I was interviewed by Josephine Lee of The Texas Observer. She asked about growing up in Houston and my thoughts about Trump’s education agenda. It’s a conversation, not an article. I will write more on this subject in the future.
Archives for category: Education Industry
Thirteen years ago, Republican Governor Scott Walker and the legislature of Wisconsin enacted Act 10, which banned collective bargaining for public employees, except for public safety employees. Teachers, social workers, and other public employees were outraged. They encircled the State Capitol for days. Walker became a star, and his sponsors, the Koch brothers, were happy.
But today, Act 10 was declared unconstitutional. Time will tell whether the decision is upheld.
A Dane County judge on Monday sent ripples through Wisconsin’s political landscape, overturning a 13-year-old law that banned most collective bargaining among public employees, consequently decimating the size and power of employee unions and turning then-Republican Gov. Scott Walker into a nationally known political figure.
But there’s been a revival of hope in Wisconsin:
The effort to overturn Act 10 began in November 2023 when several unions representing public employees filed the lawsuit, citing a “dire situation” in workplaces with issues including low pay, staffing shortages and poor working conditions.
In July, Dane County Circuit Judge Jacob Frost ruled provisions of Act 10 unconstitutional and denied a motion filed by the Republican-controlled Legislature to dismiss the case.
The lawsuit argued the 2011 law violated equal protection guarantees in the Wisconsin Constitution by dividing public employees into two classes: “general” and “public safety” employees. Public safety employees are exempt from the collective bargaining limitations imposed on “general” public employees.
Jan Resseger read the proposals of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 and the America First Policy Institute to divine the likely shape of Linda McMahon’s plans if she is confirmed as Secretary of Education. McMahon was chair of the board of the America First Policy Institute so its goals are inportant.
It’s not as if these two groups are far apart: they are both closely aligned with Trump and his determination to expand public funding of private schools and sow chaos.
Please open the link, as I am posting only the first half of Jan’s post.
She writes:
Linda McMahon formerly served as an executive of World Wrestling Entertainment; led the Small Business Administration during Trump’s first term; and took a job in 2919 leading the America First Action PAC to support Trump’s candidacy for President. Beginning in 2009, McMahon served part of a term on Connecticut’s state board of education, and once upon a time, after majoring in French in college, the now 76-year-old McMahon secured a teaching certificate in her home state of North Carolina. Currently she chairs the board of the America First Policy Institute, a think tank competitor to the Heritage Foundation and its Project 2025. Both think tanks have been drawing up a policy agenda to drive Trump’s second term.
There is some agreement that McMahon is not as likely to shut down the U.S. Department of Education as many feared Trump’s appointment would be charged to do. The National Education Policy Center’s Kevin Welner believes the complexity of the history and needs served by that federal department would make its closure unlikely: “By the time Congress established the department in 1979, the federal government was already an established player in education policy and funding. For instance, the Higher Education Act of 1965 began the federal student loan program. In 1972, Congress created the basic Educational Opportunity Grant, the predecessor program to today’s Pell Grants. The G.I Bill of 1944, which, among other things, funded higher education for World War II veterans, preceded them both. At the K-12 level, federal involvement in vocational education began with the Smith-Hughes Act of 1917. Federal attention to math, science and foreign language education began in 1958 with the National Defense Education Act. Two laws passed during the Lyndon Johnson administration then gave the federal government its modern foothold in education: the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. The 1964 law provided antidiscrimination protections enforced by the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights. The 1965 law… includes Title I, which sends extra funding to schools with high populations of low-income students. In 1975, Congress added the law currently known as the Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act, or IDEA… To dissolve the Education department, both houses of Congress would have to agree, which is unlikely.”
Assuming the U.S. Department of Education will survive a second Trump administration, it is worth comparing the policy agendas both think tanks—the Heritage Foundation with its Project 2025, and the America First Policy Institute (AFPI) where Linda McMahon has been chair of the board—have prepared for the incoming Trump administration’s Department of Education.
