US Education Department almost taken down: How will students suffer?

Every major education reform announces itself with noise: Bills, protests, budget fights, Senate hearings. But sometimes the quieter moves are the more consequential. The United States is living through one such moment — a slow rearrangement of its federal education scaffolding that may not immediately register in classrooms, yet promises to reshape who gets support, who falls through, and who decides what ‘education’ even means. It has been announced that large pieces of the US Department of Education (ED) will move to other federal agencies. It is a change in the wiring diagram behind a vast ecosystem of grants, protections and programmes. And when the wiring changes, the current eventually feels different to those at the end of the line: American students. The federal machinery th