As headlines swirl around the potential elimination or drastic restructuring of the U.S. Department of Education (ED), the conversation has largely centered on politics, funding, and classroom oversight. But there’s a quieter crisis emerging — one that lives in code, servers, and unpatched systems: the cybersecurity of America’s education sector.
This isn’t just an operational concern. It’s a matter of national security.
The Department of Education has long served as the federal convener, funder, and cyber policy anchor for school districts, higher education institutions, charter schools, and EdTech providers. These entities collectively manage vast stores of sensitive information — not just academic records, but also health histories, immigration status, financial aid data, and more. Remove the centralized infrastructure that ED provides, and you risk exposing that data — and the students behind it — to heightened cyber threats with diminished safeguards.