The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 suggests systematically dismantling or relocating to other departments the institutions that were originally pulled together in 1979 to be managed by one federal agency. According to a concise report in August from the Brookings Brown Center on Education Policy, the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 prescribes tearing apart the Department’s structure and functions: “dismantle the U.S. Department of Education; eliminate the Head Start program for young children in poverty; discontinue the Title I program that provides federal funding to schools serving low-income children; rescind federal civil rights protections for LGBTQ+ students; undercut federal capacity to enforce civil rights law; reduce federal funding for students with disabilities and remove guardrails designed to ensure these children are adequately served by schools; promote universal private school choice; and privatize the federal student loan portfolio.” Project 2025 would, first, end or reduce specific federal funding streams enacted by Congress to serve vulnerable groups of students, and second, disrupt or undermine the specific agency prepared to enforce laws and regulations that protect the civil rights of groups which have experienced discrimination and unequal access to opportunity in the past.
The America First Policy Institute’s agenda is far more focused on what have been called culture war issues, while both think tanks do make universal school choice—the diversion of public dollars for school privatization—a priority. The agenda of the America First Policy Institute (AFPI) features four pillars, each one described in a two page brief:
First — “Give Parents Control by Allowing Them to Select the School Their Child Attends.” AFPI’s brief on school privatization is piece of classic pro-privatization ideology. Ignoring the fact that two weeks ago in three states, voters rejected ballot measures which would have expanded tuition vouchers for private schools and further, that every single time voters have been presented with voucher initiatives in previous years, voters have flatly rejected school vouchers, the America First Policy Institute (AFPI) tells a lie: “Just 18% of Americans are opposed to school choice. Support for school choice in America has increased from 64% to 72% since April 2020.” And despite Josh Cowen’s research that demonstrates lower academic achievement when students use vouchers at private schools, AFPI declares: “Standardized test scores significantly improve for students who exercised school choice.” AFPI endorses charter schools and criticizes the Biden administration’s efforts to strengthen regulation of the federal Charter Schools Program, which the Network for Public Education has repeatedly shown suffers from poor oversight. AFPI writes: “(R)egulations would severely limit the types of schools that could apply for funding and would restrict any potential expansion of charter school programs.” AFPI concludes mistakenly: “Educational freedom is a tool that has a proven record of putting students and families first, and parents need to be given the power to choose the best educational opportunities for their children.”
Education Week‘s Brooke Shultz directly quotes Linda McMahon in 2016 strongly supporting charter schools : “One of the issues most important to me is the question of school choice.” Shultz also quotes McMahon in 2015: “I don’t believe charter schools take anything away from traditional public schools; rather I think they can be centers for innovation and models for best practices.”
Second —“Give Every Parent the Right to See All Curriculum Materials in Every Class their Child Attends.” AFPI endorses parents’ individualist right to insulate and shield their children from programs and ideas that the parents consider offensive. However dangerous it may be for a school district to privilege individual parents with the power to set the curriculum according to the biases of the most powerful parents, and however impractical it may be for parents to review and debate each classroom’s lessons in advance, that is the policy AFPI endorses: “The formal authority to approve curriculum for public schools rests with states and local school boards. However, the authority for educating children rests with parents. As such, they should be involved early in the approval process in determining what qualifies as appropriate content for curriculum and lesson plans.” The bias here is clear: “Many children are being taught to see white supremacy everywhere, indoctrinated to believe America’s foundation was built on racism, talked to about sex and gender identity in developmentally inappropriate ways, and presented with other questionable curriculum… Officials that have the authority to make and approve curriculum do so as stewards of the public’s trust. The taxpayers and parents who schools ultimately answer to deserve to know what schools are teaching and how tax dollars are being spent.”
Again, please open the link to read this excellent post in full.
Perry Bacon, a regular columnist for The Washington Post, paints a sunny view of the politics of education. He thinks that the public is so strongly united behind their public schools that Trump might back off his plan to turn federal funding into vouchers. Higher education, however, is a different story, he says, with a bipartisan coalition arrayed against student protests and debt relief.
