One of President-elect Trump’s campaign pledges was to
eliminate the Department of Education. He claimed that the department pushes
“woke” ideology on America’s schoolchildren and that its employees “hate our
children.” He promised to “return” education to the states.
In fact, the Department of Education does not set curriculum;
states and local governments do. The Department of Education collects
statistics about schools to monitor student performance and promote practices
based in evidence. It provides about 10% of funding for K–12 schools through
federal grants of about $19.1 billion to high-poverty schools and of $15.5
billion to help cover the cost of educating students with disabilities.
It also oversees the $1.6 trillion federal student loan
program, including setting the rules under which colleges and universities can
participate. But what really upsets the radical right is that the Department of
Education is in charge of prohibiting discrimination on the basis of race and
sex in schools that get federal funding, a policy Congress set in 1975 with an
act now known as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). This
was before Congress created the department.
The Department of Education became a stand-alone department
in May 1980 under Democratic president Jimmy Carter, when Congress
split the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare into two departments:
the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of
Education.
A Republican-dominated Congress established the Department of
Health, Education, and Welfare in 1953 under Republican president Dwight D.
Eisenhower as part of a broad attempt to improve the nation’s schools and
Americans’ well-being in the flourishing post–World War II economy.
When the Soviet Union beat the United States into space by
sending up the first Sputnik satellite in 1957, lawmakers concerned that
American children were falling behind put more money and effort into educating
the country’s youth, especially in math and science.
But support for federal oversight of education took a
devastating hit after the Supreme Court, headed by Eisenhower appointee Chief
Justice Earl Warren, declared racially segregated schools unconstitutional in
the May 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision.
Immediately, white southern lawmakers launched a campaign of
what they called “massive resistance” to integration. Some Virginia counties
closed their public schools. Other school districts took funds from integrated
public schools and used a grant system to redistribute those funds to
segregated private schools.
Then, Supreme Court decisions in 1962 and 1963 that declared
prayer in schools unconstitutional cemented the decision of white evangelicals
to leave the public schools, convinced that public schools were leading their
children to perdition.
In 1980, Republican Ronald Reagan ran on a promise to
eliminate the new Department of Education.
After Reagan’s election, his secretary of education
commissioned a study of the nation’s public schools, starting with the
conviction that there was a “widespread public perception that something is
seriously remiss in our educational system.” The resulting report, titled “A
Nation at Risk,” announced that “the educational foundations of our society are
presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very
future as a Nation and a people.”
Although a later study commissioned in 1990 by the Secretary
of Energy found the data in the original report did not support the report’s
conclusions, Reagan nonetheless used the report in his day to justify school
privatization.
He vowed after the report’s release that he would “continue
to work in the months ahead for passage of tuition tax credits, vouchers,
educational savings accounts, voluntary school prayer, and abolishing the
Department of Education. Our agenda is to restore quality to education by
increasing competition and by strengthening parental choice and local control.”
The rise of white evangelism and its marriage to Republican
politics fed the right-wing conviction that public education no longer served
“family values” and that parents had been cut out of their children’s
education. Christians began to educate their children at home, believing that
public schools were indoctrinating their children with secular values.
When he took office in 2017, Trump rewarded those
evangelicals who had supported his candidacy by putting right-wing evangelical
activist Betsy DeVos in charge of the Education Department. She called for
eliminating the department—until she used its funding power to try to keep
schools open during the covid pandemic—and asked for massive cuts in education
spending.
Rather than funding public schools, DeVos called instead for
tax money to be spent on education vouchers, which distribute tax money to
parents to spend for education as they see fit. This system starves the public
schools and subsidizes wealthy families whose children are already in private
schools. DeVos also rolled back civil rights protections for students of color
and LGBTQ+ students but increased protections for students accused of sexual
assault.
In 2019, the 1619 Project, published by the New York
Times Magazine on the 400th anniversary of the arrival of enslaved
Africans at Jamestown in Virginia Colony, argued that the true history of the
United States began in 1619, establishing the roots of the country in the
enslavement of Black Americans.
That, combined with the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020,
prompted Trump to commission the 1776 Project, which rooted the country in its
original patriotic ideals and insisted that any moments in which it had fallen
away from those ideals were quickly corrected. He also moved to ban diversity
training in federal agencies.
When Trump lost the 2020 election, his loyalists turned to undermining the public schools to destroy what they considered an illegitimate focus on race and gender that was corrupting children. In January 2021, Republican activists formed Moms for Liberty, which called itself a parental rights organization and began to demand the banning of LGBTQ+ books from school libraries.
Right-wing activist Christopher Rufo engineered a national panic
over the false idea that public school educators were teaching their students
critical race theory, a theory taught as an elective in law school to explain
why desegregation laws had not ended racial discrimination.
After January 2021, 44 legislatures began to consider
laws to ban the teaching of critical race theory or to limit how teachers could
talk about racism and sexism, saying that existing curricula caused white
children to feel guilty.
When the Biden administration expanded the protections
enforced by the Department of Education to include LGBTQ+ students, Trump
turned to focusing on the idea that transgender students were playing
high-school sports despite the restrictions on that practice in the interest of
“ensuring fairness in competition or preventing sports-related injury.”
During the 2024 political campaign, Trump brought the
longstanding theme of public schools as dangerous sites of indoctrination to a
ridiculous conclusion, repeatedly insisting that public schools were performing
gender-transition surgery on students.
But that cartoonish exaggeration spoke to voters who had come
to see the equal rights protected by the Department of Education as an assault
on their own identity. That position leads directly to the idea of eliminating
the Department of Education.
But that might not work out as right-wing Americans imagine.
As Morning Joe economic analyst Steven Rattner notes, for all that Republicans
embrace the attacks on public education, Republican-dominated states receive
significantly more federal money for education than Democratic-dominated states
do, although the Democratic states contribute significantly more tax
dollars.
There is a bigger game afoot, though, than the current attack
on the Department of Education. As Thomas Jefferson recognized, education is
fundamental to democracy, because only educated people can accurately evaluate
the governmental policies that will truly benefit them.
In 1786, Jefferson wrote to a colleague about public
education: “No other sure foundation can be devised for the preservation of
freedom, and happiness…. Preach, my dear Sir, a crusade against ignorance;
establish and improve the law for educating the common people.
Let our countrymen know that the people alone can protect us
against [the evils of “kings, nobles and priests”], and that the tax which will
be paid for this purpose is not more than the thousandth part of what will be
paid to kings, priests and nobles who will rise up among us if we leave the
people in ignorance.”
-Heather Cox Richardson
Notes:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2023/09/26/home-schooling-vs-public-school-poll/
https://www.npr.org/2020/11/19/936225974/the-legacy-of-education-secretary-betsy-devos
https://pulitzercenter.org/sites/default/files/full_issue_of_the_1619_project.pdf
https://glaad.org/moms-for-liberty-book-bans-anti-lgbtq/
https://www.edweek.org/policy-politics/map-where-critical-race-theory-is-under-attack/2021/06
https://www.chalkbeat.org/2023/4/6/23673209/trans-students-sports-participation-biden-title-ix/
https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-10-02-0162
https://www.reaganfoundation.org/media/130020/a-nation-at-risk-report.pdf
https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/just-visiting/nation-risk-and-re-segregation-schools
X:
SteveRattner/status/1856816905379532870
DGComedy/status/1848389872165306824
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