US President Donald Trump has signed an executive order calling for the dismantling of the country’s department of education.
However, the department cannot be dismantled without an act of Congress, which created it in 1979. Republicans have said they will introduce a bill to achieve that.
Mr Trump has long promised to take the agency apart, deriding it as wasteful and polluted by liberal ideology. It has been a long-time target of conservatives.
The order would leave school policy almost entirely in the hands of states and local boards, a prospect that alarms liberal education advocates.
The president blamed the department for America’s lagging academic performance and said states will do a better job.
“It’s doing us no good,” Mr Trump said at the White House.
The White House said the department will not close completely and retained its responsibilities for funding for low-income schools, and distributing money for children with disabilities.
The White House said earlier on Thursday that the department will continue to manage federal student loans, but the order appears to say the opposite.
The department’s workforce has already been slashed in half, and there have been deep cuts to the Office for Civil Rights and the Institute of Education Sciences, which gathers data on US academic progress.
Much of the agency’s work revolves around managing money – both its extensive student loan portfolio and a range of aid programmes for colleges and school districts, like school meals and support for homeless students. The agency is also key in overseeing civil rights enforcement.
Trump was surrounded by school pupils during an event signing the executive order. Pic: Reuters
States and districts already control local schools, including the curriculum, but some conservatives have pushed to cut strings attached to federal money and provide it to states as “block grants” to be used at their discretion.
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Advocates for public schools said eliminating the department would leave children behind in an American education system that is fundamentally unequal.
“This is a dark day for the millions of American children who depend on federal funding for a quality education, including those in poor and rural communities with parents who voted for Trump,” NAACP president Derrick Johnson said.
Democrats said the order will be fought in the courts and in Congress.