I do not share his view that Republicans will relinquish their fealty to vouchers and privatization. No matter how determined the public is to defend their public schools, the billionaires who want vouchers are unrelenting. Bacon doesn’t see that the monied people don’t give a damn what the public wants. Betsy DeVos, the Koch machine, Jeff Yass, and Texas billionaires Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks don’t care what the public wants. Perry Bacon would have written a different article if he had read Josh Cowen’s new book The Privateers: How Billionaires Started a Culture War …
Bacon writes:
The Biden years have featured some surprising bipartisan and cross-ideological coalitions on education issues, including school vouchers and protests on college campuses, that might extend into Donald Trump’s presidency. It’s the rare policy area where the divides aren’t simply along party lines.
On K-12 education, Republican and Democratic voters have unified — against the desires of powerful conservative groups and Republican politicians. The political right has long been frustrated with American education and is pushing a number of major changes, most notably voucher programs that would put more kids in private schools and either shrink or, perhaps eventually, dismantle the public school system.
But a clear majority (57 percent) in Nebraska earlier this month voted to repeal a voucher initiative, nearly matching Trump’s support there (60 percent). In Kentucky, all 120 counties (and 62 percent of voters) rejected a proposal to start a voucher program.
The results from those two states aren’t outliers. States with huge Republican majorities in their legislatures have struggled to get voucher programs passed because lawmakers are hearing from wary constituents, including Republicans. Even when they are enacted, voucher programs so far have not resulted in a huge number of students flooding to private schools.
In another rejection of conservative education policy, Moms for Liberty, the group that backs right-wing candidates running in local school board races, has struggled electorally. Only about one-third of the candidates it backed won their races last year, according to a Brookings Institution analysis. (There hasn’t yet been a detailed analysis of the group’s election results in 2024.) There has been a strong backlash against Moms for Liberty and other conservative groups seeking to ban books on racial and LGBTQ+ issues from public schools.
Meanwhile, counties throughout Florida, where Trump won easily, voted to increase local property and sales taxes to boost public school funding.
What’s behind this strong support of public schools? Only 45 percent of all Americans and 31 percent of Republicans say they are satisfied with public schools nationally, according to Gallup polling. But 70 percent of all Americans and 62 percent of Republicans are satisfied with the schools their kids are attending. Education policy tends to reflect local dynamics, so schools in very conservative areas are probably cautious in speaking about racism or LGBTQ+ issues. But what I suspect is actually driving that strong support for public schools is that for Republicans, particularly in rural areas, public schools are a central, positive part of their lives, where their friends and relatives work and their kids play sports.
But on higher-education policy, the bipartisan coalition is against the left. Like their Republican counterparts, many Democratic politicians and prominent left-of-center leaders and activists think both that the United States became overly invested in recent decades in having people attend college and that campuses are too left-wing. (I disagree with both claims.)
So in the spring, Democratic politicians, including President Joe Biden, joined Republicans in portraying on-campus protests against Israel’s military actions in Gaza as antisemitic. Schools in both red and blue states, pushed by their centrist or conservative governing boards, have now created new limits on protests, particularly barring the kind of encampments that pro-Palestinian students created.
Biden himself was under fire from centrist Democrats and Republicans alike for trying to cancel student-loan debt, a policy strongly backed by many progressives. Many in either party argue that mass college attendance, unlike K-12 education, is not a necessity for the country and people who accrued debt during college knew the costs and should pay it back in full. The recent progressive pushes for both universal free college and mass debt cancellation seem stalled for now.
Prominent liberals have joined conservatives in questioning the value of humanities classes and departments and want colleges to focus more on graduating students ready to work in science, technology and other fields where jobs are growing. Nearly every day a Democratic politician says something along the lines of, “Our party is too influenced by the views and perspectives of professors and students on campuses and college graduates,” mirroring the rhetoric of conservatives such as Vice President-elect JD Vance.
How did we end up with Republican voters defending public schools and Democratic politicians criticizing colleges? Part of the explanation for why education policy hasn’t split on predictable partisan lines is that Biden hasn’t made the issue one of his major priorities. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona has been more low-profile than Betsy DeVos and Arne Duncan. Biden didn’t have a major education initiative such as No Child Left Behind (President George W. Bush) or Race to the Top (President Barack Obama).
Trump and his incoming administration could make this issue super-partisan. The activist right is unified around the idea that both K-12 schools and colleges are using taxpayer dollars to force liberal ideas on young people, particularly on issues of race, gender and sexual orientation. So, the Trump administration could push hard to get more K-12 students enrolled in private schools, stop K-12 schools and colleges from offering classes out of line with conservative ideology, and limit on-campus protests for left-wing causes.
