Former entertainment entrepreneur Linda McMahon is now U.S. Secretary of Education. She released her first statement, reiterating Trump’s attacks on “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” as well as “gender ideology” (I.e. recognizing the existence of ONLY the male-female binary and not recognizing those who are LGBT, such as Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent, who is openly gay).
McMahon’s views are closely aligned with those of Moms for Liberty. Check out the website of the America First Policy Forum, where McMahon was chair of the board.
This statement was released by the department’s press office.
When I took the oath of office as Secretary of Education, I accepted responsibility for overseeing the U.S. Department of Education and those who work here. But more importantly, I took responsibility for supporting over 100 million American children and college students who are counting on their education to create opportunity and prepare them for a rewarding career.
I want to do right by both.
As you are all aware, President Trump nominated me to take the lead on one of his most momentous campaign promises to families. My vision is aligned with the President’s: to send education back to the states and empower all parents to choose an excellent education for their children. As a mother and grandmother, I know there is nobody more qualified than a parent to make educational decisions for their children. I also started my career studying to be a teacher, and as a Connecticut Board of Education member and college trustee, I have long held that teaching is the most noble of professions. As a businesswoman, I know the power of education to prepare workers for fulfilling careers.
American education can be the greatest in the world. It ought not to be corrupted by political ideologies, special interests, and unjust discrimination. Parents, teachers, and students alike deserve better.
After President Trump’s inauguration last month, he steadily signed a slate of executive orders to keep his promises: combatting critical race theory, DEI, gender ideology, discrimination in admissions, promoting school choice for every child, and restoring patriotic education and civics. He has also been focused on eliminating waste, red tape, and harmful programs in the federal government. The Department of Education’s role in this new era of accountability is to restore the rightful role of state oversight in education and to end the overreach from Washington.
This restoration will profoundly impact staff, budgets, and agency operations here at the Department. In coming months, we will partner with Congress and other federal agencies to determine the best path forward to fulfill the expectations of the President and the American people. We will eliminate unnecessary bureaucracy so that our colleges, K-12 schools, students, and teachers can innovate and thrive.
This review of our programs is long overdue. The Department of Education is not working as intended. Since its establishment in 1980, taxpayers have entrusted the department with over $1 trillion, yet student outcomes have consistently languished. Millions of young Americans are trapped in failing schools, subjected to radical anti-American ideology, or saddled with college debt for a degree that has not provided a meaningful return on their investment. Teachers are leaving the profession in droves after just a few years—and citing red tape as one of their primary reasons.
The reality of our education system is stark, and the American people have elected President Trump to make significant changes in Washington. Our job is to respect the will of the American people and the President they elected, who has tasked us with accomplishing the elimination of bureaucratic bloat here at the Department of Education—a momentous final mission—quickly and responsibly.
As I’ve learned many times throughout my career, disruption leads to innovation and gets results. We must start thinking about our final mission at the department as an overhaul—a last chance to restore the culture of liberty and excellence that made American education great. Changing the status quo can be daunting. But every staff member of this Department should be enthusiastic about any change that will benefit students.
True change does not happen overnight—especially the historic overhaul of a federal agency. Over the coming months, as we work hard to carry out the President’s directives, we will focus on a positive vision for what American education can be.
These are our convictions:
Parents are the primary decision makers in their children’s education.
Taxpayer-funded education should refocus on meaningful learning in math, reading, science, and history—not divisive DEI programs and gender ideology.
Postsecondary education should be a path to a well-paying career aligned with workforce needs.
Removing red tape and bureaucratic barriers will empower parents to make the best educational choices for their children. An effective transfer of educational oversight to the states will mean more autonomy for local communities. Teachers, too, will benefit from less micromanagement in the classroom—enabling them to get back to basics.
I hope each of you will embrace this vision going forward and use these convictions as a guide for conscientious and pragmatic action. The elimination of bureaucracy should free us, not limit us, in our pursuit of these goals. I want to invite all employees to join us in this historic final mission on behalf of all students, with the same dedication and excellence that you have brought to your careers as public servants.
This is our opportunity to perform one final, unforgettable public service to future generations of students. I hope you will join me in ensuring that when our final mission is complete, we will all be able to say that we left American education freer, stronger, and with more hope for the future.
This article appeared in The New York Review of Books. As daily newspapers have shrunk or abandoned their book reviewing, the NYRB stands out as the nation’s leading journal of literature, the arts, and politics. It takes books seriously. This is an essay-review about the history of vouchers. I reviewed Josh Cowen’s outstanding book The Privateers, about the cabal that engineered the expansion of vouchers. I hope you will consider subscribing to the New York Review of Books and reading Josh Cowen’s important book.
For decades, the term “school choice”—and the programs it signifies, which divert public money to private schools—was widely and rightly dismissed as racist. Now it’s the law in thirty-three states.
Minnijean Brown, Thelma Mothershed, and Melba Pattillo, three of the first Black students to attend Little Rock Central High School, with Arkansas NAACP president Daisy Bates (third from left), 1957
Donald Trump promised that he will make public funds available to private as well as religious schools in every state, and this is what his party wants, too. Over the past quarter-century, Republicans have assailed America’s public schools by supporting vouchers, which divert money from public education systems to subsidize tuition at private and religious schools.
