Julian Vasquez Heilig is a scholar of equity. Until recently, he was provost at Western Michigan Hniversity. He stepped back to his role as a scholar, and he now speaks his mind freely and forcefully.
He wrote on his blog “Cloaking Inequity” about the choice facing the leaders of higher education: either stand up for academic freedom or hide in fear. His post is about “The White Flag of Cowardice.”
Before the inauguration of Trump, The New York Review of Books invited me to write about his education agenda. I read three important documents in which his views and goal were spelled out: the education chapter in Project 2025; Agenda 47, Trump’s campaign document; and the website of the America First Policy Institute, the organization led by Linda McMahon, Trump’s choice for Secretary of Education. The three documents overlap, of course. Trump intends to privatize education; he despises public schools. He wants to eliminate the Department of Education. He and his supporters are obsessed with “radical gender ideology,” and they blame public schools for the very existence of transgender students. The election of Trump, it was clear, would mean the end of civil rights protections for LGBT students and a determined effort to defund and destroy public schools.
I posted the article yesterday.
The NYRB invited me to participate in an interview.
This article is part of a regular series of conversations with the Review’s contributors; read past entries here and sign up for our e-mail newsletter to get them delivered to your inbox each week.
In “‘Their Kind of Indoctrination,’” published on the NYR Online shortly before Donald Trump’s second inauguration, Diane Ravitch writes about the troubling future of American public education. Referring to the president’s infamous remark from his first campaign—“I love the poorly educated”—Ravitch warns that his second term is likely to lead to “more of them to love.”
A historian of education, Ravitch worked on education policy in both George H. W. Bush’s and Bill Clinton’s administrations. She has spent her career analyzing the national and state policies that reshape public schools, like laws that implement high-stakes testing or that divert taxpayer money to charter schools. In addition to writing nearly two dozen books—including The Troubled Crusade: American Education, 1945–1980 (1983), Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools (2013), and, most recently, Slaying Goliath: The Passionate Resistance to Privatization and the Fight to Save America’s Public Schools (2020)—Ravitch posts regularly about American education policy on her widely read blog. Her memoirs will be published later this year by Columbia University Press.
I reached out to Ravitch to discuss the current state of American education, the forces threatening it, and her vision for how public schools can better fulfill their democratic promise.
Regina Martinez: How did you start writing about education? Were you influenced by your time in public schools in the South?
Diane Ravitch: I started writing about education when I was in college. The first paper I ever wrote was for a political science class in my freshman year at Wellesley in 1956. It was about the politics of the Houston public school system in the early 1950s, when I was a student there. Voters elected a new school board every two years, and control went back and forth between a group of far-right extremists, who saw Communists lurking everywhere, and moderates who just wanted to make sure that the schools were running well. At one point, books about Russia were removed from the high school library’s shelves. Under the moderates, we heard assembly speakers who spoke of racial and religious tolerance; under the Minute Women, the female wing of the John Birch Society, we were warned to beware of Communist influence. Also, while I was attending them, the schools were racially segregated.
In “Their Kind of Indoctrination,” you write, “One can only imagine the opprobrium that will be visited upon teachers who are not certified as patriots.” How do you imagine this will impact the teaching profession? What might it mean for teacher recruitment in the future?
The threat of political surveillance is chilling, as it would be in every profession. In many states, especially “red” states, teachers have to be careful about what they teach, what reading they assign, and how they handle topics related to race and gender. Trump recently issued an executive order stating that he would cut off the funding of schools that “indoctrinate” their students by teaching about “radical gender ideology” and racism. His effort to impose thought control is illegal but that hasn’t stopped him from trying.
This sort of political censorship is happening in K–12 schools but also in higher education. The number of people choosing to prepare to be teachers plummeted in the wake of the Bush-Obama emphasis on standardized testing. The threat of political loyalty screening can only make matters worse.
One of President Trump’s recent executive orders reauthorized federal agents to detain children at schools. What actions if any can schools, families, and students take to resist the incursion of the security state into schools?