Trump, in his post on Truth Social announcing that Linda McMahon would be education secretary, emphasized his support for vouchers.
But in that statement, Trump also said that education policy should be left largely to states. (It’s not clear that Trump can or would fully eliminate the federal Education Department, as he suggested during the campaign.) So perhaps his administration will take a more hands-off approach, aware that many Republican voters like how their schools are run locally.
Looking forward, it’s possible that Republican voters fall in love with voucher programs if the Trump administration pushes them hard. Or perhaps Democratic politicians will feel more compelled to defend colleges if they become a target of Trump.
But if I had to guess, I would predict that education policy continues to be an issue that doesn’t break down simply along party lines. After all, it’s personal for so many Americans, who vividly remember their time in grade school or college. And it’s complicated — exactly how should colleges have handled the Gaza protests? The happy middle for America might be a robust public school system, more of a Democratic goal, along with less liberal colleges that fewer people attend, more in line with Republican preferences.
Yeah, yeah, I know it’s a strange headline, but it’s true.
Here is the story: Politico reporter goes to Arizona to cover the voucher story. Discovers that the chief advocate for vouchers is a beautiful, charming mom who uses state money to home-school her five children.
Writer is wowed by this mom. Writer notes that mom is funded by DeVos and Koch machine. It doesn’t matter. She’s so charming and pretty, who cares that vouchers are busting the state budget?
Writer pays more attention to the adorable mom than to those fighting to stop the damage she is doing to kids, public schools, and communities. Somehow she becomes the hero of the story.
Who cares that vouchers are used mostly by families whose kids never went to public schools? Who cares that vouchers are harming the state’s public schools?
Who cares that Arizona voters overwhelmingly rejected voucher expansion? Who cares that the legislature ignored their vote?
Who cares that less than 5% of the state’s students are undermining the state budget and the schools that educate the other students?
Families, mostly from high-income zip codes, have applied the taxpayer funds for everything from ski lift passes to visits to trampoline parks, a $4,000 grand piano, more than a million dollars in Legos, online ballet lessons, horse therapy and cookie-baking kits. Proponents justify expenditures like these in the name of parents’ prerogative to shape their children’s education or by pointing to wasteful spending by public schools. As a result, ESA costs have ballooned from the legislature’s original estimated price tag of $100 million over two years, to more than $400 million a year — a figure, critics have noted, that would explain more than half of Arizona’s projected budget deficit in 2024 and 2025.
Ain’t it grand?
Love is love, even when it is underwritten by billionaires!
The Network for Public Education urges you to sign a petition opposing the appointment of Linda McMahon as Secretary of Education. McMahon is committed to privatization of our neighborhood schools. Her background in the wrestling industry does not qualify her to lead the federal role in education.
Open the link. It will send your petition to your Senators on your behalf.
Writing in his blog Curmudgucation, Peter Greene reviews Kevin Huffman’s career as a big Reform honcho and his latest advice about what the federal government should do to make schools better. Peter noted that none of Huffman’s ventures has been successful, which makes a fine example of someone who has mastered the art of “failing upward.”
Peter Greene writes:
A few weeks ago, Kevin Huffman was in the pages of the Washington Post, bemoaning the lack of education discussion during the Presidential campaign and offering thoughts about What America Needs To Do Next. Nobody needs to read it. Really.
Kevin Huffman is a long-time reformster; in fact Kevin Huffman, as the Tennessee Grand High Commissioner of Education, represents a reformster milestone. Huffman’s career path took him to Swarthmore, which led to a Teach For America posting, which led to law school, which led to practicing education law in DC, which led back to TFA, first as general counsel and later as various VP executive titly things. Then, a few years later, Governor Bill Haslam tapped him for Tennessee Educational Poobahdom. Which made him the first TFA temp to get to run an entire state’s education system.
Once in charge, he made his reformy mark. (I will mention, because someone always brings it up, that he was for a brief while married to Michelle Rhee). He chimed in with Arne Duncan to claim that low-achieving students, including those with learning disabilities, just needed to be tested harder. And as a super buddy of charter schools, he took $3.4 million dollars away from Nashville city schools because their board didn’t approve the charter that he had personally shepherded through the process.
