In a piece for The Baffler, Jennifer Berkshire puts the current administration’s attack on public education in the context of earlier attacks, giving us a peek at the real motivations.
Trump’s early education-related orders have been heavy on faux outrage and doublespeak. In the name of “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling,” schools must now teach “patriotic education” or risk punishment from the federal government. At least fifty-five Department of Education employees were immediately put on indefinite paid leave, most for having attended a DEI training seminar offered by the department since at least Trump’s first term.
In less spectacular fashion, the administration has been taking aim at the true function of the department: its enforcement of equality as a goal. ED’s Civil Rights division, which exists to protect the rights of the most vulnerable students, will now prioritize investigations into reverse racism against white students, and antisemitism, which, as defined by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), often includes criticism of the state of Israel. Another target: so-called gender ideology. The division’s first official case will investigate a gender-neutral bathroom in a Denver high school, constructed in response to student demands, for which the district is said to be “discriminating against its female students.”
Of the thousands active complaints under investigation when Trump took office, those pertaining to race and gender discrimination have been indefinitely paused. Meanwhile, the division’s incendiary “Dear Colleague” letter, sent to every public K-12 school and college, threatens institutions that defy the administration’s crusade against DEI with the loss of funding.
Musk’s DOGE team has also taken a chainsaw to the department’s research arm, the Institute of Education Sciences. The cuts, totaling nearly $1 billion, fall heaviest on research focused on “what works” in public education. The answer to the question of which practices and approaches improve a broad range of outcomes for all kids has long proven frustratingly elusive. Now it won’t be asked at all. The Department also announced recently that it is canceling one of the tests that has been used to measure student performance since the 1970s.
“At the very least, government should not be into the race, sex, and LGBT bean counting business,” opined anti-DEI crusader Richard Hanania recently. Hanania was taking something of a victory lap. It was his argument—that “woke” is essentially civil rights law, and therefore the latter is bad—that informed Trump’s early executive order ending affirmative action for government contractors, which had been in place since 1965. Hanania, who once dabbled in online white supremacy, makes the case in his book The Origins of Woke that Lyndon Johnson started the trend of the government “considering race and sex and being woke all the time.” Other figures in the Trump-o-sphere take Hanania’s argument one step further, foreshadowing where the administration might go next. The Claremont Institute’s Scott Yenor, an influential advisor to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis on higher education who was recently appointed chair of the board of trustees at the University of West Florida, has pushed to make state employees civilly liable for collecting data on the basis of race or sex, as a challenge to what he describes as “the country’s corrupting ‘civil rights’ regime.” Yenor, by the way, is best known for his loud insistence that women should forego college in favor of motherhood.
Hanging over all of these claims, of course, is the putrescence of race science, and the belief, shared by Musk and his fellow oligarchs, along with many Trumpian intellectuals, that hierarchy is both good and natural. In this view, a cognitive elite with the highest of the high IQs deserves to rule over the rest of us, all in our natural places. In this fixed economy of spoils, there is little point to an institution whose goal is “equalizing.” It can’t be done.