Jeff Bryant is an independent journalist who writes about education for Our Schools. In this recent piece, he looks at how the administration is turning public education “into the great unequalizer.”
The U.S. Supreme Court’s July 14 decision to allow President Donald Trump and his secretary of education, Linda McMahon, to proceed with dismantling the U.S. Department of Education came with no explanation from the conservative majority that issued the ruling. It didn’t need to.
Indeed, if the court’s conservative majority had provided an explanation, it would likely have been the kind of rhetorical sleight of hand that Justice Elena Kagan described in her dissent to the court’s Free Speech Coalition, Inc. v. Paxton ruling, which radically shifted legal precedent for free speech rules. In her dissent to that ruling, Kagan argued that the conservative majority’s explanations for its decisions were not based on legal precedent nor the U.S. Constitution, but on “these special-for-the-occasion, difficult-to-decipher rules. … needed to get to what it considers the right result.” And the “right result” regarding the fate of the Department of Education appears to be whatever Trump and the conservative majority want.
This case was, meanwhile, decided “using the ‘shadow docket’—usually reserved for emergency cases, but more and more used to quietly rule on controversial questions with brief, often unsigned opinions,” according to a newsletter by Michael Waldman, president and CEO of the Brennan Center for Justice.
The court’s ruling came on the heels of the Trump administration’s announcement to withhold nearly $6.8 billion in funding that was to be distributed to schools and districts across the country. The money allocated by Congress was supposed to be distributed to states on July 1, 2025. It was, by and large, funding that schools and districts were counting on to pay for programs and personnel, some of which, according to Education Week, are required by law. Many schools felt hard-pressed to find alternative sources of funding or cut services and lay off staff.
Twenty-four states sued Trump over this “illegal” action. “The withheld money includes about 14 percent of all federal funding for elementary and secondary education across the country. It helps pay for free or low-cost after-school programs that give students a place to go while their parents work,” according to a July 2025 New York Times article.
That Trump administration edict was also issued with “little explanation,” according to the New York Times, with only some vague reassurance about being “committed to ensuring taxpayer resources are spent in accordance with the president’s priorities.”
The Trump administration, however, later announced that it was reversing its decision to withhold this amount after receiving a letter from 10 Republican senators “imploring” it to release the funds.
But the president’s proposed budget for 2026 “eliminated all the grants that had been frozen,” NPR reported.