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Jan Resseger: McMahon and the Death of the U.S. Education Department

By dianeravitch
January 15, 2026 //
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Jan Resseger reminds us of the purpose of public education by quoting Derek Black’s new book Dangerous Learning, in which he writes that “public schools are the place where children—regardless of status—share a common experience, come to appreciate the public good, and prepare for equal citizenship. The purpose of public education has always been to sustain a republican form of government.” The Trump administration does not want to “sustain a Republican form of government.” It blabbers on about parents’ rights, not the common good. It is determined to destroy the U.S. Department of Education because it protects the rights of students, especially the most vulnerable. Ironically, the claims for “parents’ rights,” has been turned into a battering ram against students’ rights.

Jan writes:

In his newest book, Dangerous Learning, constitutional law scholar Derek Black explores one of the most basic reasons our public schools, our society’s most extensive and inclusive civic institution, are essential: they are an enormous system whose promise is to serve the needs and protect the rights of nearly 50 million children and adolescents.  Justice cannot be achieved solely through the protection of parents’ rights, by which parents vie to advance their own children’s needs.

Black writes: “As rhetoric, educational freedom sounds good.  As a practical matter, it falls well short of freedom for all. It does not even attempt to ensure that private education works for children. At best, it is agnostic toward the school environments students enter. At worst, it uses public funds to facilitate patterns and values that America has spent the past half century trying to tame…  Public schools to be sure, are far from perfect. They have never fully met the needs of all students and all communities. But those shortcomings are clearly understood as problems to fix. They are seen as bugs, not features, of public education, which has operated for two centuries on the premise that public schools are the place where children—regardless of status—share a common experience, come to appreciate the public good, and prepare for equal citizenship. The purpose of public education has always been to sustain a republican form of government. And public schools are the only place in society premised on bridging the gaps that normally divide us—race, wealth, religion, disability, sex, culture, and more. The founders of the American public education system believed that rather than inhibiting liberty, a common public education is essential to it.” (Dangerous Learning, pp. 182-183)

Widespread educational justice across the nation cannot be achieved solely through the laws of the states. At the federal level, Brown v. Board of Education, and federal laws like the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act have for three quarters of a century been tools by which the federal government could challenge and rectify injustice in public schools.  In 1979, the U.S. Department of Education was founded to pull together many of the programs designed to increase opportunity for children in states whose public schools had failed to protect their educational rights due to their race, ethnicity, or disability—the work of the Office for Civil Rights, and programs supporting English language learners and special education for disabled students, for example.  The Education Department also increased investment in school districts which states had inadequately funded—Title I for school districts serving concentrations of poor children, for example, and grants for Full-Service Community Schools and 21st Century After-School Programs.

The Trump administration has, however, avoided acknowledging the history of educational injustice as the President has consistently promoted the goal of shutting down the U.S. Department of Education and “returning education to the states.”  When she was confirmed as Education Secretary last March, Linda McMahon declared: “President Trump pledged to make American education the best in the world, return education to the states where it belongs, and free American students from the education bureaucracy through school choice. I intend to make good on that promise.”  McMahon has laid off staff whose positions were created by Congress, threatened to send specific programs to other federal departments, and cancelled a raft of specific, congressionally allocated grant funding —all contrary to federal law. Many of these threats have been temporarily stayed by the courts; others are quietly moving forward.

Last week, McMahon took a new step to weaken the Department’s reach—by agreeing to waive federal rules that prescribe how federal funding can be spent and allowing states to combine at their discretion funding from specific federal grant lines. For the Associated Press, Colin Binkley explained: “The Trump administration is giving Iowa more power to decide how it spends its federal education money, signing off on a proposal that is expected to be the first of many as conservative states seek new latitude from a White House promising to ‘return education to the states.’ Iowa was the first state to apply for an exemption from certain spending rules.”  Binkley describes Education Secretary McMahon’s justification for giving Iowa control of spending federal dollars from four different grant programs: “McMahon told The Associated Press that the new flexibility will free up time and money now devoted to ensuring compliance with federal rules. With fewer strings attached, states can pool their federal dollars toward priorities of their choosing, including literacy or teacher training….”

For K-12 Dive, Kara Arundel lists four separate programs established by the federal Every Student Succeeds Act whose funding streams Iowa has been permitted to combine: Title II, Part A—Supporting Effective Instruction; Title III, Part A—English Language Acquisition; Title IV, Part A—Student Support and Academic Enrichment; and Title IV, Part B—21st Century Community Learning Centers (after-school programs). Arundel describes Iowa’s Republican Governor Kim Reynolds expressing gratitude for giving her state more freedom: “Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds, speaking at the press conference, said the state is ‘confident that we can do even more by reallocating compliance resources. Iowa will begin shifting nearly $8 million and thousands of hours of staff time from bureaucracy to actually putting that expertise and those resources in the classroom.’ “

Several writers, looking at the modesty of last week’s Iowa waiver to consolidate grants are not yet anticipating that the Iowa situation bodes massive deregulation of federal funding.  Education Week’s Mark Lieberman explains: “The waiver approval appears to mark the first time since the 2015 passage of the Every Student Success Act that the federal government has used its authority under that law to allow a state to consolidate funding. But, in contrast with proposals the state put forward roughly a year ago, the new federal approval touches only 5% of Iowa’s overall allocation of federal education funds, the part that’s set aside for the state education agency. The bulk of federal dollars that flow to school districts each year—$900 million worth—will retain their current structure and spending and reporting requirements.”

