Brown Center scholars reflect on education after 1 year of the Trump administration

January 20, 2026, marks the one-year anniversary of President Trump’s second presidential inauguration. Here, scholars from the Brown Center on Education Policy reflect on the year that passed and consider what might lie ahead from this administration.

Within the first two weeks of his second term, President Trump issued three executive orders ending diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives across the government and in schools. Over the last year, the Trump administration has followed through by canceling federal research projects, withholding funds, and strong-arming universities into compliance.

Yet, the administration’s actions on diversity, equity, and inclusion do not overturn the wealth of empirical evidence supporting it. A racially diverse teacher workforce positively affects students now and into the future. Some benefits accrue to white students, too. Students who feel included and respected at schools are more likely to be engaged with their learning—a relationship observed across racial and gender categories. Representative governance is also associated with more equitable school funding allocations and smaller achievement gaps between groups. And, historically, these gaps have narrowed by lifting the lowest-performing groups up, not pulling the highest performers down.

Just like discouraging vaccines does not end the spread of infectious disease and calling climate change a hoax does not stop weather patterns, the administration’s actions to dismantle DEI programs do not change the value proposition behind having a diverse teacher workforce and inclusive schools. Rather, they simply prevent students from accessing these benefits.

The headlines of 2025 tell a story of turmoil in higher education. DOGE cuts and ongoing reductions in force left the Department of Education with 1,700 fewer employees and cancelled millions of federal research dollars. ED offloaded core postsecondary functions to other federal agencies. The administration overreached in university governance, as exemplified by the high-profile resignation of Jim Ryan as president of the University of Virginia. State lawmakers passed bills censoring faculty and coursework, with enforcement resulting in firings, revoked job offers, and micromanaged syllabi.

Yet, another type of story unfolded in 2025, too. Lawmakers advanced legislation to simplify financial aid and improve transfer pathways. The Senate and House held largely bipartisan hearings on college affordability and cost transparency. The One Big Beautiful Bill—far from perfect—includes provisions to simplify the federal loan system and authorizes new Workforce Pell dollars for short-term credentials. And notwithstanding reduced staffing at Federal Student Aid, the FAFSA opened early and filing rates are up. Despite sustained executive branch attacks, students continue to pursue college as a pathway to a better life, and many lawmakers want to make that path easier. 

It is tempting to dismiss the turmoil as noise and just focus on the (more positive) pockets of constructive policymaking, but these two stories are inseparable. Waves of censorship and federal overreach are not just talking points. If cultural attacks in 2026 continue to hollow out public trust in higher education and weaken college autonomy, then even the best-intentioned policymaking will fall short of improving college access and affordability. 

The first year of the second Trump administration has seen an unprecedented effort to repurpose federal anti-discrimination law to reverse longstanding efforts to promote equality in public life. This includes education.

Federal laws prohibiting racial and sex-based discrimination are being used to withhold federal funding from schools and colleges without even the facade of an investigation. The administration is targeting institutions for a narrow range of supposed offenses. For instance, colleges that didn’t crack down on student protests against the war in Gaza are being punished for “antisemitism”; school districts with transgender-inclusive policies are being denounced for sex-based discrimination against girls; and schools and colleges pursuing racial equity (e.g., with DEI programs) are being accused of racial discrimination against white and Asian students. All the while, legitimate complaints of discrimination are piling up.

Federal anti-discrimination law does not guarantee equality, but it defines the bare minimum treatment that students and families should expect. To be clear, the foundation of our civil rights paradigm had structural problems that predate the Trump administration. For example, Title IX enforcement has been characterized a weak policy lever (for victims of sex-based harassment) with excessive red tape (for institutions). But now the foundation may be breaking entirely—with an assist from the Supreme Court. 

The stickiness of the Trump administration’s reforms remains to be seen, especially given the plethora of ongoing litigation. However, it’s clear that federal policymakers will need to build a stronger legal paradigm to ensure equality in public life, including public education.

For all the talk of “dismantling” the U.S. Department of Education (ED), the reality is more complicated than that. There’s a real contradiction in the Trump administration’s handling of ED.

On one hand, the administration has dismantled much of the Department. It has slashed ED’s staff, used interagency agreements (IAAs) to shift responsibilities to other agencies, and neglected to perform some basic functions like investigating complaints of illegal racial discrimination.

On the other hand, this may be the most activist incarnation of ED in its history. This is especially evident in how ED’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) is operating. Historically, OCR has almost never withheld funds from educational institutions over civil rights violations (perhaps to avoid punishing students and faculty who weren’t responsible for the alleged wrongdoing). Over the last year, though, we’ve seen OCR withhold or threaten to withhold funds from many K-12 and higher education institutions. This is largely based on claims of antisemitism (from colleges’ responses to campus protests over Gaza) and sexism (from schools allowing transgender students to participate in girls’ sports). This is affecting institution’s budgets and creating fear of consequences for institutions that do not “comply in advance.”

It’s unclear what lies ahead for ED in 2026. The Trump administration will probably continue to offload ED’s responsibilities to other federal agencies through IAAs. At the same time, it’s hard to imagine that the administration is ready to give up on a department that it sees as useful for fighting its preferred culture-war battles.

President Trump has not completely accomplished his K-12 policy agenda at the end of the first year of his second term. Federal governance in K-12 illuminates both the power and the limits of executive direction. Clearly, the Trump administration has extensively used unilateral actions to restructure the U.S. Department of Education, redefine federal enforcement of civil rights, dismantle many research programs, and enable parental use of tuition tax credit for choosing schools. However, as of January 2026, the federal government remains present in the intergovernmental education policy system that originated in the Great Society era. Without formal congressional support, the administration cannot completely dismantle its role in K-12, and cannot terminate major programs such as IDEA and Title I. And Congress continues to resist the administration’s proposed deep cuts.

As we enter the second year of Trump’s second term, it is not clear if the president’s goal of completely dismantling the federal role will be realized by the end of his presidency. The main hurdles the administration faces include building bipartisan congressional support, completing rulemaking on tight timelines to institutionalize policy changes, and maintaining Republican control in Congress after the November 2026 midterm elections. New dynamics in these governing conditions could suggest that the Trump administration has reached its limits in redefining federal involvement in K-12 and that the future of the federal role will likely land on the desk of the next president in January 2029.