He became one of Jeb Bush’s Chiefs for Change.Huffman was a loyal Common Core warrior and was right at the front of the line to hand the feds the Race to the Top keys to Tennessee education in exchange for a NCLB waiver. Huffman never met a reformster idea he didn’t like (evaluation to root out bad teachers, performance based pay, charters)
Huffman also recruited Chris Barbic from Houston to come run the Achievement School District. The ASD was an attempt to see if New Orleans style public-to-private education conversion could be implemented without the fortuitous advent of a hurricane. Could human beings deliver that kind of destruction without the assistance of nature and create a network of business investment opportunities private charter schools?
The ASD was Huffman’s audacious attempt to bundle the bottom 5% of schools and take them over as a state-run “district.” The 2012 edition of the now-defunct ASD website proclaimed:
The Achievement School District was created to catapult the bottom 5% of schools in Tennessee straight to the top 25% in the state. In doing so, we dramatically expand our students’ life and career options, engage parents and community members in new and exciting ways, and ensure a bright future for the state of Tennessee.
Three years later, Barbic gave up, saying,
Let’s just be real: achieving results in neighborhood schools is harder than in a choice environment. I have seen this firsthand at YES Prep and now as the superintendent of the ASD. As a charter school founder, I did my fair share of chest pounding over great results. I’ve learned that getting these same results in a zoned neighborhood school environment is much harder.
Barbic was replaced by a Broadie, who also failed to do anything other than move some goal posts (no more of that “top 25%” stuff). Huffman couldn’t close the deal on selling the model to other states. And the ASD just kept failing.
Failing so consistently that a little more than a week after Huffman’s WaPo op-ed, Chalkbeat reported that research by Brown’s Annenberg Institute found that the ASD “generally worsened high school test scores.” It also didn’t help on ACT scores and “data related to attendance, chronic absenteeism, and disciplinary actions wasn’t encouraging, either.” Researchers found neither short-term nor long-term gains for students, and Tennessee legislators seem to finally be getting the idea that the ASD is junk.
But the guy who created it is still failing upward, having passed through the reform-pushing City Fund and now working as CEO of Accelerate, one more educational consulting fix-it shop operated by people with lots in the reformy funding universe (the board includes John White and Janice Jackson). They’re particularly keyed in to tutoring and individualized instruction, both computerized.
So what advice does the chief with no actual edu-wins to his name have to offer? Well, he thinks that George W. Bush was swell, and remember, reading and math scores wet up in the early days of No Child Left Behind. Folks like Monty Neill of Fairtest have since pointed out that these gains were only on the state Big Standardized Test. I was in the classroom at the time, and I can tell you exactly why test scores went up initially– because once the tests were rolled out we could learn how to teach to the test, and after a few years we had collected all the test prep gains we were going to get.
Huffman likes the “gains” in race to the Top testing which, again, reflect teachers learning how to game the new PARCC and SBA tests.
But, Huffman complains, by the end of the Obama administration, the feds were giving in to demands for more local control and pre-COVID test scores were already dipping, then “following the academic wreckage covid-19 left behind, heavy deferral to the states on spending and policy has left us with massive learning gaps and no national plan for closing them.”
It takes a person whose educational “experience” is almost entirely outside the classroom to believe that the Big Standardized Test is a useful measure of learning that should be the centerpiece of education policy rather than understanding that BS Testing is the most toxic force to be unleashed on education in the last couple of decades.
Huffman argues we need “strong national leadership around education policy,” which makes sense only if such leadership is guided by an actual understanding of teaching and learning and schooling, but history suggests that isn’t happening any time ever. But, he asserts, everyone wants “the best basic education for their children.” I don’t know what to do with that “basic” in there.
How do we get it?
For starters, the next president should issue a national call for all states and all groups of students to surpass pre-pandemic learning levels in reading and math by 2030 — and direct the Education Department to report on each state’s progress.
God, one of my least favorite forms of management– management by insistence. This is like sales managers who issue increased sales targets with helpful directives like “sell more.” But worse, this is demanding that schools focus more intently on the wrong damn target– test scores.