Binkley reassures the public: “Iowa’s new plan leaves Title I funding untouched.”

Lieberman quotes Anne Hyslop, who now leads All4Ed, and who worked in the Department during the Obama administration: “This announcement could signal an acknowledgment from the department that its legal authority to flatten discrete funding programs and implement unrestricted block grants without congressional approval is limited, said Anne Hyslop… It also foreshadows an uphill battle for other states aiming to convert federal education funding to block grants, including Indiana, which submitted a request for that flexibility, along with relief from certain school accountability requirements in October.”

Chalkbeat’s Erica Meltzer adds States already control most aspects of education. Federal funding makes up about 10% of overall education spending, and those dollars do come with restrictions and reporting requirements that aim to ensure money is spent appropriately… Iowa’s waiver doesn’t allow districts to consolidate most of their federal funding, which would have represented a much larger pot of money.

However, the reporters acknowledge that, in the context of the Trump administration’s goal to return education to the states, the Department may increasingly grant waivers that limit federal oversight.  Will Iowa’s waiver be the first step as the Department of Education reduces guardrails that protect students’ civil rights?

Meltzer reports that the new waiver, “does allow Iowa school districts to take advantage of a 1999 federal provision called  Ed-Flex to roll over more money year over year to make it easier to invest in big-ticket items and longer-term strategies….”  Lieberman adds: “Separate from the waiver approval, McMahon also simultaneously announced she’s approved Iowa to join 10 other states currently participating in the department’s Ed-Flex program, which gives state education agencies the authority to waive certain spending regulations for individual districts… The 10 states currently participating are Delaware, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Texas, Vermont and Wisconsin. Iowa is the first state to gain the distinction since McMahon became secretary.”

Meltzer concludes by cautioning readers: “(T)he Education Department still needs to ensure money is being appropriately spent, which is more challenging after massive layoffs.” She quotes Hyslop worrying: “(T)he U.S. Department of Education right now lacks the capacity to do meaningful oversight of how this program is being implemented or the waiver process in general.”

Specifically, Meltzer warns that one of the federal grants Iowa was allowed to merge supported English language instruction, a step that could well reflect the Trump administration’s attack on immigrants or its anti-DEI initiatives: “Advocates are particularly concerned that Iowa’s new block grant consolidates Title III funds that are required to go to English learners…. The Trump administration laid off most of the staff at the Education Department who support those students, and rescinded a guidance document considered to be the ‘bible’ in that field.” She quotes the Education Trust’s Nicholas Munyan-Penney: “I think of red tape equaling protections for students… We want to make sure that students have access to the protections and resources they need to be successful.”

Will 2026 be the year that the Department of Education expands the use of waivers to undercut the federal oversight of funds that protect equality of educational opportunity across our nation?  We will need to watch carefully as the chaotic education policy in McMahon’s Department of Education continues into its second year.

Categories English Language Learners, Ethics, Funding, Lies, Privatization, U.S. Department of Education

Trump’s Illegal Demolition of the U.S. Department of Education

By dianeravitch
December 17, 2025 //
3

Senator Maxie K. Hirono of Hawaii conducted a forum on Trump’s illegal demolition of the U.S. Department of Education.

Trump promised to eliminate the U.S. Department of Education but he needs the approval of the U.S. Congress to wipe out a Department authorized by Congress. There are Republicans who would not support this reactionary step, so Trump bypassed Congress and took a different, blatantly illegal path.

Acting through his Secretary of Education, wrestling entrepreneur Linda McMahon, he began laying off employees. Then his DOGE crew closed down whole sections of the Department, including its historic mission, the collection of data and statistics about education, as well as its research arm.

The legal way to achieve his goal was to seek Congressional action. Instead, he broke up the Department and handed its functions to other Departments.

McMahon likes to say that the Department spends lots of money, but test scores haven’t gone up. That’s not the purpose of the Department. it exists to equalize funding to some extent, to add extra funding for students who are low-income, who have disabilities, or who have other needs. It also funds postsecondary education and, though its Office for Civil Rights, protects students against discrimination. OCR is now in the hands of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, which is hostile to the traditional definition of civil rights; its highest priority appears to be the protection of the straight white makes.


WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, U.S. Senator Mazie K. Hirono (D-HI) held a spotlight forum titled, “Dismantling Education: What the Trump Administration’s Illegal Attacks on Federal Programs Mean for Students, Families, and Educators,” highlighting the dangerous consequences of the Trump Administration’s efforts to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education (ED) for our nation’s students, families, educators, and schools—among others. During the forum, a panel of witnesses comprised of K-12 education leaders and civil rights experts spoke about how abolishing ED and moving these programs to other federal agencies would harm students across the country, especially those who come from low-income, rural, Native, migrant, and federally-impacted communities.

 

“From Day One, President Trump and his regime have been illegally attacking and undermining the Department of Education, in an attempt to abolish the Department altogether,” said Senator Hirono. “Trump has sown and continues to sow chaos for students across the country: directing the closure of the Department of Education; firing nearly half the Department workforce; slashing, withholding and rescinding funding for federal education programs; and creating a national school voucher program—to name a few things. In the process, he has jeopardized our children’s futures. Today’s forum provided an important opportunity to inform individuals and communities about the destructive actions he has taken so far. Every child in our country deserves access to a quality education, and I will continue working with my colleagues to make sure that is the case.”

 

Specifically, the forum focused on this administration’s recent proposal to illegally move nearly all federal K-12 programs and many higher education programs to other federal agencies that have limited capacity to run these programs and have no experience with dealing with them. ED announced last month that it would partner with the Departments of Labor, Interior, Health and Human Services, and State to conduct the transfer of these programs. This move would essentially fulfill Trump’s promise to eliminate the Department altogether and remove the federal government’s role in helping to ensure that all students have access to a quality education.

 

The forum featured testimony from:

  • Randi Weingarten, President, American Federation of Teachers
  • Rachel Gittleman, President, American Federation of Government Employees Local 252
  • Denise Forte, President and CEO, The Education Trust
  • Dr. Amy Loyd, CEO, All4Ed
  • Chad Rummel, Executive Director, Council for Exceptional Children
  • Angelica Infante-Green, Rhode Island Commissioner of Elementary and Secondary Education, Rhode Island Department of Education

 

At the forum, Senator Hirono was joined by a number of her colleagues, including Senators Peter Welch (D-VT), Jack Reed (D-RI), Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), Jeff Merkley (D-OR), Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), and Dick Durbin (D-IL).

 

“The Trump Administration has taken a wrecking ball to essential federal education programs like Title I, which ensure first-generation, rural, and lower-income students get an equal opportunity to learn and grow. Despite our taxpayers spending one of the highest rates in the country for our students’ education, Vermont now ranks well below the national average on reading and math scores. Just a decade ago, our students scored the 4th highest in the country,” said Senator Welch. “Instead of trying to dismantle the Department of Education, we should be doing everything in our power to give students the resources they need to succeed.” 

 

“The Trump Administration’s plan to dismantle the Department of Education isn’t about streamlining or efficiency.  It’s whittling down or just completely abandoning critical programs and support for public school students, teachers, and entire communities,” said Senator Reed.  “I’m fighting to ensure our teachers and schools have the support and resources they need to give every child a top-notch education that prepares them for success.  I am grateful for Rhode Island’s Education Commissioner Angelica Infante-Green and education leaders from across the nation who joined us today to discuss their work protecting and preserving opportunity for our students.”

 

“After a year that included mass firings, cancelling critical grant funds for our local schools, and cutting access to student loans, the Trump Administration is trying to make good on their promise to shutter the Department of Education,” said Senator Van Hollen. “While there are many ways to improve our education system, dismantling the department piece by piece only threatens our longstanding goal of ensuring that every child has access to a quality education. We should be investing more in this objective, not less – for the success of today’s students and the future of our country.”

 

“The Trump administration’s attempts to dismantle the Education Department are an attack on public education and public schools,” said Senator Warren. “I’m fighting to ensure every kid, no matter their zip code or how much money their family makes, has a shot at a quality education.”

 

“When I was young, my father took me to the doors of the schoolhouse and told me ‘If you walk through those doors and work hard, you can do just about anything because we are fortunate to live in America,’” said Senator Merkley. “I’m grateful that a public school education opened the doors of opportunity for me, but today that dream is harder and harder to achieve as the Trump Administration undermines the tools and resources students need to succeed. We must fight to protect programs like TRIO that expand opportunity for all and strengthen the four foundations working families need to thrive – including health care, housing, good-paying jobs, and education.”

 

“A good education for every American is one of the very best investments we can make in our future as a nation,” said Senator Klobuchar.“That is why I so strongly oppose President Trump’s attempts to dismantle the Department of Education and retreat from our commitment to education and our nation’s future. Instead of working with states and school districts to support students, this administration is adding more layers of bureaucracy that will make it even harder for students and schools to succeed.”

 

“The Trump Administration is sabotaging our nation’s future by dismantling the Department of Education,” said Senator Durbin. “So many students rely on the programs and protections provided by the Department, and without that support, the next generation will have less access to the resources they need to thrive.”