But most voters today do not favor vouchers. In fact, since 1967 no state referendum on vouchers has ever passed. In 2024 three states had referenda on the ballot, and vouchers were again defeated. Voters in two of those three states, Kentucky and Nebraska, cast ballots overwhelmingly for Trump—and in both states public funding for private schools was decisively rejected. The story of how Republican politicians have twisted this widespread popular opposition to vouchers into pervasive education policy across the country is one that requires a deeper historical view.
This opposition to public funding for private schools changed on May 17, 1954, when the Supreme Court ruled, in the Brown v. Board of Education decision, that de jure racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. The Court’s decision had little to do with school funding, but it set off a frantic search among white elected officials in the South to find, or create, a legal mechanism through which to protect racial segregation. The overwhelming majority of southern whites considered the prospect of racial integration repugnant, and their elected officials were determined to block it.
Until the mid-1950s most Americans believed that the government should not underwrite the cost of private and religious schooling. Catholic organizations had periodically sought public subsidies for their schools on grounds of fairness; as taxpayers, they said their schools were entitled to receive the same funds as public schools. But they were repeatedly rebuffed by Congress, the courts, and state legislatures; most state constitutions explicitly prohibited the use of public funds for religious school tuition.
Southern governors and legislators found the rationale and language they sought in the writings of Milton Friedman, a prominent libertarian economist at the University of Chicago, who in 1955 published an essay called “The Role of Government in Education.” The paper argued in favor of parents’ rights to choose any school they wanted, as well as educational freedom, the right for a child not to attend a neighborhood school—music to the ears of segregationists. Friedman said that the government should finance schools but should not be expected to administer them. He recommended that government distribute money—in the form of what he called vouchers—to parents for each of their school-age children, and that parents should be free to spend this allotment at any institution, whether its operations were for-profit or nonprofit, religious or secular, so long as the school met certain minimum educational standards defined by the local government.
If Black parents wanted their children to attend a segregated Black school, Friedman said, or if white parents wanted their children to attend a segregated white school, or if parents wanted their children to attend an integrated school—all should be equally free to do so. Competitive private enterprise and parental choice, he asserted, would promote a “healthy variety of schools” while making teachers’ salaries “responsive to market forces.” He predicted that private schools would “spring up to meet the demand.”
Southern governors used Friedman’s rhetoric and arguments to fight the implementation of the Brown decision. They adopted his endorsement of “freedom of choice” as well as his belief that private schools would provide a better education than “government schools”; indeed, advocates of vouchers began to refer to “public schools” as “government schools,” a term of derision that continues to appear in our ongoing debates about “school choice” today. As the historian Nancy MacLean demonstrated in “How Milton Friedman Exploited White Supremacy to Privatize Education,” a 2021 paper posted by the Institute for New Economic Thinking, Friedman taught southern leaders that the best way to protect Jim Crow schools was to use “race-neutral arguments” and to “embrace both an anti-government stance and a positive rubric of liberty, competition, and market choice.” As a result, seven states—Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia—enacted laws to subsidize the private school tuition of families fleeing the prospect of desegregated public schools.
In the following decades, existing private schools for white students expanded, and new private schools opened—“white flight academies” or “segregation academies”—to enroll students whose parents opposed racial integration. Often the enrollment of a single Black student in a previously all-white public school was enough to spur an exodus of white families. This happened in New Orleans in 1960 when six-year-old Ruby Bridges enrolled at the William Frantz Elementary School. She had to be escorted into the school each day by federal marshals, on the direct orders of the federal judge J. Skelly Wright. Each day Ruby withstood the screaming of angry white parents at the schoolhouse doors. And Ruby was the only child in her classroom; only a handful of white students remained in the school.
As late as 1965, less than 3 percent of Black children in the South attended schools with white children. Until then southern states engaged in a strategy of “massive resistance” to school integration, blocking the implementation of the Brown decision by providing “tuition tax credits” (a form of vouchers) so that white students could go to all-white private schools, by intimidating Black students so that they would not apply to attend white public schools, or by closing public schools altogether.
Virginia was at the forefront of this “massive resistance.” In 1959 its general assembly repealed the compulsory school attendance law and allowed localities to close their public schools. Prince Edward County was ordered by two courts to integrate its schools but chose instead to shutter its entire public school system. Officials provided tuition grants (vouchers) for white students to attend all-white private schools but made no such arrangements for Black children. Some Black families organized makeshift schools, but for five years there were no public schools for Black students in Prince Edward County. It wasn’t until 1968 that the Supreme Court outlawed Virginia’s tuition grants to private all-white schools.
After the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act in 1965, which made federal funding available to public schools, the federal government had the legal and financial tools to end resistance to integration. Federal courts across the South struck down laws authorizing public funding for vouchers and private schools, as well as any other state laws intended to block racial desegregation. The US Office of Education informed school districts across the South that they would not receive federal funding unless they desegregated promptly. Because of this well-known history, the term “school choice” was so closely associated with resistance to the Brown decision that it was widely and rightly dismissed as racist. It fell into disrepute for decades.
Now, seventy years after Brown, vouchers have not only been rehabilitated, since the 1990s they have been enacted in various forms in thirty-three states and the District of Columbia. Some of these programs are euphemistically called “education scholarships” or “tuition tax credits” or “education savings accounts,” but the fundamental principle is the same in all of them: public money pays for private school, even—in fact, most often—for religious schools. Republican-controlled legislatures in states such as Florida and Arizona enacted voucher programs that started small (in 1999 and 2011, respectively), intending to “save poor kids trapped in failing public schools” or supposedly only for children with disabilities. Over time these programs expanded, increasing the number of eligible students. Now both states have removed all limits, and every student, regardless of family income, is eligible for a tuition subsidy, at a cost to taxpayers that is expected to rise to $1 billion a year in Arizona and $4 billion in Florida.
