The Trump administration’s latest actions to dismantle the Department of Education can be hard to make sense of.

On the one hand, this is a milestone moment in conservatives’ long-running campaign to gut the agency. On the other hand, the administration has promised that most of the underlying programs will be protected.

There is very little reason to think that dismantling the Department of Education, or moving various programs to other agencies, will matter much for schools. Running the same programs, just out of a different department, is unlikely to affect the typical student.

“If that’s all they’re doing, they’re not going to save any money, they’re not going to change any policy,” says Shep Melnick, a political scientist at Boston College. “It’s hard to see what the point of all that is.”

Yet there’s a reason this have gotten such attention. The Trump administration’s commitment to dismantling the Education Department matters both for what it represents and for the legal and political battles that will soon follow.

Here’s how to understand how we got here and what the latest actions to dismantle the Department of Education do and don’t mean.

Dismantling the Education Department Has Become a Symbol for Conservative Frustration with Schools

It is often said that Republican presidents have been trying to eliminate the Education Department ever since it was created in 1979. This is not quite right. Ronald Reagan quickly gave up on this amid national concern about declining standards in schools. George W. Bush dramatically expanded the federal role with No Child Left Behind. In his first term, Trump made a feeble and failed effort to merge the Education and Labor departments.

The second Trump administration has been different in its attempts to dismantle the Department of Education, surprising even many veteran education observers. Knowing that congressional approval is all but impossible, Trump officials have moved to decimate the agency from within.

This reflects the Education Department’s role as a potent representative of conservative anger at public schools and universities for embracing various liberal ideas. That the Trump administration has pushed so hard on this speaks to the depth of the backlash and the increased importance of education as a political issue to conservatives.

Read the full article about the significance of dismantling the Education Department by Matt Barnum at Chalkbeat.