 

“No government agency is perfect, and the Department of Education is no exception. Improvements and efficiencies can always be made. But what we are seeing now is not reform—it is abandonment. The administration is walking away from the federal role in education and effectively selling it off for parts,” said AFT President Randi Weingarten. “Families deserve safe and welcoming public schools that are relevant, engaging, and inclusive. These schools, along with thriving universities, are the bedrock of our children’s future and the nation’s economic, scientific, and medical success. We must strengthen—not abandon—public education. Our economy, our democracy and our children depend on it. Every American deserves nothing less.”

 

“The Trump Administration’s plan to dismantle the Congressionally created U.S. Department of Education is unlawful and an insult to the tens of millions of students who rely on it to protect access to a quality education,” said AFGE 252 President Rachel Gittleman. Splintering the Department’s core responsibilities across agencies that lack the expertise to carry them out creates more red tape for states and communities, not less. After attempting to fire the public servants who do this critical work, the Administration is now pushing those responsibilities onto agencies unequipped to serve students and families—creating confusion, eroding public trust, and leaving students and families to pay the price.”

 

“The focus of this Administration has been to deliver on the Great American Heist. The administration’s talk of efficiency and bureaucratic bloat is a cover for stripping students of civil rights, destabilizing millions of student borrowers, and pushing privatization through massive tax credits that subsidize wealthy families’ private and religious schooling,” said Denise Forte, President and CEO of EdTrust. “The federal government should be working with States to improve and strengthen public education for all students, instead of cruel attempts to steal students’ futures.”  

 

“At a time when the U.S. Department of Education faces unprecedented threats—weakening oversight, equity protections, and student supports—every policy decision matters,” said Dr. Amy Loyd, CEO of All4Ed.“The Trump Administration’s attempt to dismantle the Department is illegal, ineffective, and reckless. Rather than one agency coordinating federal education funding, accountability, and oversight, responsibilities are scattered across five departments—Labor, HHS, Interior, State—and a hollowed-out Department of Education. This is not streamlining government; it is fragmenting our national commitment to learners of all ages. I applaud Senator Hirono’s leadership in sounding the alarm and urge Congress to halt these unlawful actions and restore the Department of Education.”

 

“Special education is facing a five-alarm fire,” said Chad Rummel, Council for Exceptional Children Executive Director. “Current actions to close the U.S. Department of Education, fire nearly everyone in the Office of Special Education Programs and deplete the Office for Civil Rights are fracturing the federal education system designed to support all children, and pose a cruel and unnerving threat to the education of children with disabilities.”

 

“As a state education chief, a daughter of immigrants, a lifelong educator, and a mother of two school-aged multilingual children, including one who is on the autism spectrum, I know that a quality education can make all the difference in a child’s life,”said Angelica Infante-Green, Rhode Island Commissioner of Elementary and Secondary Education. “During this critical time for our students, the federal government should be finding ways to better support local school communities rather than providing less and creating chaos and concern by proposing to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education. Federal support is not optional; it is essential for continued academic recovery and for advancing the success of children in Rhode Island and across the nation.”

 

Video of the full forum can be found here and photos can be found here.  

 

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Categories Disruption, Extremism, Special Education, Trump, U.S. Department of Education

John Thompson: A Stellar Review of AN EDUCATION

By dianeravitch
December 12, 2025 //
2

John Thompson, historian and retired teacher in Oklahoma, wrote this thoughtful review of my memoirs, An Education: How I Changed My Mind About Schools and Almost Everything Else.

He writes:

Diane Ravitch’s An Education: How I Changed My Mind About Schools and Almost Everything Else is dedicated to her wife Mary; her sons, Joe, Michael, and Steven; her grandsons Nico, Aidan, Elijah, and Asher; and her ex-husband Richard. An Education intertwines deeply emotional personal and family experiences with the history of how she became such a transformative education leader. Although Diane denies it, I believe she’s the most influential education advocate of the last century.

I’ve been reading Diane Ravitch’s work for decades, but An Education is my favorite book. And my favorite passage started with Diane’s citation of Robert Hutchins who said, “We have to learn to live with those whose opinions differ from our own. After all, they may turn out to be right.”

Then she wrote about Hutchins statement, “for three decades I didn’t realize that it was intended for me.”

Being from Oklahoma, I was captured by the first part of her book, about growing up in Texas. I especially loved her story about meeting Roy Rogers at the Rodeo when she was 9 years old. After Rogers slapped her hand, Diane said, “I determined on the spot that I would never wash that hand again!”

Diane was a tomboy who loved horses and dogs. But she experienced sexism and trauma. She said she “did not have an idyllic adolescence. No one ever does.”  But her teenage years were “destroyed by my father abusing me.” 

During the middle of her book, she recalled her complicated marriage to Richard Ravitch and, then, her wonderful wife, Mary. Mary worked with the progressive educator Deborah Meier and opened a progressive small school in New York City. 