The determination of the Trump administration to raid schools is terrifying for children and for their teachers, whose job it is to protect their students. Imagine a child being arrested in his or her classroom. It is indeed frightening. Many districts have urged teachers to get legal advice from the district legal officers. At the very least, educators should demand to see a warrant. If ICE agents are armed, resistance may be futile. Elected leaders will have to develop contingency plans, if they have not done so already.
You worked on education policy under both President George H. W. Bush and President Bill Clinton. What, if anything, was different about your work between a Republican and a Democratic administration? How do you think the Department of Education—and federal education policy more generally—has changed since the early 1990s?
I served as assistant secretary for education research and improvement under President Bush. Then President Clinton appointed me to the national testing board, known as the National Assessment Governing Board. There was a continuity of policy from the first President Bush to Clinton, and then from Clinton to the second President Bush to President Obama.
The first President Bush wanted to reform American education through voluntary measures. He convened a meeting of the nation’s governors in 1989, and they agreed on a set of six goals for the year 2000. He thought that the goals could be reached by exhortation, at no cost. The goals were indeed aspirational (they hoped, for example, that American students would be first in the world in mathematics and science by the year 2000), but no one had a plan for how to reach them, nor was there any new funding. President Clinton got credit for drafting them, so he and Bush shared that commitment. He was willing to spend real money to help states improve their schools, and added two more goals (one about teacher training, another about parent participation). He also believed that the nation should have national standards and tests. None of the goals was reached by the year 2000, except for having 90 percent of students graduate from high school. But that goal was a matter of definition. If it meant that 90 percent should graduate high school in four years, we did not meet that goal. If you counted the students who graduated in five or even six years, we surpassed it.
Since you launched your education blog in 2012, it has become a popular forum for discussions about education and democracy. Looking back, are there any positions you’ve shared on the blog that you would reconsider or approach differently today? Are there positions you took or predictions you made that you’re particularly proud of?
I started blogging two years after publication of The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Have Undermined Education. In that book, I renounced views that I had advocated for decades: competition between schools, relying on standardized testing as the measure of students, merit pay, and many other policies connected to accountability and standardization.
What I have learned in the past fifteen years has made me even more alarmed than I was then about the organized efforts to destroy public education. That book has a chapter about “The Billionaire Boys Club.” I focused on the venture philanthropy of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation. These billionaires used their philanthropy strategically to fund privately managed charter schools, high-stakes standardized testing, and a system that evaluates teachers by the test scores of their students and closes schools where students got low scores. I opposed all of these measures, which were endorsed by both the second Bush administration and the Obama administration. I demonstrated in that book and subsequent books that these strategies have been failures and are enormously demoralizing to teachers. They also turned schools into testing factories, crushing creative thinking and the joy of teaching and learning.
In the years since, I have learned that “the Billionaire Boys Club” is far larger than the three families that I mentioned. In my last book, Slaying Goliath, I tried to make a list of all the billionaires and the foundations that support charter schools and vouchers, and it was long indeed. Even now, I continue to come across billionaires and foundations that should be added to the list. What I suspected was that charter schools paved the way for vouchers by treating schooling as a consumer good, not a civic responsibility. What I did not realize was that the voucher movement is even more powerful than the charter movement. Its constituency is not just right-wing billionaires like the Koch brothers and the DeVos family, but Christian nationalists, white supremacists, extremist organizations like the Alliance Defending Freedom and the American Legislative Executive Council, affluent parents who want the state to subsidize their private school tuition, and Catholic leaders who have always believed that the state should underwrite Catholic schools.
There has been a lot of discourse recently about declining rates of literacy due to AI, the pandemic, phones, or a host of other causes. How significant do you think this risk is? What might be done to reverse the trend?
I too am concerned about declining rates of literacy, as well as declining interest in literature. In my field of study, I believe that standardized testing has been a culprit in shortening the attention span of children of all ages. Students are expected to read short snippets, then to answer questions about those limited passages. In the early decades of the twentieth century, the College Board sponsored college entrance examinations in which students were assigned works of literature in advance, then asked to write about what they had read. Teachers and professors read their essays and graded them. Now the exam answers may be read by a machine or by a person hired off Craigslist to read swiftly, giving only a minute or two to each written answer.
