BIRMINGHAM, Ala. – While national leaders have pledged to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education, Alabama education officials are monitoring developments.
State Superintendent Eric Mackey earlier this month said abolishing the department is a possibility, if Congress wants to act.
“These pervasive rumors about Congress getting involved and actually shutting down the Department of Education – that takes 60 votes in the Senate and it takes the majority of the House,” Mackey said to reporters after the Feb. 13 state board of education meeting. “And we just haven’t heard that the Congress really wants to do that and completely reorganize the cabinet.”
Mackey has been following discussions about a possible reorganization of the department, including the possibility that some of its responsibilities currently could be shifted to other agencies. Nothing concrete has emerged.
Some of Alabama’s K-12 schools are heavily dependent on federal funding. In 15 school districts, federal funding accounts for between 30% and 40% of total funding.
Mackey expects programs like Title I, which for the current fiscal year, will provide $286 million in funding for instruction and support for students in poverty, and IDEA, which has allocated $192 million for special education for the current year, to continue to flow.
Title I and IDEA Part B funding are tied to formulas that are based on student counts and distributed to school districts, Mackey explained. Funding for competitive grants administered by the Alabama Department of Education could be at risk if federal cuts occur.
Federal funding accounted for $560 million, or 8.5% of the total $6.8 billion spent on K-12 schools in Alabama in 2023.
While not directly impacting funding to Alabama’s K-12 schools, the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, is making sweeping changes, including temporarily freezing federal grants, laying off thousands of federal employees, canceling research contracts and ending long-running data collection programs.
These shifts have raised concerns within Alabama’s higher education community. Jim Purcell, director of the Alabama Commission on Higher Education, said the most immediate impact could be on research funding.
“From what can be seen now, the biggest impact may be with contracts that our research universities have through the National Science Foundation and National Institute of Health,” Purcell told Alabama Daily News.
Federal grants to those agencies have funded multi-million-dollar research projects, with the University of Alabama at Birmingham, Alabama’s biggest employer, among the biggest recipients nationally.
A UAB spokesperson told Alabama Daily News they are keeping an eye on developments. “We are closely monitoring and assessing the developments regarding recent federal orders but do not have additional information to share at this time,” the spokesperson wrote in an email response.
“The effort to cut the National Center for Education Statistics is also a big concern,” Purcell said. “Data collected from the colleges and universities helps the campus and state leading in managing and planning.”
Purcell believes the department will be dismantled but some of its essential functions, such as student financial aid, will remain. However, those responsibilities could be moved to other agencies, he added.
“Disruptions of services until things are settled should be planned for,” Purcell said.
Alabama’s public institutions of higher education received $1.7 billion in federal funding, accounting for about 13% of their $13 billion in total revenue in 2023.
Purcell said institutions may need a new strategy to reduce reliance on federal funding.
“Campus and state officials need to work to make institutions less dependent on federal funds,” he said.
Appointments to the department continue
Despite the uncertainty, Mackey is enthusiastic about recent appointments to the department. Mackey said he is “thrilled” that career educators are being placed in key leadership roles.
Mackey personally knows some of those educators, adding that those connections are “huge for Alabama.”
“I don’t know if we’ve ever had so much influence in the (U.S.) Department of Education,” he said.
“We see this administration stepping up and saying ‘we’re going to put career educators, people who have spent their entire lives in the classroom, people who’ve been state superintendents, leading the Department of Education.”
Meanwhile, President Donald Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Education, Linda McMahon, cleared a U.S. Senate committee vote Thursday. The full Senate is expected to vote on confirmation soon.