On Gutting the Department of Education

To everything there is a season. Like so many people, I’m trying to figure out what to do in a world where people with power and resources are energetically, intentionally, and consequentially shredding the web of our interconnectedness and interdependence — with each other, with our planet, and with all living and nonliving things. Stacey Abrams says we should think of a thing that we can do, that gives us joy in the doing, and that needs doing — and then do that. I don’t know if adding more words to the world needs doing, but, for me, at least, it meets the other criteria. So here goes. In this space, and from time to time, I’ll say a few things. Hopefully these words will connect with someone, somewhere. If that someone is you, please feel free to write me back.

For nearly all of American history, access to literacy and formal education – elementary, high school, university and beyond – was a rich person’s privately funded game. Think tutors, governesses, preparatory schools, boarding schools, colleges, and so on.

It has also been a Protestant Christian game. The earliest laws governing compulsory education in Massachusetts were designed to prepare young people in Puritan communities to read the Bible.

It has also been a White game. Beginning in the 1770s, anti-Black literacy laws were enacted to keep Black people from learning to read and write. As scholar Arlette Ingram Willis argues, these laws directly affected the opportunities of Black Americans to become economically independent. Today, she argues, reading retention laws and the diminished quality of literacy instruction disproportiately fails Black students and limits opportunities to pursue higher education, which in turn ensures a “cheap and under-educated source of labor.”

The reality has always been that access to a good education sustains and facilitates access to power, opportunity, and what sociologist Pierre Bourdieu called cultural capital.

I’m not talking about the early 20th century factory model of public schooling, when an industrializing economy benefitted from socializing masses of everyday people into lines and rows of anchored desks that prepared bodies and spirits to receive instructions and labor on assembly lines. Nor do I mean the kind of assimilationist, melting-pot view of elementary education whose aim was to forge a shared American identity for the millions and millions of children who immigrated to the U.S. between 1880 and 1930.

I’m talking about what we mean now when we talk about a good education, the kind of inquiry-based, student-centered, experiential, academically rigorous education that can lead to personal freedom for individuals and the collective well-being of entire communities.

What we’re facing now are highly schooled right-wingers with power who have personally benefitted (as we all have!) from formal schooling, including the making and spreading of knowledge that happens in universities as access to higher education has expanded over time. These same people want to limit the power, opportunities, and well-being of others, and especially of historically marginalized groups. This is the heart of anti-DEI rhetoric and efforts.

But there’s also this: To keep the not-so-affluent, non-college-educated citizenry in line, these highly schooled right wingers have preyed on this group’s alienation from formal education. For this group, the message is that the educated élite is suspect, that universities are bastions of subversion, and that people who learn stuff and communicate in complex symbol systems are their enemy and the enemy of the President.

Given all this, it’s pretty weird to hear Donald Trump speak of Elon Musk and his DOGErs as “super geniuses” and “seriously high IQ individuals.” If I were a MAGA person without a college or highschool degree who’s been persuaded that highly educated people are a problem, nay, the reason for all my problems, I’d feel disoriented, not to say betrayed, by the President suddenly telling me to admire this one well-schooled genius. I mean, the only other super genius I’ve ever heard of was Wile E. Coyote. And he spent most of his time having the T-N-T he deployed to stop the Roadrunner blow up in his own face.

This whole situation only makes sense if we take the long view, and understand the current administration’s plan to shut down the Department of Education as the next natural step for political forces that have been fighting to constrain public access to high-quality public schooling for 40 years.

In 1985, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) began crafting policies and pouring funding into campaigns for state-level candidates for school boards and state government in order to promote anti-public-school agendas. With this support at the national level, right-wingers and evangelicals have been running for and winning seats on local school boards. ALEC-supported schoolboard members control the hiring of district superintendents, through whom they have a say in what teachers teach, what books students read, and how district dollars get spent.

Today, Project 2025 makes the two-point plan perfectly clear in Chapter 11 (pp. 319 - 362), written by Lindsey M. Burke, the Director of the Center for Education Policy at the Heritage Foundation.

Their first objective is to rid the country of all public schooling through a combination of privatizing, resource draining, vouchers-promoting, undermining of teachers’ working conditions, union-bashing, and promoting the ever-more-insidious intrusion of profiteering education technology products and other “free-market forces” into curriculum and schooling.

Their second objective is to make the public schools that continue to exist in the meantime the kinds of places that flout the civil rights of students with respect to sex, gender, and sexual orientation; with respect to skin color and ethnic/cultural background; with respect to neurodivergence; and with respect to the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

(This last part is exactly what 1964 Republican presidential nominee Senator Barry Goldwater and his supporters wanted 60 years ago, when they inserted a platform plank which aimed to undo a Supreme Court ruling that banned school prayer and bible reading in public schools.)

Flouting the Establishment Clause also includes trying to prevent teachers from teaching science that contradicts the religious beliefs of Christian orthodoxy (cf., the Scopes trial of 1925). Indeed, between 1968 and 2005, 10 major cases have attempted to challenge the teaching of evolution and insert into the curriculum the teaching of “creation science,” “creationism,” or “intelligent design.”

It’s a commonplace to say that power in and over public schools has primarily been wielded at the state and municipal level, and that the federal Department of Education was only established in 1979 and can’t do much other than manage and distribute federal student loans; manage and distribute Title 1 funding for public districts that enroll students from economically vulnerable communities; and run the Office for Civil Rights, which ensures that public schools obey federal laws that protect students with disabilities.

But if the Department of Education’s role were truly minor, the Trump Administration wouldn’t be in such a rush to crush it to bits and re-assign a few of the remaining bits to state and local authorities and other federal agencies. Today’s New York Times reports that this week's firings in the Dept of Education’s Office for Civil rights “eliminated the entire investigative staff in seven of the office’s 12 regional branches, including in Boston, Cleveland, Dallas and San Francisco, and left thousands of pending cases in limbo.”

Of course people who care about public education on are edge. Especially people who live in states with Republican-dominated state governments. It’s not that we don’t want things to change for the better or haven’t been striving for decades to make things better. It’s that we know firsthand the educational harm that gets done when state control aligns with free market forces, and when the plan for school reform nationwide is for world’s richest person to hoist a giant anvil to the top of the nearest bluff and, snickering, assume his position as special government employee so he can drop his bought-and-paid-for Acme School Crusher on top of everything all at once.