In my dreams, I would change expectations and ask high school teachers to assign books that are worth reading, then require students to write three or four pages about why they did or did not like the book.
While I welcome the expansion of the canon to include works by women and by people of color, I would also welcome a revival of interest in the great works that were once considered the classics of Western literature. In too many high schools, the classics have not just been marginalized, they have been ousted. That is as grave an error as ignoring the works of those who are not white men.
Given the increasing momentum behind the privatization of education, how do you envision the next generation advancing public school advocacy? What do you anticipate will be their greatest challenge?
Public schools are one of the most important democratic institutions of our society. In many states, they enroll 90 percent of all students. They have always enabled children and adolescents to learn together with others who come from backgrounds different from their own. There is a major movement today, funded by right-wing billionaires, to destroy public schools and to replace them with religious schools, private schools, and homeschooling. It is called “school choice,” but the schools choose, not the students or families. Private schools are allowed to discriminate on any grounds and are not bound by federal laws that prohibit discrimination and that protect those with disabilities. Racial and religious segregation will increase. More students will attend schools whose purpose is indoctrination, not building a democratic society.
The greatest challenge facing those who believe in the value of public education is that the money behind privatization is enormous, and it is spent strategically to win political allies. To my knowledge, there is no billionaire funder for public education as there are for privatization. In the world of public education advocacy, there are no equivalents to the Koch money, the DeVos money, the Walton money, the Texas evangelical billionaires Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks, the Pennsylvania billionaire Jeff Yass. I have been president of an organization called the Network for Public Education since 2013, and our annual budget is a pittance compared to the privatizers’ organizations. One pro–school choice organization spent as much on their annual dinner party as our entire annual budget.
The other side of this struggle to save public education is the reality that important Democrats still believe that school choice helps poor Black and Hispanic kids, despite overwhelming evidence that this claim is not true and is in fact part of the hustle. Representative Hakeem Jeffries, Senator Cory Booker, Governor Jared Polis, and Senator Michael Bennett are a few of the Democrats who have dampened the interest of their party in fighting for public schools.
What makes me hopeful is that the reality is becoming clearer with every passing day: those who are concerned for the common good must support public schools, not undertake to pay the tuition of every student who chooses not to attend public schools. Privatization benefits some, not all, not even most. Public money should pay for public schools. Private money should pay for private schools.
Haley Bull of Scripps News reported yesterday that Trump sent out an order to all 50 states warning that the federal government would cut off funding to any school that teaches about “diversity, equity or inclusion.”
She wrote:
The Department of Education is warning state education agencies they may lose federal funding if they do not remove DEI policies and programs to comply with the department’s interpretation of federal law.
A letter from the Department of Education Office for Civil Rights was sent to the departments of education in all 50 states, according to the Department of Government Efficiency.
“Institutions that fail to comply with federal civil rights law may, consistent with applicable law, face potential loss of federal funding,” acting assistant secretary for civil rights Craig Trainor writes in the letter. The message warns that “the department will vigorously enforce the law” to schools and state educational agencies receiving funding and that it will start taking measures “to assess compliance” in no more than 14 days.
The letter argues that a Supreme Court decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which found that affirmative action in the university’s admission process violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, should apply more broadly.
“The law is clear: treating students differently on the basis of race to achieve nebulous goals such as diversity, racial balancing, social justice, or equity is illegal under controlling Supreme Court precedent,” the letter states.
This letter fails to mention that since 1970, the U.S. Department of Education has been subject to a law that states clearly that no officer of the federal government may interfere with what schools teaching.
The law states: “No provision of any applicable program shall be construed to authorize any department, agency, officer, employee, of the United States to exercise any direction, supervision, or control over the curriculum, program of instruction, [or] administration…of any educational institution…or over the selection of library resources, textbooks, or other printed or published instructional materials.“
The law is P.L. 103-33, General Education Provisions Act, section 432.
These zealots are trying to turn teaching about civil rights, about Black history, and about LGBT people into a criminal act.
They are wrong. Reality exists no matter what they ban and censor.
They are violating the law, and they must be stopped.
They must be sued by the ACLU, the NAACP, and every other legal organization that defends the rule of law.