Josh Cowen, a professor of education policy at Michigan State University, explains this remarkable turnaround of voucher policy in his superb book The Privateers: How Billiionaires Created a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers. Cowen has researched vouchers for most of his career. He worked with teams of academics who received millions of dollars in federal and philanthropic funds to study the results of voucher programs in different cities and states. Like many of his fellow researchers, he hoped that vouchers would provide better education for low-income students. But three years ago he published an article in The Hechinger Report, a nonpartisan education journal, in which he bluntly declared that vouchers were a failure.
Cowen explained that his initial enthusiasm for vouchers cooled as the evaluations were released. He participated in a study of Milwaukee’s vouchers from 2005 to 2010 that concluded that “there was very little difference on test scores” between students in public schools and carefully matched students in voucher schools. Furthermore, when low-income and Black students left voucher schools and returned to public schools, their academic performance in reading and math improved. At the same time that the Milwaukee study ended, a new report showed “shockingly bad early test score results for students in the Louisiana voucher program in the years following Hurricane Katrina.” Those poor results persisted and were replicated by studies in Ohio and Indiana.
The Privateers tells the story of how and why public policy on funding private and religious schools changed. As the consistent failure of state referenda shows, vouchers were never a popular idea; it was the politicians’ dependence on big campaign donors that made school choice a staple of Republican rhetoric. The widespread adoption of vouchers, Cowen explains, was basically a policy coup staged by billionaires who were libertarians or religious zealots or both. Cowen explains
how a small band of interconnected and insular groups of conservative advocates, tightly networked to some of the wealthiest and most influential players in right-wing US politics, invented a rationale for school privatization largely from nothing and out of nowhere.
He describes the agenda of that “network of scholars, lawyers, donors, and activists” as religious nationalism.
The main organizations in this movement to break down the wall of separation between church and state were two right-wing philanthropies, the John M. Olin Foundation and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, which funded both the Harvard professor of government Paul Peterson and the libertarian lawyer Clint Bolick. The Bradley Foundation, based in Milwaukee, supported the creation of the nation’s first publicly funded voucher program in that city in 1990 and played a crucial part in funding the three pillars of the voucher movement: research, policy advocacy, and litigation. Peterson became the point person for voucher research and advocacy; he also mentored a cohort of graduate students at Harvard who became the nation’s most prominent evaluators of voucher projects.
Bolick, who ran the libertarian Institute for Justice (funded by the billionaire Koch brothers), oversaw litigation and appeared on behalf of the Milwaukee and Cleveland voucher programs in state and federal courts. When more money was needed for research or litigation, members of a secretive right-wing group called the Council for National Policy were available to help; the CNPincluded the Koch brothers and the DeVos family, who used their fortune from the multilevel marketing company Amway to fund conservative candidates and think tanks and deployed their philanthropy to advance public funding of religious schools. Reviewing the players and their strategy, Cowen concludes that “there is nothing in education policymaking today that comes close to the conservative political apparatus accessed by and…even driving, at times, the creation of evidence on behalf of school vouchers.”
In 1990 the political scientists John Chubb and Terry Moe published Politics, Markets, and America’s Schools, in which they asserted that school choice would heal American education; the book was funded by the Olin and Bradley Foundations. Many seemed to have forgotten the racist origins of school choice. Chubb and Moe argued that small-d democratic politics was a handicap for public schools because it kept them in the grip of vested interests, like teachers’ unions and associations of school superintendents. The result of this stasis, they claimed, was poor academic performance. They maintained that “reformers would do well to entertain the notion that choice is a panacea.” School choice “all by itself,” they claimed, could transform American education. The book was a sensation in the education world because it offered a simple solution to complex problems and, of course, gave ideological and scholarly weight to the growing movement for charter schools and vouchers.
That same year, the Milwaukee voucher program started at the behest of the local Black leaders Howard Fuller, a militant social worker who became Milwaukee’s school superintendent, and Polly Williams, a state legislator. Fuller and Williams were disappointed by the academic performance of Black students in public schools. The Bradley Foundation, which was eager to see a demonstration of the success of vouchers in its hometown, quickly provided funding. The Milwaukee Parental Choice Program began as a project that enrolled 341 low-income students in seven private schools. By 1994 it had increased to 830 students in twelve schools.
The legislation authorizing the voucher program required that the students take a state test and that the results be evaluated by an independent researcher. The state superintendent, who opposed vouchers, appointed John Witte, a professor from the University of Wisconsin, to conduct the evaluation. When Witte eventually concluded that the program had minimal impact on students’ academic outcomes or attendance and that voucher recipients returned to public schools at high rates, voucher advocates denounced him as biased. Cowen says that Witte was fair and that his study was accurate.
The loudest voice deploring the negative evaluation of the Milwaukee voucher program was that of Peterson, who wrote a letter to TheNew York Times eviscerating the Witte study for minimizing the academic gains of the students and the importance of parental satisfaction. Cowen points out that Peterson was a political scientist with minimal experience in statistical evaluation. Peterson worked with his then graduate student Jay P. Greene on a study, funded by the Bradley and Olin Foundations, of the Milwaukee program. They concluded that, contrary to the state evaluation, vouchers produced significant academic benefits. The voucher system produced these positive results, they wrote, despite legislative burdens such as income limitations and the exclusion of religious schools.