Huffman also wants the feds to replace ESSA (too weak) with “a return to nationwide education goals” along with accountability measures. And also, grants for states that “pursue ambitious education reform” as, one assumes, defined by the feds.
In other words, Huffman would like to rewind to 2002 and start NCLB/CCSS/RTTT all over again, and I guess we can say that keeping on with something that hasn’t worked yet is on brand for Huffman. But man– it all didn’t work the first time, and not just “didn’t work” but “did more harm than good.”
But he has some specifics that he wants the feds to enforce this time. One is phonics-based learning and I don’t have time to get into the reading wars other than to say that any time someone says “if we just use X, every student will learn Y” they are wrong.
He also wants the feds to boost high-dosage tutoring, which coincidentally is one of the foci of his present gig. High-dosage tutoring is hard and expensive to scale up, with the research support very narrow and specific. He also wants more CTE (fine).
Bottom line, Huffman wants presidents not to abdicate their “responsibility to push school districts toward success,” a sentiment in line with the reformster notion that everything wrong with education is the fault of lazy educators who have to be coerced into doing their jobs (and certainly not treated like partners in the education world).
The federal standards and BS Testocrats had their shot, and they failed hard. In many ways, their failures are still haunting the public school system. Huffman is a poster child for the Teach For America crowd who visited a classroom for a couple of years and parleyed that into “education expert” on their resume, going on to promote and support an array of ill-advised policies flavored with a barely-concealed disdain for the people who have actually made education and teaching a career. They should not get a do-over. They cannot be taken seriously, even if they manage to be platformed by major media outlets.
Trump has promised to eliminate the U.S. Department of Education. He needs Congressional approval to do it. Trump made this promise during the campaign. The details are spelled out in Project 2025. The elimination of ED is step one. Then right wingers approve their dream, which is to “block grant” all the big funding. That means that the money goes to states without limits on how it is spent. They can spend it as they wish, without federal oversight. But then comes the kicker: the federal government stops funding Title 1, Special Education, and other “categorical programs,” and the states have to fund it themselves. This works for the well-off states, because they currently pay more than they receive. But the poor states, which voted overwhelmingly for Trump, are screwed. They receive more from the federal Department of Education than they pay in. Tough justice. Bad for kids.
What about the U.S. Department of Education?
One of President-elect Trump’s campaign pledges was to eliminate the Department of Education. He claimed that the department pushes “woke” ideology on America’s schoolchildren and that its employees “hate our children.” He promised to “return” education to the states.
In fact, the Department of Education does not set curriculum; states and local governments do. The Department of Education collects statistics about schools to monitor student performance and promote practices based in evidence. It provides about 10% of funding for K–12 schools through federal grants of about $19.1 billion to high-poverty schools and of $15.5 billion to help cover the cost of educating students with disabilities.
It also oversees the $1.6 trillion federal student loan program, including setting the rules under which colleges and universities can participate. But what really upsets the radical right is that the Department of Education is in charge of prohibiting discrimination on the basis of race and sex in schools that get federal funding, a policy Congress set in 1975 with an act now known as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). This was before Congress created the department.
The Department of Education became a stand-alone department in May 1980 under Democratic president Jimmy Carter, when Congress split the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare into two departments: the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Education.
A Republican-dominated Congress established the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare in 1953 under Republican president Dwight D. Eisenhower as part of a broad attempt to improve the nation’s schools and Americans’ well-being in the flourishing post–World War II economy. When the Soviet Union beat the United States into space by sending up the first Sputnik satellite in 1957, lawmakers concerned that American children were falling behind put more money and effort into educating the country’s youth, especially in math and science.
But support for federal oversight of education took a devastating hit after the Supreme Court, headed by Eisenhower appointee Chief Justice Earl Warren, declared racially segregated schools unconstitutional in the May 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision.
Immediately, white southern lawmakers launched a campaign of what they called “massive resistance” to integration. Some Virginia counties closed their public schools. Other school districts took funds from integrated public schools and used a grant system to redistribute those funds to segregated private schools. Then, Supreme Court decisions in 1962 and 1963 that declared prayer in schools unconstitutional cemented the decision of white evangelicals to leave the public schools, convinced that public schools were leading their children to perdition.