Trump appointed Andrea Lucas, an outspoken critic of policies that acknowledge race or gender, to be chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The EEOC traditionally advocates for race-based and gender-based policies to monitor whether employers are trying to give all groups an equal chance. Lucas opposes the EEOC’s actions.
If the EEOC receives a complaint about racism in a workplace, it would collect data about the workforce. Its recommendations would be based on that data.
Lucas believes that hiring decisions must “colorblind,” so if the workforce is 100% white, there’s no problem.
Lucas opposes any enforcement that takes race or gender into account. She is also strenuously opposed to acknowledging that transgender people exist. She may think the same of gay people.
Lucas spoke at a Federalist Society meeting, where she made her views on gender clear:
“It’s important to say that biological sex is real and it matters, and it’s immutable and it’s binary. And from that premise we have, that’s the foundation on which we then proceed to have the various civil rights laws that have been enacted for the last 60 years.”
In short, don’t expect her to have any sympathy for discrimination against LGBT people.
There are five members on the EEOC, and she is the only Republican. Trump appointed her in 2020. There is a vacancy. Even with a 3-2 majority of Democrats, don’t expect much civil rights enforcement for the next four years.
Laurence Tribe and Kathleen Sullivan report in The Contrarian on a momentous event that was ignored by the media: The U.S. Constitution has a new amendment. In one of his last acts as President, Joe Biden made the Equal Rughts Amendment official.
Critics claimed that the time limit for the ERA had passed, but Tribe and Sullivan explain why the critics were wrong.
With three days left in his presidency, Joseph R. Biden ensured that the United States Constitution, the oldest on earth, would finally include an explicit guarantee of sex equality. In truth, the Equal Rights Amendment should have been recognized as part of our Constitution nearly half a dozen years ago, when Virginia became the 38th state to ratify it on January 27, 2020.
By proclaiming, in effect, “Yes, Virginia, you have made history by repairing a glaring omission in our most fundamental law,” President Biden made official a reality that many Americans failed to recognize at the time: that Article V of the Constitution expressly makes any proposed Amendment to that document “Part of this Constitution, when ratified by the Legislatures of three fourths of the several States.” Nothing in Article V makes the Constitution’s binding contents depend on any further official action by any branch of the federal government, whether Congress or the Judiciary or indeed the Executive.
What makes this action controversial is, of course, the decades that have elapsed since Congress saw fit to propose the ERA to the states for ratification in 1972. But there is no legal basis for treating the ERA as having expired when the arbitrary time limits of 7 and then 10 years set by the House and Senate for the ratification process had run out. The Constitution’s arduous process for amending the document makes it the hardest in the world to revise, with the result that an 18th and 19th century sensibility casts too long a shadow There is no justification for making a uniquely difficult amendment process more difficult by grafting onto it a requirement that amendments must be ratified speedily, a requirement nowhere to be found in the Constitution’s text .
Nor can any such requirement be extrapolated from the history of the amendment process as we have employed it over the years. The most recently ratified amendment, the 27th, was finally approved by the Legislature of Michigan in May 1992, more than two centuries after it was proposed by the First Congress in September 1789. But because its text – unlike that of the 18th, 20th, 21st, and 22nd Amendments – contained no language making it “inoperative unless ratified” by enough states “within seven years of its submission” or indeed within any specified time, that long percolation period made no difference.
So too with the ERA. Congress knew by the date of its submission to the States, March 22, 1972, precisely how to include a shelf date in the text of the amendment , but instead included a time limit only in the advisory resolution . That makes all the difference, because such a resolution is not a binding law, and is not a part of the amendment the States vote whether or not to ratify. Congress recognized as much when it extended that limit by three years in 1982 through a resolution of the two houses.
The Supreme Court, in a case that one of us (Tribe) presented to that court over four decades ago, National Organization For Women v. Idaho, similarly treated the time limit in the resolution as non-binding. And, although five states – Idaho, Kentucky, Nebraska, South Dakota, and Tennessee – attempted to rescind their state legislatures’ earlier ratifications of the ERA between 1972 and 1982, nothing in the Constitution provides for any such turnabout nor tolerates the chaotic and unpredictable legal situation that would be created by permitting states to reverse course as the process proceeds. Ratification is rightly understood as a one-way ratchet.