I was especially impressed by Diane’s communication with Al Shanker. He sought to allow teachers to start schools within schools to turnaround kids “in the back of the classroom with their heads on their desks.” Back in the late 1980s, it seemed like he might be able to bring diverse factions together. But, by 1994, charters had been high-jacked by corporate reformers and their winners and losers ideology.

In the middle of An Education. Diane revealed in so much detail the inside stories of her years as a conservative.  Back then, when I was an academic historian, I learned the most about Diane when reading her 1983 book, “The Troubled Crusade: American Education, 1945 – 1980.” Although I couldn’t yet read her work through the eyes of a teacher, I was exceptionally taken by her calls for teaching background knowledge so students could develop reading comprehension skills so they could “read to learn,” and her placing education pedagogies in a broad historical context.

Diane recalls her support for meritocratic, standardized testing, and color-blind policies, when she questioned bilingual education, and even the benefit of the Equal Rights Amendment. This was the time when she made friends with Bill Bennett, President Reagan’s Secretary of Education, and Chester Finn, and Tennessee Governor Lamar Alexander. I knew she had ties to Daniel Patrick Moynihan, but I too thought that progressives’ criticism of him was too politically correct. And, until I read An Education, I knew little about the two sides of James Coleman’s research, whose earlier research had seemed persuasive to me.

Neither would I have thought that Chester Finn was like a “sibling” to Diane.

When explaining her then-conservative beliefs, I sometimes felt that Diane was too hard on herself. For instance, she was far, far from alone in failing to understand the wisdom of Gov. Ann Richards, who said, “If there ever is school choice in Texas, the hard-right Christians will get the money to indoctrinate children.”

Moreover, as An Education schooled me on the propaganda behind the so-called “Texas Miracle” it did more than foreshadow the “New York City Miracle,” the “Harlem Miracle,” and the “Mississippi Miracle.”  It brought me back to the decades-long Oklahoma reality when our curriculum and policies were based on Texas’ accountability systems.  During most of my career, our policies were informed by one Texas trick after another to jack up accountability metrics.

Diane served as member of the National Assessment Governing Board from 1997 to 2004, and she would dig deeply into the numbers and the methodologies behind NAEP. But, as she explained, few journalists read the fine print of the research and they wrote “breathlessly” about supposedly dismal results in traditional public schools. They certainly didn’t report properly about the way that students’ outcomes were linked to family income.

When serving in the Education Department, Diane took a lead in establishing national standards for every school subject. Drawing upon excellent historians, multicultural History standards were set. She hoped standards like those would remain voluntary and “unify their respective fields and establish a common ground for a curriculum without telling teachers how to teach.” 

But the conservative Lynne Cheney “published a scathing denunciation of them.” Cheney said the History standards focused too much on people like Joe McCarthy and the Ku Klux Klan, and not enough on Ulysses S. Grant, and Robert E. Lee. This launched the modern wars over curriculum that have become especially destructive under President Trump. 

Even so, in 2002, Diane hoped that Mayor Mike Bloomberg and Joel Klein (who knew nothing about education) would succeed in improving New York City Schools. Klein reorganized schools from top to bottom, with multiple schools per building drawing on funding by the Gates Foundation. (By the way, I saw the chaos Klein created when visiting dozens of hurriedly opened school, especially in Bedford–Stuyvesant. Usually, leaders of the new schools didn’t even know how many new schools were being opened in their building.)

And, even worse, Jack Welch CEO of General Electric pushed 20-70-10 “stack ranking,” meaning 70% of teachers would be in the middle in terms of effectiveness, and 10% should be “removed,” even if it took the use of invalid and unreliable metrics to evaluate all teachers.

Especially after Diane engaged in a seven-year debate with Deborah Meier, which further “broadened her perspectives,” she became an invaluable leader of the grass-roots opposition to corporate school reforms. She objected to top-down mandates on teaching reading. Diane was among the first to explicitly link in a detailed manner the reforms to the wider privatization movement. And she nailed it when identifying them as the “Billionaires Boys Club.”

Diane analyzed the public relations campaigns which sold “reforms” as the “New York City Miracle.” Drawing upon her insights from serving on the National Assessment Governing Board, she clearly explained why NYC schools flipped back and forth between A and F grades.  Then, she linked President Obama’s flawed $5 billion RTTT experiment with the problems with Common Core curriculum and tests that were years above students’ reading levels.

Diane then quotes John Maynard Keynes who said, “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”

Today, Diane changes minds by clearly explaining the interconnections between Free Market ideology, and profits, and the mindsets of elites that push privatization. She also reports daily on the interconnected attacks on schools throughout the nation. And now she’s sharing the same wisdom when spreading the word about Trumpism and today’s attacks on democracy.

I always read Diane’s daily blog posts. And I so very much appreciate An Education, even if it briefly pulled me away from reading everything in the Diane Ravitch Blog.

