Askwith Education Forum Details The ‘Uncertain Future’ of the U.S. Department of Education

Seismic changes at the U.S. Department of Education (DOEd) were the focus of the first Askwith Education Forum of the spring semester at the Harvard Graduate School of Education on Tuesday. An esteemed panel of experts detailed the turmoil and uncertainty impacting the educational landscape in the wake of Donald Trump’s second term as U.S. president.

The wide-ranging forum, “An Uncertain Future: The U.S. Department of Education and K–12 Education Policy,” featured Brian Gill, senior fellow at Mathematica; Catherine Lhamon, former assistant secretary for Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Education; Neal McCluskey, director of the Center for Educational Freedom at the Cato Institute; and Andrew J. Rotherham, co-founder and senior partner at Bellwether.  

Moderator Martin West, HGSE professor and academic dean, highlighted how the event was “a chance to model how engaging in civil disagreement on controversial issues can promote deeper understanding.”

Topics weighed during the 90-minute forum included how cuts to the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) will affect research and the way we measure student success, the potential damage to civil rights in K-12 schools, and what moving some Department of Education functions to other areas of the federal government could mean moving forward.

While panelists disagreed on policy, the role of government in education, and even the meaning of the U.S. Constitution, there was common ground found on stage. Many, for example, agreed that problems exist across the American educational system and the Department of Education could change for the better.

“We’re treating Donald Trump like the weather,” said Rotherham, “Like it’s this thing that just happened rather than that this is downstream of a whole bunch of stuff.”

How those downstream issues will be tackled by the current administration, though, was a big concern for the panel. Gill, whose work at IES has already been significantly impacted by layoffs and executive orders from the Trump administration, admitted he’s “not optimistic” about what the seismic changes and other promises of disruption will mean for education moving forward.

“My hope would be that the serious educators hired by the department get to actually make the decisions about what’s ahead rather than the DOGE folks or the West Wing folks,” said Gill. “But I can’t claim to have optimism that that’s going to happen.”

Even McCluskey, a libertarian who advocated for the DOEd’s elimination long before Trump’s return to office in January, found the “haphazard” rollout of changes in the early months of 2025 concerning.

“My biggest concern is that this is being done so haphazardly, like a bull in a China shop,” said McCluskey. “I want to see the Department of Education go away and the federal role greatly shrunk, but if it’s being done in a way that’s without any planning, that’s haphazard, that’s just chaos, I’m afraid it will make it look like what I want is horrendous and it’s because of the way it was done.”

Lhamon, who explained in great detail how the dismantling of the DOEd’s Civil Rights departments will impact students, called it a dangerous time for democracy in America.

“Schools are incubators for how to be in the world, how to participate in democracy, and how to be effective in our communities,” Lhamon said. “And we’re walking away from six decades of commitments to core protections of who each of us is. I find that terrifying.”

She offered a call to action to educators and others in the field to “find a path forward in the bleakest of moments” to protect students in a changing educational landscape.

“I have hope looking at the cycles of American history, looking at how we have come back at different points and how we have come together to make a way out of no way,” said Lhamon, evoking Black traditional teachings. “This is not a moment to wait for somebody else to do it. This is not a moment to wait for the next, more dangerous thing to come. This is a moment to act now, every day.”

You can watch the full Askwith Education Forum above.