In 1980, Republican Ronald Reagan ran on a promise to eliminate the new Department of Education.
After Reagan’s election, his secretary of education commissioned a study of the nation’s public schools, starting with the conviction that there was a “widespread public perception that something is seriously remiss in our educational system.” The resulting report, titled “A Nation at Risk,” announced that “the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people.”
Although a later study commissioned in 1990 by the Secretary of Energy found the data in the original report did not support the report’s conclusions, Reagan nonetheless used the report in his day to justify school privatization. He vowed after the report’s release that he would “continue to work in the months ahead for passage of tuition tax credits, vouchers, educational savings accounts, voluntary school prayer, and abolishing the Department of Education. Our agenda is to restore quality to education by increasing competition and by strengthening parental choice and local control.”
The rise of white evangelism and its marriage to Republican politics fed the right-wing conviction that public education no longer served “family values” and that parents had been cut out of their children’s education. Christians began to educate their children at home, believing that public schools were indoctrinating their children with secular values.
When he took office in 2017, Trump rewarded those evangelicals who had supported his candidacy by putting right-wing evangelical activist Betsy DeVos in charge of the Education Department. She called for eliminating the department—until she used its funding power to try to keep schools open during the covid pandemic—and asked for massive cuts in education spending.
Rather than funding public schools, DeVos called instead for tax money to be spent on education vouchers, which distribute tax money to parents to spend for education as they see fit. This system starves the public schools and subsidizes wealthy families whose children are already in private schools. DeVos also rolled back civil rights protections for students of color and LGBTQ+ students but increased protections for students accused of sexual assault.
In 2019, the 1619 Project, published by the New York Times Magazine on the 400th anniversary of the arrival of enslaved Africans at Jamestown in Virginia Colony, argued that the true history of the United States began in 1619, establishing the roots of the country in the enslavement of Black Americans. That, combined with the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, prompted Trump to commission the 1776 Project, which rooted the country in its original patriotic ideals and insisted that any moments in which it had fallen away from those ideals were quickly corrected. He also moved to ban diversity training in federal agencies.
When Trump lost the 2020 election, his loyalists turned to undermining the public schools to destroy what they considered an illegitimate focus on race and gender that was corrupting children. In January 2021, Republican activists formed Moms for Liberty, which called itself a parental rights organization and began to demand the banning of LGBTQ+ books from school libraries. Right-wing activist Christopher Rufo engineered a national panic over the false idea that public school educators were teaching their students critical race theory, a theory taught as an elective in law school to explain why desegregation laws had not ended racial discrimination.
After January 2021, 44 legislatures began to consider laws to ban the teaching of critical race theory or to limit how teachers could talk about racism and sexism, saying that existing curricula caused white children to feel guilty.
When the Biden administration expanded the protections enforced by the Department of Education to include LGBTQ+ students, Trump turned to focusing on the idea that transgender students were playing high-school sports despite the restrictions on that practice in the interest of “ensuring fairness in competition or preventing sports-related injury.”
During the 2024 political campaign, Trump brought the longstanding theme of public schools as dangerous sites of indoctrination to a ridiculous conclusion, repeatedly insisting that public schools were performing gender-transition surgery on students. But that cartoonish exaggeration spoke to voters who had come to see the equal rights protected by the Department of Education as an assault on their own identity. That position leads directly to the idea of eliminating the Department of Education.
But that might not work out as right-wing Americans imagine. As Morning Joe economic analyst Steven Rattner notes, for all that Republicans embrace the attacks on public education, Republican-dominated states receive significantly more federal money for education than Democratic-dominated states do, although the Democratic states contribute significantly more tax dollars.
There is a bigger game afoot, though, than the current attack on the Department of Education. As Thomas Jefferson recognized, education is fundamental to democracy, because only educated people can accurately evaluate the governmental policies that will truly benefit them.
In 1786, Jefferson wrote to a colleague about public education: “No other sure foundation can be devised for the preservation of freedom, and happiness…. Preach, my dear Sir, a crusade against ignorance; establish and improve the law for educating the common people. Let our countrymen know that the people alone can protect us against [the evils of “kings, nobles and priests”], and that the tax which will be paid for this purpose is not more than the thousandth part of what will be paid to kings, priests and nobles who will rise up among us if we leave the people in ignorance.”