Categories Accountability, Common Core, Corporate Reform, Education Industry, Equity, Extremism, Freedom to Learn, Freedom to Read, Gender, History, Klein, Joel, New York City, Privatization, Racism, Ravitch, Diane, Research, School Choice, Segregation, Texas, U.S. Department of Education

Peter Greene: Trump Is Not Sending Education Back to the States

By dianeravitch
December 4, 2025 //
4

Republicans opposed the creation of the U.S. Department of Education. In 1979, President Jimmy Carter promised the NEA that he would push it through. Republicans fought it but he had the votes, and it was created. While NEA wanted the Department, Albert Shanker of the AFT was against it. He feared that the federal government would exert too much control over schools and that education might be politicized, with each party pushing its agenda. He preferred a department of education, labor, and social services.

Now, the Trump administration is dismantling the U.S. Department of Education. They have not sought Congressional approval, which is necessary to eliminate an authorized Department. Instead, they are eliminating it by layoffs and shifting programs to other departments. There may be a “Departnent of Education,” but the building will be empty. No one will be enforcing laws protecting the rights of children with disabilities. The Office of Civil Rights will likely go to the Justice Departnent, where it will not enforce the civil rights of women and racial minorities, but will make sure that schools stamp out DEI and deny any protections to transgender students.

Peter Greene writes:

The continued dismantling of the federal Department of Education is both a con and a lie, one more piece of a quilt of patchwork policies all built around a simple idea– some people are better than others, and the uppity lessers really ought to learn their place. And the rhetoric being used to sell the dismantling is a lie.

The over-simplified version of the department’s origin comes in two parts. First, Congress created some major funding streams meant to level the playing field for students and families, and with those funding streams, some civil rights laws to make sure states leveled their own playing fields for schooling and education. Second, Jimmy Carter, who had promised a cabinet-level ed department (and who wanted to be re-elected) proposed the department as a way to collect, organize, and administer the various policies.

The department’s job was never supposed to be to determine what an excellent education should be. It was supposed to make sure that whatever a good education was presumed to be in your state, everybody got one. So even if a child was presumed to be a poor Lesser, a future meat widget, a child whose special needs made them harder to educate– no matter what, the district and state were supposed to have the resources to meet the challenge. The quality of a child’s education was not supposed to depend on their zip code. 

This does not fit well with the current regime’s conception of civil rights, a conception rooted in the notion that the only oppressed group in this country is white guys, or their conception of democracy, a conception rooted in the notion that some people really are better than others and therefor deserve more power and privilege. (Nor does the regime love the idea of loaning people money for college and not collecting it).

So they’ve undone the second step of the department’s creation, and parceled out a bunch of programs to other departments, a move that philosophically advances the idea that education has no point or purpose in and of itself, but exists only to serve other interests.

For example, as Jennifer Berkshire points out, now that the Department of Labor exists to serve the interests of bosses, its interest in education centers on producing more compliant meat widgets to serve boss’s interests. Meanwhile, the ed programs now farmed over to the Department of Health and Human Services can be reorganized around RFK Jr.’s interest in eugenics and identifying those lessers whose proper place in society is, apparently, on a slab. 

That unbundling of education programs from the department only undoes the second phase of the department’s origin. But Secretary Linda McMahon’s assertion that these interagency agreement will “cut through layers of red tape” or “return education to the states” is thinly sliced baloney. It’s a lie.

“Instead of dealing with this government department, you will deal with this other government department” does not even remotely equal “You will now have less red tape.” In fact, given that you may have to track down the correct department and then deal with people who don’t have actual expertise and knowledge in education may spell even more red tape.

“We moved this from one government department to another government department” is definitely not the same as “we sent this back to the states.” 

Some programs may be sent back to the states in the sense that the feds would like to zero out the budget entirely which means the states that want to continue those programs will have to create and fund the programns on their own. If you tell your kids, “I’m not making you supper tonight,” I guess that’s kind of like saying “I’m sending the supper program to you.”

But the big ticket items, like IDEA and Title I will still be operating out of DC until such day as Congress decides to rewrite them. And given Dear Leader’s shrinking political capitol, I’m not sure that gutting IDEA is high on his To Do list right now. 

Matt Barnum suggests that gutting the department is largely symbolic and that actual schools won’t feel that much of a difference. On the one hand, that’s true-ish. “What is less clear,” Barnum writes, “is the Trump administration’s longer-term ambitions.” I’m not sure that’s all that mysterious. The far right’s goal, often in tandem with the modernn ed reform movement, is to get government entirely out of the education business while turning education into a get-it-yourself commodity. If government is involved in education at all, it would be 1) to provide a school-shaped holding tank for the difficult students that private schools don’t want and 2) to provide taxpayer funding for schools that deliver the “correct” ideological indoctrination. 

The parcelling-out of the department may only be a small step in that direction, but its long-seething right wing critics can see it as a means of shushing those annoying voices that keep bringing up rules and civil rights and stuff.

