Nancy Bailey offers her reaction to the executive order for dismantling the Department of Education. Reposted with permission.
Don’t it always seem to go That you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone…
~Joni Mitchell
Many educators and parents found it painful watching Donald Trump sign off on dismantling the US Department of Education (USDOE).
For those who taught and continue to teach and parent activists fighting for public education, observing billionaires and state governors laughing about destroying the federal DOE conjured up feelings like what those who saw Elon Musk gleefully wielding a chainsaw felt after firing veterans and USAID workers who had been helping the world’s poor.
As painful as it was to watch Trump sign the order, eliminating the USDOE might not have surprised some. For 40 years since the Reagan administration’s bogus report of a manufactured crisis, A Nation at Risk, Republicans and oligarchs, with the help of some Democrats, have worked to end public education.
Eliminating the federal government’s responsibility for laws protecting students is one step closer to ending public education altogether.
David Pepper on Substack noted that the cheering section at the US DOE death signing included governors who can now better push their school choice reforms. They included Florida’s DeSantis, Ohio’s DeWine, Indiana’s Braun, Iowa’s Reynolds, Tennessee’s Lee, Idaho’s Little, Texas’s Abbott, and Virginia’s Youngkin.
Now you know why they were laughing. They’re closer to getting vouchers, education savings accounts (ESAs), and tax-credit scholarships for their wealthy constituents. Ask how many poor or children with disabilities will get into those wealthy private “choice” schools they talk about. By the way, school choice fails at the ballot box.
It has never been about parental choice. School administrators pick who attends their schools. The middle class, poor kids, and those with disabilities will be sorted into poorly run for-profit charter schools.
This has always been the plan. Reagan subscribed to economist Milton Friedman’s idea of school choice. Historian Nancy MacLean describes in How Milton Friedman Exploited White Supremacy to Privatize Education:
All they had to do was cease overt focus on race and instead deploy a neoliberal language of personal liberty, government failure and the need for market competition in the provision of public education.
Today, they like to say the USDOE did nothing and failed. Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt claimed on FOX News that the DOE never educated a child and only stole from taxpayers to create more regulations that hurt our children’s education.
This is wrong, of course. With its Office of Civil Rights laws, the US DOE protects and ensures that children get the educational services they deserve.
Many supporters of ending the USDOE also tout poor test scores, complaining that children have failed for decades. This has been the school privatization modus operandi.
- They won’t reference the high-stakes standards that started with NCLB forcing children, even those with disabilities, to move in lockstep fashion to learn.
- They don’t discuss the 2016 University of Virginia research on how they’ve made kindergarten the new first grade. There will always be children who won’t develop up to par with crummy standards that ignore child development.
- And then there’s poverty. Remember, no excuses? No one talks about children needing better healthcare, not being homeless or food insecure, or their underfunded schools and crummy school buildings with no school libraries or librarians.
What they’ll tell you is that there’s too much DEI, too many trans kids in sports, too many racy books in school libraries, and too many liberal teachers promoting LBGTQ rights.
What they won’t tell you is that these federal firings don’t only hurt Democrats. Republicans hold federal education positions, too. Poor schools with Republican children who rely on funding from the USDOE will be affected as well.
We eventually learned, in what appeared an afterthought, that IDEA would likely go to Health and Human Services under Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., whose conspiratorial meanderings have created dangerous skepticism about vaccines, likely contributing to an epidemic of hazardous measles, which were once pretty much eradicated.
Colossal concerns involve civil rights and children with disabilities. McMahon, who claims to have studied education but never completed the degree, had no idea what IDEA stood for on FOX News and chalked it up to being on the job only five weeks—long enough to fire half of the department.
McMahon performed better but still skirted around serious questions with CNN’s Dana Bash, who asked about USDOE’s changes and how they will affect children. When McMahon claims states will do well following the law without strings attached, we should consider what happened in Texas and what could happen again if the USDOE no longer keeps states in check.
From 2018, The Texas Tribune:
A U.S. Department of Education investigation concluded Thursday that Texas violated federal law by failing to ensure students with disabilities were properly evaluated and provided with an adequate public education.
After interviews and monitoring visits with parents, school administrators and state officials, the federal investigation found that the Texas Education Agency effectively capped the statewide percentage of students who could receive special education services and incentivized some school districts to deny services to eligible students.
Instead of eliminating the department, the USDOE should have done more audits and been stricter on states and local school districts that refused to follow the laws.
It’s unclear if Americans understand that breaking up or eliminating the USDOE is one step closer to stealing what is rightfully theirs: a democratic public school system that is free and open to all children! That provides school districts with school boards where they can voice concerns and have a say in their children’s education.
Trump’s fan base seems giddy over gutting the services and laws that protect student civil rights. At the same time, the ceremony staged a diverse group of children seated at desks around the President during the signing ceremony. A day earlier, Trump’s Defense Department had purged the histories of notable military service members, including Jackie Robinson, the Navajo Code Talkers, the Tuskegee airmen, and Ira Hayes, one of the flag-raising Marines at Iwo Jima.
Public education has not been perfect, primarily because those who wanted it to end all these years set continuous roadblocks in its way. Still, it managed to educate America due to great teachers. Sadly, our American political system could have gone a long way toward creating more beautiful public schools over the years instead of concerted efforts to tear them down and privatize them.
President Jimmy Carter had the right idea. A great school system demands a well-run US Department of Education (USDOE) and seals education’s place in Washington, D.C. This is essential to preserving laws that protect public school students and to offer all children equal educational opportunities. The USDOE demonstrates the commitment of a public school system to the nation.
Citizens from both parties desire and should demand an excellent public education for America, and fighting for great public schools could be the Democratic Party’s ticket back to the White House. Please.