Education's Eve of Destruction
Among the long term consequences will be states with poorly performing and underfunded schools eliminating public education entirely...
Amid a staged set of young people seated at desks on risers on Thursday, President Trump signed a long-promised executive order for cabinet secretary Linda McMahon to begin shutting down the Department of Education.
“We’re going to shut it down, and shut it down as quickly as possible,” Trump said.
According to Article I of the Constitution, only Congress can shut down the education department. For this reason, no other modern president has attempted to unilaterally shutter a federal department. There are already lawsuits challenging the order, but the intention by Trump is to leave an entity so worthless that Congress will feel obligated to make the death blow.
Hollowing out of the Department of Education is following the formula drawn up by the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. It’s all there on page 319 of their manifesto.
At Civil Discourse, Joyce Vance spelled out the reasoning in an essay published last summer, where she concluded:
Trump and the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 authors are afraid of an open marketplace of ideas where kids learn to think for themselves. Kids can learn about—and learn from—the history of slavery in this country. The idea that it must be suppressed because it might make white kids feel bad is ridiculous.
The more we know of our history, events like the internment of Japanese Americans in camps during World War II, or the treatment of Irish, Italian, Jewish, and other immigrants as they came to country, the better we can become. Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. That seems to be the plan here.
The hacking away of the Department of Education by the Trump administration is just the beginning of Make America Ignorant Again. Public schools will be the first to suffer, and there are positively vile actions coming for institutions of higher education.
Like other major MAGA/DOGE overhauls within the federal government, the premises for undoing public education are faulty. Maybe faulty is too nice a word; let’s call it a pack of lies, playing on misconceptions and misinformation circulating among the public.
Today’s essay will be focused on K-12 systems. Later on, I’ll get to higher education, as I sort the debris arising from the flood of actions from the Trump administration .
Before I get into the particulars, let’s take a look at the bigger picture, namely an understanding of the purpose of public education. There are different answers to that question, based on who is getting educated, and what the needs of a society are.
In western societies, dating back to the Prussian empire’s standardization and mandatory regimens, the spread of mass primary education outside the church and home was an effort to advance economies. If you look at how, where and why public education was adopted, it’s increasingly obvious that mass primary education also is used as a tool for social control.
These days universal public education is considered to be part of a the social compacts government made to address the needs of the citizenry. If you realize that a big part of the MAGA agenda is the dissolution and or privatization of social services, then the need to dismantle the Education Department makes more sense.
The desegregation of public schools led to instructional and behavioral changes in education, and polite society has largely ignored the animus made with people raised to believe in strata-based race and wealth structures in society.
The Department of Education exists because states wouldn’t fund poor schools, wouldn’t protect kids with disabilities, and wouldn’t follow civil rights law, especially in the South. MAGA-world’s view of the agency is that it is wasteful and exists to serve as a conduit for liberal advocacy. As we now know with the demonization of DEI theory and practice, what gets called liberal is actually code for anything challenging racism and other pre-20th century social structures.
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The political campaign of Donald Trump treated public education as a disaster, with claims about the US being first in spending and last in test scores. Assuming one accepts standardized testing as a measure of educational success (you shouldn't), both of Trump’s claims are untrue. I’m sure the fear generated for parents by their repetition is very real.
Via ABC News:
Even though the country spends a lot per pupil, the Education Data Initiative found an average of $20,387 per year of federal, state and local spending. The amount is the third-highest per pupil (after adjusting to local currency values). The country is not last in any education statistic that ABC News has reviewed.
The U.S. is above average in reading and science, and about average when it comes to scores in math, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's (OECD) Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). PISA is the industry standard for ranking students from different countries, according to education experts. There are roughly 40 member countries and economies in the OECD and about 40 more countries have participated in the last three assessments. It varies by year -- in 2015, 70 countries and economies participated; in 2018, 78 participated.
In 2022, the most recently released data, roughly 81 countries took part in OECD's PISA assessments, which measure 15-year-olds' ability to use their reading, mathematics and science knowledge. The U.S. ranked ninth out of 81 in reading, 16th/81 in science, and 34th/81 in math, according to the 2022 PISA results.
Federal funding for education averages out to about 13.6% of local school budgets nationwide, mostly used for special needs instruction, research, and training. The Department of Education does not administer curriculum or create lessons for the nation's students, nor do they set requirements for enrollment and graduation or establish or accredit schools or universities.
According to the ACLU:
The ED is also statutorily-mandated to enforce national student privacy laws and to provide students and parents an avenue to challenge abuses of their privacy. Without those protections, information about students’ grades, discipline, medical history and families’ income may be used for purposes they never agreed to — and even being weaponized in President Trump’s deportation machine.
The department does hold schools accountable for enforcing non-discrimination laws based on race, gender and disability, and that role is offensive to the MAGA crowd. They want to get rid of what they see as inducements for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion baked into the culture of education. Getting schools back to “local control” carries with it the understanding that these unwanted ideas will be left to wither away.
Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, responded succinctly to Trump's plan to sign the order. —"See you in court," she said.
To hear President Trump tell it, he’s dismantling the Education Department by public demand. That’s not what polling says:
Trump has actually expanded at least one education department function: Propaganda! The department has been ordered to promote “patriotic” education so that students will unquestioningly love the country as it’s being converted into an authoritarian oligarchy.
What the righties want is an education system teaching kids that the status quo (as in America Made Great Again) is okay and for the people at the bottom to be taught to stay in their place and to be happy with what they have. Critical thinking is something that would be taught to (mostly white male) students who have submitted to the discipline.
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Even before the Presidential order calling for the dismantlement of the Department of Education was issued, the gutting of the agency had started. Nearly 50% of staff was fired last week, with more than 1,300 employees given termination notices and nearly 600 workers taking voluntary resignation offers. Offices covering research, data and statistics were decimated.
Research programs which have yet to be completed, putting years of work and tens of millions of dollars – to waste. At the department’s Institute of Educational Sciences (IES), more than 160 education research funding contracts and grants worth $900 million were cancelled. As is true with other agencies, what is being overlooked are the impacts occurring with the private sector contractors, many of whom will be forced to close.
A federal judge in Maryland has since ordered a temporary halt to the reduction in force firings at the Department of Education and other agencies. The Trump administration has appealed.
Attorneys general from 20 states and the District of Columbia also filed a lawsuit last week over the Trump administration’s attempt to dismantle the agency.
The Education Department was already the smallest Cabinet agency, costing American taxpayers $268 billion in 2024, just $14 billion more than it had when President Jimmy Carter brought it into existence in 1979.
Education will be undoubtedly discussed at a virtual town hall co-hosted by Indivisible and Rep. Sarah Jacobs on Saturday, March 23, at Noon. Register at tinyurl.com/sarajacobstownhall
Among the immediate consequences of the destruction of the education department will be:
26 million kids in every school district—rural, suburban, and urban—will lose critical funding that helps them get ahead.
12 million students will lose access to career & technical education, including apprenticeships in trades and STEM careers.
10 million students from lower-income families could lose access to affordable college, making two- and four-year degrees out of reach.
7.5 million students with disabilities––15% of all students nationally will lose special education funding for essential services.
Among the long term consequences will be states with poorly performing and underfunded schools eliminating public education entirely, leaving a private marketplace chock full of grifters to squeeze vouchers for as much revenue and as little education as possible.
In his victory speech at the end of the 2016 Nevada primary, candidate Trump offered up thanks to his family and friends, adding:
“We won the evangelicals. We won with young. We won with old. We won with highly educated. We won with poorly educated. I love the poorly educated.”
So you could look at his education policies as an effort to shore up what’s proven to be his most consistent group of supporters. It is another instance of Trump putting himself before country.
Musk links trans people to Tesla attacks the same day his estranged daughter critiques him in Teen Vogue interview by Liam Reilly at CNN
In the 12 hours since Wilson’s Teen Vogue interview published, the billionaire has alleged that New York will attempt to illegally usher in non-citizen voting and amplified a post claiming that 10,000 voters in Arizona used the same social security number to vote.
Musk also repeatedly circulated posts connecting the reports of vandalism on Teslas to trans people.
“What are the statistics on trans violence,” Musk asked in yet another X post on Thursday. “The probability of a trans person being violent appears to be vastly higher than non-trans. Hormone injections cause extreme emotional volatility. That is simply a fact.”
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Administration Officials Believe Order Lets Immigration Agents Enter Homes Without Warrants by Devlin Barrett at the New York Times
Last week, Mr. Trump quietly signed a proclamation invoking the law, known as the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. It grants him the authority to remove from the United States foreign citizens he has designated as “alien enemies” in the cases of war or an invasion.
His order took aim at Venezuelan citizens 14 or older who belong to the Tren de Aragua gang, and who are not naturalized or lawful permanent residents. “All such alien enemies, wherever found within any territory subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, are subject to summary apprehension,” the proclamation said.
Senior lawyers at the Justice Department view that language, combined with the historical use of the law, to mean that the government does not need a warrant to enter a home or premises to search for people believed to be members of that gang, according to two officials familiar with the new policy.
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Intelligence Assessment Said to Contradict Trump on Venezuelan Gang by Charlie Savage and Julian E. Barnes at the New York Times
President Trump’s assertion that a gang is committing crimes in the United States at the direction of Venezuela’s government was critical to his invocation of a wartime law last week to summarily deport people whom officials suspected of belonging to that group.
But American intelligence agencies circulated findings last month that stand starkly at odds with Mr. Trump’s claims, according to officials familiar with the matter. The document, dated Feb. 26, summarized the shared judgment of the nation’s spy agencies that the gang was not controlled by the Venezuelan government.
The disclosure calls into question the credibility of Mr. Trump’s basis for invoking a rarely used wartime law, the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, to transfer a group of Venezuelans to a high-security prison in El Salvador last weekend, with no due process.