Peterson and Greene’s favorable review persuaded the Republican-controlled Wisconsin legislature to renew and expand the voucher program in 1995 by including religious schools and increasing the number of participants to 15,000. The inclusion of religious schools led to a court battle that voucher advocates eventually won, litigated by Bolick and the high-powered lawyer Kenneth Starr, who later became famous for his part in the investigation of President Bill Clinton. The Bradley Foundation underwrote his firm’s fee of $300,000 for one month of work, Cowen writes.
Meanwhile the voucher push shifted to Ohio, where the Republican governor wanted Cleveland to be a model for the nation. The program was designed for low-income students, but—unlike in Milwaukee—it did not exclude religious schools; nearly all of the fifty-two participating schools were Catholic. The official evaluator, the Indiana University professor Kim Metcalf, found “few overall differences in student achievement,” but once again Peterson and Greene dismissed the official evaluation and produced their own report—this time funded by the Walton Family Foundation in addition to the Olin Foundation—which showed “large gains” for voucher students. Cowen notes that Peterson’s work was typically reported in newspaper editorials (usually the pro-voucher Wall Street Journal), not in peer-reviewed scholarly journals.
Cowen points out that Peterson’s research findings were more clearly directed toward the Supreme Court than toward other scholars: he filed an affidavit on behalf of the Cleveland program in the crucial 2002 case Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, which concerned the legality of public funding of religious schools. The Court decided 5–4 in favor of including religious schools in the voucher program—a significant reversal of numerous decisions upholding the separation of church and state. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor cited Peterson and Greene’s work in her concurring opinion.
Since that Supreme Court decision, vouchers have been sold to the public as a way to “save poor kids from failing schools.” School choice has been described as “the civil rights issue of our time” by Betsy DeVos, Ted Cruz, and Donald Trump. Republican elected officials adopted school choice as party dogma, and state after state enacted laws authorizing vouchers, despite a distinct lack of public support. Voters in Utah rejected vouchers in 2007, voters in Florida rejected vouchers in 2012, and voters in Arizona rejected vouchers in 2018, but the Republican leaders in all three states ignored the referenda and continued to expand voucher programs. Republican legislatures and state courts have also ignored explicit provisions in state constitutions that forbid the public funding of religious schools, claiming that the voucher goes to the parents, not to the religious schools where they pay for tuition. Where there’s a will, partisans find a way.
Voucher advocates continually promised academic gains, especially for the poorest students, but after 2010, as the voucher programs grew in scale, the academic results turned sharply negative. Cowen realized that poor kids were actually harmed by using them. Low-income students did not use vouchers to enroll in elite private schools, which mostly did not accept these students—either because they were behind academically or because the voucher was worth far less than the school’s tuition—but to enroll in religious schools whose teachers were uncertified or in pop-up private schools created to capture the government money. When the outcomes were disappointing, the right-wing foundations and Republican officials promoting vouchers moved the goalposts: test scores didn’t matter, they said, but graduation rates and parental satisfaction did. When the test scores and the graduation rates were surpassed by local public schools, the pro-voucher foundations, elected officials, and researchers shifted to a different rationale, one that was “always the underlying goal,” Cowen argues: to satisfy the “values” of parents. Just as segregationists in the 1950s invoked “the right of parents” to avoid integration, voucher advocates in the twenty-first century believe that parents “have the express right to use public dollars to self-segregate.”And these advocates claim that parents have the right to receive taxpayer support for their children to attend religious schools; denying them that “right,” they argue, infringes on religious freedom.
Cowen describes how he came to this understanding. From 2013 to 2016 two teams of researchers—one from MIT and another from the Walton-funded Department of Educational Reform at the University of Arkansas—reached the same dire conclusions about vouchers in Louisiana: they “caused unprecedented large, negative impacts on student achievement.” The Louisiana voucher students were mostly Black and low-income. They entered voucher schools at the fiftieth percentile in math; after a year in private school, they dropped to the twenty-sixth percentile. They improved in the second year but remained behind their peers in public schools. This was solid evidence from two separate groups of researchers “that voucher interventions actually caused damage” to the poor students they were supposed to help. Voucher advocates insisted that the experiment needed more time and that it was overregulated by the state.
The bad results kept rolling in: from Indiana, where independent evaluators documented negative outcomes in 2015; from Ohio in 2016, in a study funded by a conservative think tank; and from Washington, D.C., where evaluators found poor results in 2017 and 2018. Cowen concludes that
no explanation then or now has fully explained the learning loss displayed in locations so different as Louisiana, Indiana, Washington, and Ohio as does the simplest one: that for all of Milton Friedman’s purported brilliance, and for all the millions of dollars pumped into the effort by Betsy DeVos, Charles Koch, and the Bradley Foundation, the idea simply did not work. The bigger and more recent the voucher program is, the worse the results have been.
Republican-led states simply ignored the evidence that low-income students who used vouchers fell behind their peers in public schools, and they continued to enact the policies, thanks to large contributions from right-wing billionaires to the campaigns of like-minded state officials. Furthermore, several of the Republican-dominated states removed income restrictions and other limitations, thus abandoning the rhetoric of “saving poor kids from failing schools.” A dozen states currently have “universal” voucher programs, meaning that any family may apply for a voucher, without regard to their income. Tennessee enacted universal vouchers only weeks ago. Other states are likely to follow their lead.