After careful consideration and consultation with constitutional experts, President Biden – like the American Bar Association last year – concluded that the ERA had met all the requirements for inclusion in the Constitution. He decided that the Oath of Office he took upon assuming the presidency – the Oath to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States” – meant that he should formally announce that conclusion to the world.
We welcome debate on the political and moral pros and cons of keeping the ERA alive rather than letting it fade from memory until Congress is again willing to propose similar language for the states to consider – a wait that could be many decades long. And others can debate the implications for the Biden legacy and even the eventual outcome of the multifaceted litigation likely to ensue. Faithful to his Oath and to his duty to execute the laws, this president did not flinch from acting in accord with simple, straightforward, legally impeccable principle.
For that, he deserves our undying gratitude.
It is not necessary for the National Archivist to publish the ERA in order for it to be adopted according to the provisions of the Constitution. The President avoided triggering a clash with the Archivist, who recently announced her intention to defy her statutory, and purely ministerial, duty to publish the ERA. The only reason Congress gave the Archivist such a duty nearly a century ago was to ensure that the Nation got word that an amendment was in force, enabling officials at all levels of government to conform their actions to it. In our modern age of broadcast, cable and internet communication, the President’s announcement itself performed that function.
Accordingly, our Constitution now demands that “equality of rights under the law cannot be denied or abridged by the United States or any state on account of sex.”
It’s long past time!
Laurence H. Tribe is Carl M. Loeb University Professor of Constitutional Law Emeritus at Harvard University.
Kathleen M. Sullivan is former Dean of Stanford Law School and professor of law at Harvard and Stanford.
Sherrilyn Ifill is a law professor who holds an endowed chair at Howard University. She is a former president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.
In this post, she offers sage advice about how to recharge your batteries and re-engage in the struggle for a better society. She wrote this piece soon after the 2024 election. It’s good advice.
….But ours is a subtle strength
Potent with centuries of yearning,
Of being kegged and shut away
In dark forgotten places.
We shall endure
To steal your senses
In that lonely twilight
Of your winter’s grief.
-Pauli Murray, To the Oppressors (1939)
The truth is that things are going to get very bad. America has gone over the cliff’s edge. How hard we land in the ravine below remains to be seen. But we are one week in, and things are already quite dire. Trump’s first round of cabinet nominees, and his insistence that his picks be installed without a vote of Congress is a defining moment. It demonstrates that there will be no bottom with this Administration.
Donald Trump and his coterie of supporters are firmly in control of the most powerful and wealthy country in the world. And because they are in charge of this country – which perhaps undeservedly, has stood as an example throughout much of the world as a symbol of freedom, equality, ethics, the rule of law and democracy – other countries will fall in our wake.
I am saying this now because I have always tried to be honest in my writings and analysis about this country. I say all of this because I have been able over the years to encourage my clients, my colleagues, my staff, my family and community to believe that we can fight and win. I have infected other people with my unshakeable optimism about what we can accomplish to transform this country.
I am going to keep fighting. It’s what I do. But I do not want to lead you astray. Because I do think that many of us – especially those of us in communities likely to be targeted by this Administration – need to see this moment as one in which we are focused on surviving this difficult time. I have faced the fact that we will not be able to move much forward in the next few years. In fact, I expect things to become so dire over the next two years, that we will scarcely recognize the country we live in. I expect that fear and cruelty will become part of our daily diet. We will hear the frightening sound of silence, as those who speak out most boldly against the excesses of the incoming administration, against its policies, against Musk and against Russia, find themselves at cross-purposes with a vindictive and cruel administration with almost unimaginable power to control communications, law, and the sense of reality itself.
Perhaps it won’t be that bad. But we are here in some measure, because far too many failed to imagine that the worst could happen. I have written already about “the nadir,” and I believe we must face it.
And so, our goal now must be first and foremost to survive this dark period with as much of our values, dignity, integrity, work, financial stability and physical and mental health intact as possible. We must also work to protect our families and communities, and to hold in place our most trusted and needed institutions, a modicum of the rule of law, our constitutional commitment to equality and to free expression.
