Nancy Clair writing for The Bulwark explains the current administration’s attack on public education.
Donald Trump is attempting to remake American public education by drastically reshaping the federal government’s role in our schools. “We’re going to be returning education very simply back to the states, where it belongs,” the president said in March. Linda McMahon, the secretary of education, echoed him in a Fox News opinion article the same month, describing how she would oversee the dismantling of the department she leads: “We will systematically unwind unnecessary regulations and prepare to reassign the department’s other functions to the states or other agencies.”
To be sure, all presidents influence the nation’s education agenda. But the Trump administration’s plans and actions demonstrate just how extreme its commitment is to changing our country’s K-12 education system from being one that prioritizes equity and federal protections for students to one with steadily expanding protections for private and religious schools. This fundamental change threatens the health of public schools—and future of the students who rely on them, especially from poor and middle-income families.
So what? Why is a robust public education system important? Public schooling is one of those common goods—like working infrastructure, a clean environment, and public health—that lifts all our prospects. Our public schools, free to all regardless of race, national origin, gender, and social status, provide foundations for a strong economy, a vigorous democracy, social cohesion, and, to borrow a phrase, the pursuit of happiness. Moreover, public schools require anti-discrimination protections. They have accountability measures for how public money is spent and how students perform. And they uphold the separation of church and state.
These are values worth defending at great cost. But the Trump administration seems intent on pulling the resulting benefits away from the public and pushing them toward a private, wealthier subset of the population.