Cowen reports that, with or without income restrictions, the majority of applicants to voucher programs were not trying to leave public schools; they were already attending private schools. This is the case in every state with vouchers. Right now between 65 and 80 percent of students who claim vouchers are using them to pay the tuition of private schools where they were already enrolled. Vouchers are also used in many states to pay the expenses of parents who teach their children at home. In Arizona, according to reports in The Arizona Republic and ProPublica, parents have used their “education savings accounts” to buy trampolines, swing sets, expensive Lego sets, horseback riding lessons, kayaks, trips to Disney World, chicken coops, skiing trips, cowboy roping lessons, and ice-skating lessons. Republican governor Doug Ducey led the campaign to make public funds available to all students in the state. His successor, Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, predicted in 2023 that the state’s voucher program could cost nearly $1 billion, with over 53 percent of all new funding paying for 8 percent of Arizona’s students.
Just as troubling to Cowen as the academic results of the voucher project is the publicly funded discrimination that these schools make possible. Right-wing rage in response to the pandemic enabled the eruption of the so-called culture wars over masking, vaccines, and teaching about race and sexuality in schools, as well as the presence of these topics in library books. In 2022 Christopher Rufo, the right-wing provocateur who first raised an alarm about “critical race theory” in public schools (few public school teachers had ever heard of the term; it refers to a course usually taught in law schools, if at all), called on conservatives in a speech at Hillsdale College to promote universal distrust in public schools in order to arrive at “universal school choice.” This distrust was fueled by right-wing groups, which made wild accusations about teachers allegedly “grooming” their students to be gay or Marxist, and about the curriculum allegedly turning students against their own country.
Vouchers appeal to those who want to escape lessons about racism, diversity, or gender equality. Religious and private schools that receive publicly funded vouchers are not bound by civil rights laws, and many openly bar the admission of LGBTQ+ students and the hiring of LGBTQ+ staff. Some bar students with disabilities. Some religious schools accept only students who are members of their own religion.
Trump issued an executive order on January 29 titled “Expanding Educational Freedom and Opportunities for Families,” which called for the diversion of federal funds to underwrite tuition at private and religious schools. He claimed that “rigorous research demonstrates that well-designed education-freedom programs improve student achievement and cause nearby public schools to improve their performance,” which according to Josh Cowen’s book The Privateers is not true. Trump issued the order on the same day as the release of the latest national test scores by the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Florida, which has a robust voucher program, experienced a sharp decline in its scores, the state’s lowest in twenty years on this test.
Cowen considers the manipulation of culture-war issues like race and gender to be a feature of vouchers, not a bug. Groups like Moms for Liberty and Parents Defending Freedom use the clarion call of “parents’ rights” to condemn the discussion of race and LGBTQ+ issues, as well as access to books about these subjects, in public schools. Such groups want to censor what is taught to all children, even those whose parents disagree with them and want their children to learn about race, gender, and sexuality. Imagine teachers in a segregated Black school being told by the state that they cannot teach accurate Black history. Why should those parents have no rights?
Cowen writes that the learning loss of poor children who used vouchers was larger than the learning loss caused by the pandemic, and at this point the evidence against their efficacy is overwhelming. Yet more states adopted vouchers in 2022 and 2023 than in any previous legislative sessions. Texas is the only large Republican-controlled state that has not enacted legislation to implement them, owing to the combined opposition of parent groups, Democrats, religious leaders who believe in the separation of church and state, and rural Republicans defending their district’s only public school. Yet Governor Greg Abbott has said that vouchers are his highest priority. He received millions of dollars from billionaires to defeat many of the rural Republicans who opposed vouchers. The issue will soon come to a vote in the legislature.
The reality is that when states offer charter schools and vouchers, public schools lose. Each time students leave for private alternatives, public schools must reduce their teaching staff, increase class sizes, and cut back on curricular offerings. States cannot afford to pay for three different school systems. Is the goal to eliminate public schools? That argument seems inherent to some who share Friedman-style thinking.
What does Cowen recommend?
Fund public schools. It really is that simple…. The more money we spend on schools, the better off children are, not simply academically, but in later-life outcomes like higher wages and fewer encounters with the criminal justice system.
Wealthy parents spend amply to educate their children—to make sure that they have certified teachers, small classes, a well-supplied library, and a curriculum that includes the arts and sciences as well as physical education and time for play. And, of course, wealthy children never go without food or medical care. We should give the same to all children.
On January 29, Trump signed two executive orders about schools: one was intended to turn federal funding into block grants to states to expand school choice, the other was intended to suspend federal funding to public schools unless they ended “radical indoctrination” about race and gender.
The administration wanted to stop all teaching about racism and sexuality. Their allies claimed that teaching about racism was racist and discriminatory. Trump’s executive order said that the schools should teach a “patriotic education,” by which it meant suppress difficult facts about our history and our society.
At the time, it was clear that the “indoctrination” order violated federal law, which explicitly bans any federal interference in curriculum. The federal law PL 103-227 General Education Provisions Act, Section 438 [20 USC-1232a] says: “No provision of any applicable program shall be construed to authorize any department, agency, officer, or 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 materials…”
That section of the law is titled PROHIBITION AGAINST FEDERAL CONTROL OF EDUCATION.
On February 21, a federal district court in Maryland overturned the order on free speech grounds.
Usually the administration ignores adverse court orders, appeals, and keeps going.
But this time the Department of Education took a step back. It just issued a statement watering down Trump’s angry and illegal executive order.
The Education Department is retreating from some of the most incendiary suggestions it made last month in a sweeping directive threatening to pull federal funding from any college or K-12 school district that considers race in hiring, programming, scholarships and virtually every other aspect of student and campus life.