As I have said in earlier pieces, this is “planting time.” Planting is work. That work must be aimed at building ideas, theories, paradigms, institutions, skills, practices, and alliances that we can seed now for a future harvest – a fulsome and lush democracy that will reflect the very best of us.
We are not “watching the Trump show” this time. We’ve seen it already. We can dip in every now and then, but we must not become paralyzed watching the train wreck. We will, of course, push back against injustice, and defend our rights and citizenship when necessary in the courts. We will demand that congressional representatives, our Governors and our Mayors, act to protect our democratic rights. Even when we know they will not stand up for what is right, we must not be silent. We must not make it easy for them to be cowards or to take our rights. We must still call, write and email our representatives and show up at town halls and meetings. Remember that those who have fought for us over these past years are tired too. Let them see us in these spaces and hear from us.
But our primary work must be first and foremost to work in our communities – both physical and ideological. To build them up and to share time and ideas with those committed to democracy and justice. We each need a curriculum of local service.
We also need a personal curriculum that will allow us to contribute to the building of the future we dream of for ourselves and our families. That means that our core work must be to commit during this time to do less watching, and more learning and more growing. We need to become better citizens for the democracy we want. That means we must dedicate time to expanding our thinking and our knowledge, and to building up our democratic imagination. That means our work is to imagine, to ally, to experiment, restore, befriend, study, read, write, serve, and create. Every one of us. Even as chaos swirls around us.
I encourage you to show your children and grandchildren real things – nature, animals, how things are built, how to cook from scratch. Teach them cursive writing, so that they have a signature all their own. Take them to live concerts and theater. Go on field trips. Infuse their lives with memories of things that are true and concrete.
If you teach, use primary documents in your teaching, take your students to historic sites, listen to audio of oral arguments and speeches so that they will feel confident in their understanding of history, and know that history was made by human beings not machines.
If you litigate, do it with the expectation that you will win. And act like it. Show out. Be excellent and remain confident. Those who can still feel shame – whether those at your opponents table or those on the bench – will feel it when you hold the standard high. And your clients will never forget it.
If you organize, never stop. Plant those seeds deep in our communities.
If you hold office. Hold it. Do not give up your power. Use your voice. Master every rule. Make a record. I repeat. Make a record–so that the truth might be known.
To protect ourselves and our loved ones, there are also pragmatic things we must do. I’ve thought of a few:
Peter Greene writes about the contradiction at the heart of Trump’s education goals. On the one hand, Trump says he will eliminate the Department of Education and turn federal funding over to the states, to use as they wish. At the same time, he says that he will punish schools if they persist in teaching liberal ideas that Trump dislikes, like diversity, equity and inclusion, or if they are insufficiently patriotic.
How will he punish schools if the federal funding has been relinquished to the states?
Greene writes:
It has been on the conservative To Do list for decades, and the incoming administration keeps insisting that this time it’s really going to happen. But will it? Over the weekend, Trump’s Ten Principles for Education video from Agenda 47 was circulating on line as a new “announcement” or “confirmation” of his education policy, despite the fact that the video was posted in September of 2023.
The list of goals may or may not be current, but it underlines a basic contradiction at the heart of Trump’s education plans. The various goals can be boiled down to two overall objectives:
1) To end all federal involvement and oversight of local schools.
2) To exert tight federal control over local schools
Trump has promised that schools will not teach “political indoctrination,” that they will teach students to “love their country,” that there will be school prayer, that students will “have access to” project-based learning, and that schools will expel students who harm teachers or other students.
He has also proposed stripping money from colleges and universities that indoctrinate students and using the money to set up a free of charge “world class education” system.
Above all, he has promised that he “will be closing up” the Department of Education. Of course, he said that in 2016 with control of both houses of Congress and it did not happen.
Are there obstacles? The Department of Education distributes over $18 billion to help support schools that educate high-poverty populations, providing benefits like extra staff to supplement reading instruction. The Project 2025 plan is to turn this into a block grant to be given to the states to use as they wish, then zeroed out. Every state in the country would feel that pinch; states that decide to use the money for some other purpose entirely, such as funding school vouchers, will feel the pinch much sooner. The department also handles over $15 billion in Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) funding, which helps cover the costs of special education; Project 2025 also calls for turning it into an unregulated block grant to states with no strings attached, meaning that parents would have to lobby their state government for special ed funding.
