rights consequences of Executive Order 14242. The NAACP’s position has been unambiguous: the executive order is unconstitutional, the mass staff reductions violate the Administrative Procedure Act, and the administration’s actions represent a fundamental betrayal of the federal government’s commitment to equal educational opportunity.
The NAACP has also called on Congress to act, demanding legislation that would strengthen public education, protect civil rights, and uphold the Department’s statutory role in ensuring equity and accountability. Congress alone has the authority to formally eliminate the Department of Education. The NAACP’s demand for congressional hearings is not proceduralism. It is a recognition that what is being done to public education, and to Black students specifically, requires the full accountability of the legislative branch.
Where Do We Go From Here
Dr. Love’s analysis for the Southern Poverty Law Center offers a framework that is worth taking seriously. She writes that if it took decades to build the infrastructure of harm, it will take equal will, money, organizing, and long-term commitment to dismantle it and build something just. She calls for school funding reform tied to a reparations framework, a national teacher recruitment pipeline with a salary floor of one hundred thousand dollars, mandatory Black history in every public school, and what she describes as educational reparations that include accountability, truth-telling, and genuine repair for the generations of Black students who were under-resourced, over-policed, and denied opportunity.
These are not fringe proposals. They are the logical conclusion of an honest accounting of what the federal government has done and failed to do for Black children in this country. And they stand in direct opposition to everything the current administration is pursuing.
For the National Black Parents Association, this moment demands clarity. We do not have the luxury of treating the dismantling of the Department of Education as a partisan disagreement about the proper size of government. This is a targeted assault on the mechanisms that protect Black children. The Office for Civil Rights existed because discrimination in schools is real and ongoing. Title I exists because school funding inequity is real and documented. The data collection programs exist because racial disparities in discipline, achievement, and access do not resolve themselves without accountability.