A new question-and-answer document, posted online late Friday, clearly states that by law the federal government cannot dictate curriculum. It also notes that cultural celebrations and events celebrating Black History Month are legally permitted as long as they are open to people of all races.
It also narrows the definition of which types of diversity, equity and inclusion programs might draw scrutiny. The new directive adheres more closely to traditional court doctrines and interpretation of civil rights law, experts said Saturday.
“I see it as a significant retrenchment back towards more established case law,” said Ray Li, an attorney who worked on these issues in the Office for Civil Rights during the Biden administration. “It reads as if written by someone different.”
“A lot of the most unsupported claims made” in the original letter, he said, “have been walked back.”
The original guidance suggested, for instance, that teaching that the United States was built upon “systemic and structural racism” would be unlawful. A lawsuit challenging the directive questioned how any school could teach a complete history without including examples of systemic racism such as slavery, Jim Crow segregation laws and the incarceration camps Japanese Americans were sent to during World War II.
“It’s certainly better supported by law and more neutral in tone” than the original letter, agreed Jon Fansmith, senior vice president of government relations at the American Council on Education, a lobbying group for colleges and universities.
Since taking office, President Donald Trump and his administration have signaled an eagerness to investigate school districts and colleges that are out of step with conservative legal theories and his priorities regarding how schools handle questions of race and gender.
Bear in mind that highly segregated private schools are subsidized by taxpayers in states that have enacted universal vouchers. The politicians today are fulfilling the fever dreams of segregationist governors in the South in the 1950s.
ProPublica reports:
Private schools in the United States are, on the whole, whiter than public schools, with fewer Black, Hispanic or Latino students. This may not be a surprising statistic because private schools can often be expensive and exclusionary, but it’s not a simple one to pin down. There is no central list of private schools in the country, and the only demographic data about them comes from a little-known voluntary survey administered by the federal government.
While reporting our project on Segregation Academies in the South last year, we relied on that survey to find private schools founded during desegregation and analyzed their demographics compared to local public school districts. Our analysis of that survey revealed, among other things, Amite County, Mississippi, where about 900 children attend the local public schools — which, as of 2021, were 16% white. By comparison, the two private schools in the county, with more than 600 children, were 96% white.
In the course of our reporting, we realized that this data and analysis were illuminating and useful — even outside the South. We decided to create a database to allow anyone to look up a school and view years worth of data.
Today, we are releasing the Private School Demographics database. This is the first time anyone has taken past surveys and made them this easy to explore. Moreover, we’ve matched these schools to the surrounding public school districts, enabling parents, researchers and journalists to directly compare the makeup of private schools to local public systems.
Until now, much of this data was difficult to analyze: While the National Center for Education Statistics, which collects the data, provides a tool to view the most recent year of Private School Universe Survey data, there was no easy way to examine historical trends without wrangling large, unwieldy text files.
As debates over school choice, vouchers and privatization of education intensify, making this repository of private school data accessible is more important than ever. The information is self-reported, but we have attempted to flag or correct some obvious inaccuracies wherever possible.
For schools, you can filter results by state, religious affiliation, school type and enrollment range. For some schools, you can also filter by founding year. By default, we only show results for schools that have responded to the survey at least once in the last few years, but you can turn off this filter to also include older data in your search results.
For public school districts, users can filter by state and sort results to see where the most students are attending private schools, as well as the gap between the district’s largest racial group and the school’s share of those same students. Because private schools can draw students from different districts, comparing their racial composition to a single district’s public schools is imperfect. Still, these comparisons can offer valuable insights into broader patterns of segregation and access.
Trump and his acolytes have thrown around the term “critical race theory” without e we defining it. He picked it up from rightwing extremist Chris Rufo, who thought that it could be used as a blunderbuss to smear public schools. He convinced large numbers of anxious white parents that the public schools were teaching their children to be embarrassed and feel guilty about being white. That, Rufo implied, was the inevitable result of teaching the unpleasant facts about slavery, Jim row, and racism.
Here is a different point of view, written by Alan Leveritt in The Arkansas Times.
Believed to be circa 1945, a map illustrates redlining practices in the Little Rock area. Red means Black neighborhoods and no loans, while green means white neighborhoods and access to FHA loans.
Credit: dsl.richmond.edu
I came close to graduating from college, damn close in fact. Last I looked (about 30 years ago) I was three hours and an overdue parking ticket short of a history degree from UA Little Rock. But even though I remain a doubtful scholar, I am a devoted student of Arkansas history and its ability to instruct us regarding some very big issues facing our country.
I am, of course, talking about critical race theory.
Army 1st Lt. J.P. Leveritt came back from World War II, got his master’s degree in physical education and in 1950, along with my mother, built one of the first houses in Lakewood in North Little Rock for $8,000. Thus began my family’s long and beneficial association with critical race theory.
To paraphrase the Oxford American Dictionary, critical race theory argues that many of our social and economic institutions have been created for and by white people. Those institutions, many dating back almost a century, were designed to lift white people up and keep Black people down. I am a direct beneficiary of that system.
When President Franklin Roosevelt tried to create the Federal Housing Administration as part of the New Deal, his proposal to make home ownership accessible to ordinary people through federal home loan guarantees met with opposition from members of both parties. What we take for granted today was just one step from communism then. Southern Democrats ultimately agreed to support the establishment of a Federal Housing Administration on the condition that Black citizens be excluded. Now white people could more easily become homeowners and Black people could more easily become renters.