The best hope at this point is for a chance to build a new version of the department under a new administration (in an imaginary world in which the Democrats don’t face plant in 2028). But one of the worst things about the department has been the irresistable urge to use those massive grants to force DC-based education ideas on states, and this attack on the department doesn’t really address that problem at all. 

What this latest move clearly does not do is send education back to the states, which is, after all, where education responsibility already rested. The regime may be trying to hamstring and privatize education, but they aren’t sending it anywhere. It’s an unserious lie from unserious people. Stay tuned. 

Categories Education Industry, Funding, Privatization, School Choice, Trump, U.S. Department of Education

Jan Resseger: Trump’s Rush to Dismantle the Federal Government

By dianeravitch
November 19, 2025 //
3

Department after department, agency after agency, in the Federal government has been killed or destroyed by the Trump administration. Foreign aid, which had decades of bipartisan support, was virtually eliminated, meaning certain death for hundreds of thousand of children and families who count on the U.S. for food and medicine. The Department of Defense is now called the Department of War, without Congressional approval. The Consumer Financial Board is gone. The Department of Education has been eviscerated. Civil rights enforcement has been turned upside down, to exclude vulnerable groups for which it was intended.

Jan Resseger is a brilliant, thoughtful analyst of education. I encourage you to sign up for her blog. Here she takes a deep dive into what this chaos means for public schools and students:

Despite that the federal government shutdown has ended, SNAP funds are being distributed, and airplanes are returning to their expected schedules, many of us are feeling disoriented and troubled by the way the federal government seems to be operating under Donald Trump’s leadership. We have been observing the Trump administration violating core principles we learned in civics class are at the heart of our democratic society. And we thought the Constitution was supposed to protect every one of us. In today’s post, I’ll try to name and explore some of the principles that President Trump seems to be violating as he attempts to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education. On Thursday, in Part 2, I’ll explore three serious constitutional violations. All of this is undermining the well-being of our nation’s massive institution of K-12 public schools, the leaders of 13,000 public school districts, over three million public school teachers, and more than 50 million students enrolled.

NY Times economic reporter Tony Romm reflects on the deeper meaning of the recent federal government shutdown: “(T)he president has frequently bent the rules of (the) budget, primarily to reap political benefits or exact retribution. He has found new and untested ways to spare certain Americans, like the military, from the pain of the government closure, while claiming he has no power to help others, including low-income individuals who rely on benefits like SNAP. The result is a shutdown unlike any other, one that has posed disparate and debilitating risks for those unlucky enough to depend on the many functions of government that Mr. Trump has long aspired to cut… At the heart of Mr. Trump’s actions is a belief that the president possesses vast power over the nation’s spending, even though the Constitution vests that authority with Congress. Mr. Trump and his budget director, Russell T. Vought have dismantled entire agencies, fired thousands of workers and canceled or halted billions of dollars in federal spending—all without the express permission of lawmakers.” Romm is not writing about public education, but you will recognize that his concerns apply to public schools and all the rest of our society’s primary institutions.

Trump Seizes the Power of the Purse

The NY Times Editorial Board enumerates three ways the President has grabbed power from Congress  by violating “the power of the purse” granted to Congress in the Constitution: “First, he has refused to spend money that Congress allocated… Second, Mr. Trump has spent money that Congress has not allocated… Third, the president has taken steps that effectively overturn Congress’s spending decisions. In these cases, he has not added or subtracted federal funds, but he has taken other steps that make it so an agency cannot carry out the mission that Congress envisioned for it.”

All year, and at a new and radical level during the recent federal shutdown, President Trump has ordered Education Secretary Linda McMahon and his other appointees in the Department of Education to usurp the power of the purse primarily by slashing the expenditure of Congressionally appropriated funds to staff the department, along with announcing the goal of eliminating the department and its federal role altogether.  The administration’s imposition of permanent layoffs during the federal shutdown focused on firing the professionals responsible for carrying out the very reason a U.S. Department of Education was established back in the fall of 1979, during President Jimmy Carter’s administration: to gather together and administer programs that equalize opportunity for students across the states, where there had historically been unequal protection of students’ rights depending on children’s family income, race, primary language, immigrant status, sexuality or disability.  Huge grant programs like Title I and IDEA and myriad smaller programs ensure that public schools, no matter where a student lives, meet the specific learning needs of all students including those whose primary language is not English and students with disabilities.

During the shutdown, the Trump administration appeared intent on violating the power of the purse at the U.S. Department of Education by radically reducing the staff who do the work—impounding funds congressionally appropriated for paying the staff who enable the Department of Education to fulfill its primary mission.  For example, Education Week‘s Brooke Schultz examines the implication of the shutdown staff cuts for the Office for Civil Rights, on top of massive staff cuts last spring: “Though the latest layoffs are on hold, an enforcement staff that had 560 members spread across 12 offices… will shrink by more than 70% if they go through… Experts worry that without federal enforcement, a fractured interpretation of civil rights laws and protections could take shape across the country—leading to conflicting and politicized handling of cases depending on where students live and what laws are on the books. They worry students in one state might not have the same protections at school as students in another… (S)ome state lawmakers are worried about civil rights complaints not being handled at all.”

