K-12 satisfaction sits at a record low, the Department of Education is being dismantled piece by piece, and a new federal school-choice tax credit takes effect in 2027 — how much of a federal role should there be in American education, and what should it look like?
Each issue breaks into the specific questions Congress actually fights over. Read each position, then head to the interactive version of this issue to mark which reflects your view and build a message to your representatives.
Only Congress created the Department of Education and only Congress can eliminate it, yet the administration has signed 14 interagency agreements since January 2025 transferring core functions — civil rights enforcement, student loans, disability services — to agencies with no operational experience running them, a haphazard dismantling-by-attrition that bypasses the legislative process entirely.
Whether particular DOE functions are better housed elsewhere is a legitimate administrative question — special-education services and the Office for Civil Rights have so far been left in place specifically because of their sensitivity — but the pace and manner of the transfers, done through interagency agreements rather than congressional reauthorization, has left states and school districts genuinely uncertain what to plan around.
Returning authority over education policy to states and local communities, who are constitutionally and practically closer to their own students, is the stated goal of the March 2025 executive order, and moving specific functions like student loans or workforce programs to agencies (Treasury, Labor) that already run comparable programs can genuinely reduce duplicative federal bureaucracy.
The Education Freedom Tax Credit is a national school-voucher program in tax-credit clothing, uncapped in total cost and projected by some estimates to reach $170 billion in foregone federal revenue — money that flows out of general Treasury funds rather than being appropriated, insulating it from the normal budget scrutiny public education funding faces.
Whether the federal credit meaningfully helps students depends heavily on how each state implements its 'opt-in,' and the split has been genuinely bipartisan in practice — a Democratic governor (Colorado's Polis) opted in while multiple Republican-controlled legislatures have had their opt-in bills vetoed by their own governors — suggesting this cuts across party lines more than the national rhetoric implies.
For the first time, federal tax policy lets any taxpayer — regardless of their state's existing programs — direct up to $1,700 in tax liability toward a scholarship-granting organization that helps a family choose the K-12 setting, public or private, that fits their child, with no cost to states that choose to participate and no mandate on states that don't.
Ending tax-free treatment of forgiven student debt starting in 2026, capping parent borrowing at $65,000 lifetime, and eliminating three existing income-driven repayment plans in favor of one new option shifts real cost onto working families and graduate students without addressing the underlying price of college that drove the debt in the first place.
Public Service Loan Forgiveness itself was left statutorily untouched by the 2025 reconciliation law, but a separate, non-statutory Department of Education rule narrows which employers qualify starting July 2026 — meaning the debate has partly shifted from 'is PSLF being cut' (it isn't, by law) to whether an agency rule can functionally narrow a benefit that Congress didn't touch, a live question in three pending lawsuits.
Consolidating a tangle of overlapping income-driven repayment plans into one simplified option, capping how much parents and graduate students can borrow, and ending indefinite economic-hardship deferments brings real underwriting discipline to a federal loan program that had let debt accumulate with few limits — while explicitly preserving PSLF's 10-year, 120-payment structure by law.
Freezing billions in research funding to Harvard and Columbia without completing a documented Title VI investigation — a federal judge found the Harvard freeze violated the First Amendment and the Administrative Procedure Act, calling the antisemitism justification a 'smokescreen' for ideological retaliation — uses a real problem, campus antisemitism, as cover for punishing universities over speech and curriculum the administration dislikes.
Genuine, well-documented incidents of campus antisemitism since October 2023 are not in serious dispute, and universities' own task forces substantiated real problems; the contested question is whether the federal government's enforcement mechanism — unilateral funding freezes ahead of, rather than after, a completed civil-rights investigation — is itself lawful, a question a federal court has now answered against the administration at least once.
Universities that received formal Title VI notice and did little to protect Jewish students from documented harassment and discrimination bear responsibility for federal action; Columbia's $221 million settlement and the DOJ's March 2026 suit against Harvard use a 1964 civil-rights law exactly as designed — conditioning federal funds on genuine compliance with federal anti-discrimination law.
The April 2025 executive order directs the Secretary of Education to approve new accreditors with weaker standards while pressuring existing ones to strip out diversity, equity, and inclusion practices — using accreditation, a technical quality-assurance process, as a lever to reshape what universities can teach and how they can organize their own student-support offices.
Accreditation genuinely was a low-visibility, insider process for decades, and the negotiated-rulemaking committee reached a fourth consecutive consensus on implementing regulations in 2026 — suggesting career higher-education stakeholders found at least some common ground on outcome-based accountability, even where DEI-related provisions remain sharply contested.
With 88 different accrediting agencies historically enforcing inconsistent standards while student outcomes and academic rigor declined, requiring accreditors to focus on measurable results like graduation rates and post-graduation earnings — rather than ideological or diversity-related compliance criteria — refocuses quality assurance on what actually serves students.