When my parents bought their home in Lakewood, they had to sign a covenant never to sell to Black buyers. This was an actual FHA requirement. Had they not signed, the FHA would have refused to guarantee them any loans in Lakewood. If Black people could move into Lakewood, the property values there would crater, putting the FHA loans at risk, was the explanation.
Another FHA innovation was to rate neighborhoods based on class and race, the thought being that neighborhoods occupied by Black people were too risky for government guaranteed loans. The Little Rock/North Little Rock redline map is color-coded, with green neighborhoods approved for FHA loans and red neighborhoods (predominantly African American) ineligible for bank loans. Thus the son of Lakewood homeowners inherits $175,000 upon his mother’s death in 2012, while the Black son of Rose City renters gets nothing.
This is an example of critical race theory in action. The primary source of intergenerational wealth is home equity. Even though Black households earn 60% of what white households earn, they only have 5% as much wealth. That wealth should have come from home ownership, which never occurred because the game was rigged.
My dad had a good war. He grew up in Smackover and went to Arkansas A&M at Monticello, where he played for the Rambling Boll Weevils and learned deep tissue massage as a trainer. He was headed to North Africa as a medic but through a series of happy accidents, wound up in the White House as President Truman’s masseuse and private trainer.
As with all vets after the war, the GI Bill allowed him to further his education and receive low-interest home loans among other benefits. But while the language of the GI Bill was inclusive of all vets, it was administered by the states, which meant that Black vets, especially in the Jim Crow South, received on average 70% of the benefits their white comrades did. Despite the GI Bill of 1944 offering free college education, it was 11 years before the first Black veteran enrolled as an undergraduate in a state-supported college in Arkansas with the exception of all-Black Arkansas AM&N. Up to then, they were directed to vocational schools if at all. The low-interest home loans the GI Bill provided weren’t much help, either. Because Black veterans could not live in white neighborhoods and Black neighborhoods were redlined, they seldom could get a loan to buy a house where they were permitted to live.
Discrimination for FHA mortgages and GI benefits has in part been remedied by various civil rights laws, many of them from President Lyndon Johnson’s time. But to understand the great economic disparity between the races, we need to know history, especially Arkansas history. The economic disparities we see today are a direct result of what happened years ago when we came up with race-based barriers to education and wealth.
Why would our Legislature and governor try to disappear this history? Why would they try to decertify an Advanced Placement African American Studies class in our high schools, or discourage honest study of systems that set some of us up to thrive but left others to struggle? Their argument that if we teach these facts, some white child might be made to feel guilty is pure nonsense.
Get over it. It’s our history. Teach our kids the truth and maybe they will be better people than we are.
It’s a time for courage. A time for outrage. Who dares to speak out against the “great and mighty” King Donald? (Where is Toto when we need someone to pull away the curtain?)
Not the Republicans in Congress. Not Republican governors. Not Amazon. Not Mark Zuckerberg. Not ABC. CBS? We will see.
Donald Trump has erased any doubt that he’s a dictator.
“He who saves his Country does not violate any Law,” he posted on X.
It’s perfectly clear that he intends to let no law, court or even the Constitution restrain him. And certainly not Congress, which he treats as a confederacy of dunces.
Trump’s quote, ostensibly first uttered by Napoleon, also brought to mind the remark attributed to an earlier tyrant, King Louis XIV: “L’État, c’est moi” — I am the state.
Louis was an absolute monarch. The United States was to have no kings, nor anyone acting like one. Our founding document, the Constitution, made that clear.
That didn’t stop Trump from declaring “Long live the King,” with a crown superimposed atop his head on a Time magazine knockoff, for supposedly stopping New York City’s congestion pricing plan.
Far from saving our country, Trump is on a path to destroying it.
He and his billionaire hatchet man, Elon Musk, devoid of any accountability, are sabotaging every function and agency of government to an extent unseen in our history. It’s senseless, savage, sadistic, self-serving and subversive.
Following the Kremlin
Listen carefully. You might hear Vladimir Putin applauding. Nothing Putin could do alone could so weaken us at home and abroad, or so undermine the NATO alliance that has kept first the Soviet Union, and now Russia, in check.
This week, Trump fed the suspicion that he’s the Kremlin’s puppet, echoing Putin’s lie that Ukraine started his war of aggression. Trump actually called Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy a “dictator.” A psychologist might call that projection.
Musk and Vice President JD Vance have also followed precisely the Kremlin’s line by lauding the rise of far-right parties in western Europe and demanding that the governments there make nice toward them.
The pillaging of our government persists — a coup against Congress, courts and the Constitution.
Consult Congress? Never
Congress did not consent to slashing the air traffic control system as if the loss of 67 lives near the White House on Jan. 29 did not prove the need for more personnel.
Congress would not consent to decimating and idling agencies responsible to restore communities ravaged by fire and flood, to cripple those needed to defend the nation against a bird flu pandemic, or to allow Musk to see your tax returns.
Congress would not consent to destroying the U.S. Agency for International Development and cutting off its lifesaving aid to children around the world.
Congress has not been asked about annexing Canada, threatening to break the Senate-ratified Panama Canal treaty, or claiming sovereignty over Gaza and ethnically cleansing it of some 2 million Palestinians, which would be a war crime.
Congress has not voted to bleach the government and the nation’s universities and public schools of anything suggesting multiracial and gender equity. Trump arbitrarily threatens to withhold funds from any that don’t bow to his white power agenda.