Cuts and repurposing of these funds will be felt immediately in classrooms across the country, particularly those that serve poor students and students with special needs. That kind of readily felt, easily understood impact is likely to fuel pushback in Congress, and it’s Congress that has the actual power to eliminate the department.
Beyond the resistance to changing major funding for states and the challenge of trying to move the trillion-plus-dollar funding system for higher education, the Trump administration would also face the question of how to exert control over school districts without a federal lever to push.
Previous administrations have used Title I funding as leverage to coax compliance from school districts. In 2013, Obama’s education secretary Arne Duncan threatened to withhold Title I funds if a California failed to adopt an “acceptable” standardized testing program. In 2020, Trump himself threatened to cut off funding to schools that did not re-open their buildings. And on the campaign trail this year, Trump vowed that he would defund schools that require vaccines. That will be hard to do if the federal government has given all control of funds to the states.
The Department of Education has limited power, but the temptation to use it seems hard to resist. Nobody wanted the department gone more than Trump’s education secretary Betsy DeVos, who was notably reluctant to use any power of her office. But by 2018, frustrated with Congressional inaction on the Higher Education Act, DeVos announced a plan to impose regulations on her own. In 2020, she imitated Duncan by requiring states to compete for relief money by implementing some of her preferred policies.
Too many folks on the Trump team have ideas about policies they want to enforce on American schools, and without a Department of Education that has control of a major funding stream, they’d have little hope of achieving their goals. Perhaps those who dream of dismantling the department will prevail, but they will still have to get past Congress. No matter how things fall out, some of Team Trump’s goals for education will not be realized.
Justin Parmentier, an NBCT-certified high school teacher in North Carolina, has been scrutinizing the nonpublic schools that receive voucher money from the state. he found that nearly 90% are religious schools where discrimination and indoctrination are commonplace.
Parmenter remembers when now-disgraced Lt. Governor Mark Robinson opened a search for public schools that indoctrinate and came up with nothing.
Public funds in NC support religious schools that openly and egregiously indoctrinate students. Not a peep from the culture warriors. It wasn’t indoctrination they objected to; it was public schools.
Parmenter wrote the following in March 2024, before Robinson was disgraced by the CNN report on his history of posting on pornography websites. To call Robinson a hypocrite would be an understatement:
With billions of dollars now on tap for North Carolina’s private schools, and 88.2% of those dollars going to religious schools, scrutiny is rising over exactly what our taxes are supporting.
Private schools are legally able to discriminate against children, and many of North Carolina’s Christian schools deny admissions to students based on religious beliefs, sexual orientation, or learning disabilities.
For example, Fayetteville Christian School, which pocketed nearly $2 million in voucher dollars this school year, expressly bans students who practice specific religions like Islam and Buddhism, and they also bar LGBTQ+ students–whom they brand “perverted”–from attending.
North Raleigh Christian Academy won’t accept children with IQs below 90 and will not serve students who require IEPs (a document which outlines how a school will provide support to children with disabilities).
If this public funding of widespread discriminatory school practices rubs you the wrong way, I have bad news for you.
It gets worse.
That harmful indoctrination Mark Robinson was howling about a couple years ago in his disingenuous attempt to generate political momentum? Turns out it’s real. It just isn’t happening in the traditional public schools Robinson was targeting.
The Daniel Christian Academy is a private school in Concord, NC. This school has received public dollars through school vouchers every year since Republicans launched the controversial Opportunity Scholarship voucher program in 2014-15 for a grand total of $585,776.
Daniel Academy’s mission is to “raise the next generation of leaders who will transform the heart of our nation” by equipping students “to enter the Seven Mountains of Influence.”
The Seven Mountains of Influence (also referred to as the Seven Mountains of Dominion or the Seven Mountains Mandate) refers to seven areas of society: religion, family, education, government, media, arts & entertainment, and business. Dominionists who follow this doctrine believe that they are mandated by God to control all seven of society’s “mountains,” and that doing so will trigger the end times.
