It is the third week in August, when across the United States, the 2026-2027 school year will soon begin. Constitutional law professor Derek W. Black explains that public education is “the largest government institution in the United States… Public education is twice the size of the entire federal government. More important, it represents the most extensive and persistent relationship that citizens ever have with government. Public schools educate roughly ninety percent of Americans for more than a decade during their formative years.” When children and adolescents begin the new school year, the majority of them will return to familiar institutions at the heart of their communities.
Our laws provide that public schools must accept all of a community’s children and adolescents, provide the services all students need, and protect the rights of each student. As this school year begins, however, while the fabric of the institution of public schools may appear from a distance the same as it always has, the Trump administration and a number of state governments have begun to try to snag threads out of the fabric. Under close examination, there are signs that the fabric may be tearing in ways that will be hard to repair.
Current Threats to Public Schools Nearly 50 million children and adolescents across the states will go back to school without realizing that the climate for their public schools has changed since Donald Trump became president. Although students may not immediately notice, their schools are threatened by serious federal policy changes and many states’ tax cuts and the diversion of essential education dollars to private school vouchers and privately operated charter schools.
The U.S. House of Representatives is not even close to agreeing with the Senate on an adequate education budget for the upcoming fiscal year. The “One Big Beautiful Bill” included federal tuition tax credit vouchers whose rules are expected in September and whose launch is scheduled for 2027. The Trump administration continues to delay grant funding for myriad federally funded programs that support teachers and provide enrichment for children, and the administration has proposed radical new rules that would allow political officials to impose the Trump administration’s ideology as the basis for approval of federal grant funding. Structurally the Department of Education has distributed much of its work to be accomplished by other federal departments as the Trump administration tries to dismantle it.
The Trump administration has sent civil rights enforcement to the Department of Justice as it has dismantled the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights. At the same time the Trump administration and the Supreme Court have banned affirmative action, and the administration has insisted that “diversity, equity, and inclusion” violates the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The Trump administration is moving implementation of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) to the Department of Health and Human Services with consequences that are not yet understood. The federal government has discontinued myriad grants to help school districts serve English language learners. Funding for wraparound full-service community schools has been delayed, and proposed rules would deregulate Head Start.
Among the serious threats are the Trump administration’s moves to force teachers to adopt Trump administration-driven ideology in their teaching of history and other subjects. Teachers have been threatened for the way they teach despite that constitutional scholar Derek W. Black explains that, in a 1943 decision: “The (Supreme) Court… made clear that neither students nor teachers ‘shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate’… and… warned that one of the greatest threats to democracy lies in invading students’ freedom of thought by forcing them to adopt state-sanctioned ideology.”
Valuing the Teachers Who Serve our Children and our Communities The most unappreciated factor in the strength of the institution of public schooling is the work of the 3.8 million public school teachers and other public school educators who, despite all the the threats to public schooling, ensure the stability of our nation’s 99,000 U.S. schools. These educators are absorbing the effects of dangerous Trump administration policies and trying to push back. At other times they must find ways to shield their students from dangerous policies and program cuts. Teachers’ unions have filed lawsuits to protect teachers from administration attempts to dictate the teaching of the ideology the Trump administration is trying to prescribe.
Schoolteachers are also buffeted every day at the federal and state level by the punitive school reformers who doggedly allege that a teacher’s work is solely to produce ever rising standardized test scores. While the politicians decry the work of teachers, the late Mike Rose, a gifted writer and professor of education at UCLA, condemned today’s technocratic, top-down mandates: “Citizens in a democracy must continually assess the performance of their public institutions. But the quality and language of that evaluation matter. Before we can evaluate, we need to be clear about what it is that we’re evaluating, what the nature of the thing is: its components and intricacies, its goals and purpose…. Neither the sweeping rhetoric of public school failure nor the narrow focus on test scores helps us here. Both exclude the important, challenging work done daily in schools across the country, thereby limiting the educational vocabulary and imagery available to us. This way of talking about schools constrains the way we frame problems and blinkers our imagination….” (Why School?, 2009, p. 203)
In a final book, When the Light Goes On: The Life-Changing Wonder of Learning in an Age of Metrics, Screens, and Diminished Human Connection (2022), published posthumously, Rose continued to explore the human connection underneath all good teaching: “Education is human work with human beings. Therein lies its power and its beauty and most everything we are at risk of losing.” (When the Light Goes On, p. xi) Rose reports on his interviews with adults who describe feeling lost and disconnected at school but being inspired by particular teachers to make a greater effort, to connect with books, or learn to weld as part of a community college program, or figure out an academic path that had been unknown or seemingly unattainable. Teachers who make the light come on “possess a fortunate blend of beliefs about ability and an alertness to signs of that ability, signs that can be faint, possibly distorted by school routines, societal biases, or a cloud of anger or defense generated by students themselves.” (When the Light Goes On, p. 61)
Today the Trump administration’s threats to students’ rights, to essential federal funding for particular students’ needs, and to academic freedom across the system of public schooling are real. Mike Rose, however, asks us not to forget the teachers who are at the heart of the institution of public schooling. Their work and continued efforts to serve each student’s needs, protect students’ civil rights and protect their own academic freedom are what make it possible for students to thrive at school despite the precarious state of federal and state education policy.
For three years in the mid-1990s, Rose made visits to observe classes in public schools across the United States. His book, Possible Lives (1995 and 2006) concludes with an assessment of the strength and importance of the institution of public schooling: “What I began to see—and it took the accumulation of diverse classrooms to help me see it—was that these classrooms in addition to whatever else we may understand about them, represented a dynamic, at times compromised and contested, strain in American educational history: a faith in the capacity of a people, a drive toward equality and opportunity, a belief in the intimate link between mass education and a free society. These rooms were embodiments of the democratic ideal… The teachers I visited were working within that rich tradition. They provided example after different example of people doing public intellectual work in institutional settings, using the power of the institution to realize democratic goals for the children in their charge, and finessing, negotiating, subverting institutional power when it blocked the realization of those goals.” (Possible Lives, pp. 412-413)