Congress has not voted to deny federal funds, as Trump is threatening, to cities and counties that don’t implement his racist deportations. Nor has it voted to destroy the civil service.
Congress has not voted to surrender to Trump the independence of the Federal Trade Commission or other agencies, nor to neuter their authority over Musk’s vast conflicts of interest.
Trump’s grasp to control everything extends even to the arts, to sacking the Kennedy Center leadership and making himself its president. It’s what dictators do.
Terrifying much of Europe
For all of its ingenious attributes, the Constitution is dangerously silent in one respect. It gives the president nearly a free hand in foreign affairs, subject only to Senate approval of treaties.
Every other president has made it his common-sense duty to consult Congress before leading the nation in dangerous directions. But Trump has already sold out Ukraine to Putin without consulting Ukraine, NATO or Congress.
Ever since World War II, which cost more than 400,000 American lives, it has been bipartisan U.S. policy to protect our nation by supporting democracy in Europe and opposing dictatorships there. No longer.
Congress has not been consulted on any of this because Trump considers it a nuisance. Louis XIV corralled troublemakers at the Palace of Versailles.
Trump keeps Congress in a political straitjacket, striking fear into Republican members of the precarious majority by threatening to “primary” them from the right. So Congress capitulates. It’s brutally effective.
Saving his country? Under Trump 2.0, America has never been in greater danger.
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.
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.
Robert Reich is a relentless fighter for our democracy. He served in the administrations of Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, and Bill Clinton, in whose administration he was secretary of Labor.
He wrote recently to urge people to organize against Trump’s violations of the law.
Friends,
Before I post my Sunday cartoon, I want to share with you some thoughts about the third hellish week of Trump II.
As of Friday, Trump has signed more than 50 executive orders, covering every aspect of American life and much foreign policy.
It’s not just that this number of executive orders is unprecedented in modern American politics. Many are unlawful, unconstitutional, or both.
In the age of monarchs, kings issued decrees. The tsars of imperial Russia proclaimed ukases. The dictators of the 20th century made diktats.
Trump issues executive orders.
Average people in the age of monarchs, tsars, and dictators were largely powerless. Resistance meant almost certain death.
Many people were resigned to vulnerability. They practiced passivity. They knew no life other than repression. But their deference entrenched and ensured the power of monarchs, tsars, and dictators.
Arbitrary power depends on the acquiescence of everyone subjected to it.
Right now, after three weeks of Trump’s “flooding the zone” (as Trumpers like to say) some of you may be feeling powerless.
Trump wants you to feel powerless. He depends on your passivity in the face of his takeover of American democracy.
He wants to be a strongman who can act unilaterally and arbitrarily — who can issue orders about anything that pops into his head. Purging, firing, prosecuting, or deporting anyone he wants removed. Obliterating, freezing, and pummeling any institution he wants destroyed. Unleashing the richest man in the world to do whatever the hell he wants with the government of the United States.
If you are dumbfounded into inaction, if you don’t even want to hear the news, if you feel as though you’re living through a nightmare over which you have no control, I get it. Every other day I feel the same.
But hear me out.
You and I have no real choice but to stand up to Trump, Musk, and their lapdogs. To allow them to bully us into submission invites more bullying, more lawlessness, more gonzo executive orders.
Last week I suggested a number of actions we can take. It wasn’t an exhaustive list, of course, only some possibilities.
Millions of Americans — including many who have been purged from their positions of responsibility — are standing up to Trump and Musk’s tyranny.
Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski says the Senate phone system has been receiving around 1,600 calls each minute, compared to the 40 calls per minute it usually gets — thus disrupting the system.
We are beginning to flood Trump and Musk’s zone.
Let’s flood it out.
This coming April 19 will mark the 250th anniversary of the battles of Lexington and Concord, which began the American Revolution and our war against monarchical power.
Anti-royalist militia in Massachusetts refused to disperse when ordered to by British troops. A shot was fired, and the troops kept firing, killing eight of those American resisters. Later that day, the militiamen returned that fire, killing a number of British soldiers. The revolution had begun.
Please don’t get me wrong. I do not advocate violence. I’m simply reminding you that this nation was founded on resistance to arbitrary authority. We built American democracy in the face of what seemed to be impossible odds.
And we will never, ever give up that fight.
My friend Harold Meyerson suggests that on April 19 we stage massive peaceful protests in every city and town — crowds of Americans celebrating the anti-monarchical uprising of 1775 and pledging their allegiance to that heritage by denouncing Trump’s increasingly autocratic rule: Thereby flooding Trump and Musk’s zone still further.
You may recall that the Wall Street Journal published an article about Marlo Elez, the 25-year-old whiz kid who made racist tweets, deleted them, then resigned after they went public. Elez is or was the senior member of the DOGE team that has been scooping up government records.
Musk conducted a poll on Twitter, asking whether the mildest member of his DOGE team should be rehired.
On Friday morning, Musk posted a poll to X, asking his followers if DOGE should rehire the “staffer who made inappropriate statements via a now deleted pseudonym.” Within hours, it had amassed more than 200,000 votes, almost 80% in favor of bringing Elez back.
Musk is likely to rehire Marko.
Some of Marlo’s tweets were extremely prejudicial towards Indians, because they get great jobs in Silicon Valley.
I wonder what JD Vance’s wife thinks of Elez. She is of Indian heritage. She is a graduate of Yale Law School, like Vance. I wonder if she likes the racist crowd he runs with.
Diane Ravitch's blog 