The Seven Mountains philosophy has been around since the 70s, but it came to prominence about ten years ago with the publication of Lance Wallnau’s book Invading Babylon: The Seven Mountains Mandate. Wallnau touts himself as a consultant who “inspires visions of tomorrow with the clarity of today—connecting ideas to action,” and his book teaches that dominionists must “understand [their] role in society” and “release God’s will in [their] sphere of influence.”
Wallnau does caution his followers that messaging about taking control over all seven areas of society on behalf of God might freak out non dominionists, saying in 2011 that “If you’re talking to a secular audience, you don’t talk about having dominion over them. This … language of takeover, it doesn’t actually help…”
So why should North Carolinians care that their tax dollars are subsidizing this sort of indoctrination of children through private school vouchers?
I posed that question to Frederick Clarkson, a research analyst who has studied the confluence of politics and religion for more than three decades and lately has been focusing on the violent underbelly of Christian nationalists who want to achieve Christian dominion of the United States at all costs. Here’s what Clarkson said:
North Carolina taxpayers should be concerned that they are helping to underwrite an academy for training children to become warriors against not only the rights of others, but against democracy and its institutions. The idea of the Seven Mountain Mandate is for Christians of the right sort to take dominion — which is to say power and influence — over the most important sectors of society. It is theocratic in orientation and its vision is forever.
This is not something that is about liberals and conservatives . Most Christians including most evangelicals, Catholics, and mainline Protestants are deemed not just insufficiently Christian, but may be viewed as infested with demons, and standing in the way of the advancement of the Kingdom of God on Earth. And they will need to be dealt with.
President Joe Biden pardoned his son Hunter, who was targeted by House Republicans, convicted for tax evasion, and buying a gun without admitting that he was a drug addict at the time.
Biden was immediately criticized for pardoning Hunter because he had said in the past that he would not do it.
President Joe Biden on Sunday pardoned his son Hunter, a controversial decision that reverses his long-standing pledge to not use his presidential powers to protect his only surviving son, who was found guilty of gun-related charges in Delaware and pleaded guilty to tax evasion in California.
Using his executive authority in the waning days of his presidency, Biden lifted the legal cloud that has hung over his son for several years. While the president had pledged several times not to pardon or commute Hunter Biden’s sentences for federal crimes, many close to him had expected the pardon would come, given the president’s loyalty to his family. The move also comes at a time when Biden will face few political ramifications, given that he is a lame duck and voters have already rendered their verdict on his administration by sending Donald Trump back to office.
In a lengthy statement on Sunday night, released just as he was preparing to depart for Africa, the president said that his son had been “being selectively, and unfairly, prosecuted.” He said that he did not interfere with the cases but that the cases were brought about because of political pressure on federal prosecutors.
“No reasonable person who looks at the facts of Hunter’s cases can reach any other conclusion than Hunter was singled out only because he is my son — and that is wrong,” he said. “There has been an effort to break Hunter — who has been five and a half years sober, even in the face of unrelenting attacks and selective prosecution. In trying to break Hunter, they’ve tried to break me — and there’s no reason to believe it will stop here. Enough is enough….”
“I believe in the justice system, but as I have wrestled with this, I also believe raw politics has infected this process and it led to a miscarriage of justice,” Biden said in his statement. “I hope Americans will understand why a father and a President would come to this decision.”
Hunter was prosecuted by Special Counsel David Weiss, Weiss, a Republican who started investigating Hunter in 2018. Republicans demanded that Merrick Garland appoint him, and Garland did. But then Republicans complained that Weiss was not strong enough. They wanted to drag Hunter through the mud, destroy his reputation, and hoped that Hunter’s tribulations hurt his father.
Can you imagine Trump’s Attorney General appointing a Democrat to investigate another Democrat?
The Republicans went after Hunter with a passion that would have been more appropriate for a mass murderer.
Hunter served years of humiliation and anxiety because he was a stand-in for his father.
It is just and right that his father pardoned Hunter.
A father owes it to his son to take care of him.
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.”
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