Think how much worse it could be. It could have been a Mom for Liberty. Or Chris Rufo.
John Thompson describes Ryan Walters’ frenzied campaign to be chosen as Trump’s Secretary of Education. In Oklahoma, where he is State Superintendent, Walters has been pushing the Trump agenda long before the election. He wants religion in the schools, he wants to dismantle the Department of Education, he wants to destroy public schools, he wants to purge the curriculum. He’s practically screaming, “Take me!”
Thompson writes:
We Oklahomans need to apologize to the nation for what some of us have been thinking since the election. But, how can we not hope that State Superintendent Ryan Walters gets a job in the Trump administration? As Oklahoma Watch has reported, Ryan Walters seems to be campaigning for an appointment to be Trump’s U.S. Secretary of Education. Walters has been “rumored to be angling for the post; he’s been on a taxpayer-funded national media blitz for months.” And after all, maybe Walters’s incompetence would make it harder to destroy the U.S. Department of Education than to realize his goal of destroying Oklahoma’s public schools.
Of course, I’m kidding, mostly. But at times like this, education supporters have no choice but to seek comfort in humor, no matter how absurd such jokes may be.
During the last week, as the Oklahoman reports, Walters has promised on social media that “President Trump’s agenda will be enacted in Oklahoma.” Moreover, as the Tulsa World explained, “’Freedom to pray’ is among the education policy tenets listed by Trump’s re-election campaign.” And Walters issued a memorandum to parents and school superintendents advocating for the elimination of the U.S. Department of Education and replacing its functions with block grants.”
The Oklahoman further explains that Walters has “sent a five-point memo to public school superintendents and parents, detailing what he has described as Oklahoma’s plan to implement Trump’s agenda in schools. The memo covered topics such as ‘ending social indoctrination in classrooms’ and ‘stopping illegal immigration’s impact on our schools.’” And he also complained that “‘well-funded, out of state groups’ had ‘bullied’ an Oklahoma teacher into removing quotes from the Bible from a classroom.”
Walters now promises a “new office would help protect teachers in similar situations in the future.” So, “Walters said the Office of Religious Liberty and Patriotism would promote its namesake principles and make sure students and teachers can freely practice their religion.” While doing so, he blamed teachers unions for undermining faith and family.
The Oklahoma Voice adds, “Walters said public schools have been “ground ‘zero’ for erosion of religious liberty. While calling church-state separation a ‘myth,’ he ordered Oklahoma districts to teach from the Bible, sought to buy Bibles with taxpayer funds and advocated for opening a Catholic charter school in the state.”
Walters falsely argued:
It is no coincidence that the dismantling of faith and family values in public schools directly correlates with declining academic outcomes in our public schools. … In Oklahoma, we are reversing this negative trend and, working with the incoming Trump Administration, we are going to aggressively pursue education policies that will improve academic outcomes and give our children a better future.
The Oklahoma Watch also explains, contrary to Walters’ promises:
Due to the courts and lawmakers’ interpretation of the 10th Amendment, the federal government and Department of Education are not involved in determining curricula or educational standards or establishing schools or colleges.
Mostly, the department gives out money, some of which has strings attached, ensuring that schools adhere to federal non-discrimination laws.
Even so, we are likely to see Walters ramping up his attacks on Oklahoma schools in order to impress Trump. After all, “Trump proposes having parents elect school principals, abolishing teacher tenure and adopting merit pay. He vows to encourage prayer in schools and expel more disruptive students from classrooms.”
Real world, I’ve been asking whether Walters could impose more actual damage on his home state than on the country as a whole. Could we hope that his record of incompetence would be more likely to bring his MAGA agenda down if he tackles the more complicated battles with the U.S. Department of Education (or any other national institutions targeted by the new President)? And, wouldn’t his irrational zealotry be more politically damaging to Trump if he attacks government on the federal level?
Or, are Oklahomans just worn down by the stress Walters inflicted on us, which is what he wants to dump on the nation?
Diane Ravitch's blog 