During the shutdown, the Trump administration also eliminated most of the remaining staff in the Office for Elementary and Secondary Education who administer the huge and essential Title I grants for school districts serving concentrations of students living in poverty. Trump and McMahon also reduced staff in the Office of Special Education Programs, which oversees IDEA grants, from around 200 to five.  Everyone has understood those proposed shutdown layoffs as the Trump administration’s threat to move special education programming from the Department of Education to the Department of Health and Human Services, despite that the mission of that department emphasizes treatment instead of education. During the shutdown, Federal District Court Judge for the Northern District of California, Susan Illston temporarily blocked the proposed permanent staff layoffs and their implications for undermining the mission of the U.S. Department of Education, though, of course her pause on the staff firings had no effect while the shutdown continued.

The end of the shutdown did temporarily end all the shutdown layoffs. We shall have to wait a couple of months to see what happens. K-12 Dive‘s Kara Arundel explains: “The continuing resolution signed into law Wednesday funds federal education programs at fiscal year 2025 levels. This temporary spending plan expires Jan. 30, unless Congress agrees to a more permanent budget before that deadline.  The deal nullifies the reduction-in-force notices sent to 465 agency employees on Oct. 10. The Education Department is also prohibited from issuing additional RIFs through the end of January and must provide back pay to all employees who did not receive compensation during the shutdown.” Clearly Trump and Vought’s power grab to eliminate much of the staff in a department established and funded by Congress has been blocked only temporarily.

Education Week‘s Mark Lieberman addsthat prior to the shutdown, “The Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan federal watchdog funded by Congress, had been investigating more than 40 instances of the Trump administration potentially violating the Nixon-era federal law that prohibits the executive branch from impounding… funds appropriated by Congress… The GAO had already published decisions before Oct. 1 finding that the administration broke the law by withholding funding from programs supporting school infrastructure upgrades, library and museum services, Head Start, and disaster preparation.”

Supreme Court Gives Trump Power through the Shadow Docket

We have also watched all year as Federal District Court judges have temporarily blocked Trump’s executive orders, but lacked the power to declare them permanently unconstitutional or in violation of federal law. Only the U.S. Supreme Court can do that. These cases then become part of “the shadow docket”— cases decided temporarily on an emergency basis but awaiting a full hearing and final decision. The number of these cases derailed to “the shadow docket” has grown rapidly in this first year of Trump’s second term.

In March, the Department of Education fired nearly 2,200 of its 4,133 staff.  After a Federal District Court judge blocked the layoffs temporarily, the case was subsequently appealed. On July 15, Diane Ravitch reported in her blog: “Yesterday, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that the President could continue to lay off the employees of the Department of Education while leaving aside the legal question of his power to destroy a Department created by Congress 45 years ago… If the Supreme Court ever gets around to deciding whether Trump has the legal authority to abolish the Department of Education, it will already be gone.”

After a Federal District Court case is appealed, the Supreme Court releases a temporary, emergency decision, putting off a formal hearing, oral arguments, and what the NY Times‘ Adam Liptak calls, “an explanation of the court’s rationale” until some future time when the case could be scheduled for hearings on what Liptak calls the Supreme Court’s “merits docket.” Liptak explains: “The question of whether the nation’s highest court owes the public an explanation for its actions has grown along with the rise of the ’emergency docket,’ which uses truncated procedures to produce terse, provisional orders meant to remain in effect only while the courts consider the lawfulness of the challenged actions. In practice, the orders often effectively resolve the case.” His implication here is what Diane Ravitch worries about. By the time the Supreme Court fully considers and decides the case, perhaps years from now, it may be too late.

The shutdown has ended, but it is not clear what will happen to the U.S. Department of Education and the many federal programs that support public school equity across our nation.  Part 2 of this post on Thursday will explore what appear to be serious constitutional violations as they impact children and public schools.

Categories Budget Cuts, Cruelty, Democracy, Disruption, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Lies, Privatization, School Choice, Trump, U.S. Department of Education, Vouchers

Trump Moves to Shut Down US Department of Education

By dianeravitch
November 18, 2025 //
11

Trump said he would close the Department of Education, and he’s well on the way to closing a Congressionally-authorized Department without asking Congress for permission.

He and wrestling entrepreneur Linda McMahon have decided that the Department is responsible for stagnant test scores. Nothing could be stupider but what would one expect from people who look with contempt on education. Especially public schools.

I cannot explain their thinking but know this: Trump wants to destroy research into science and medicine. He wants to control the curriculum and to ban teaching about race, ethnicity and gender.

As Forrest Gump’s mother taught him: “Stupid is as stupid does.”

Michael C. Bender of The New York Times wrote:

The Trump administration announced on Tuesday an aggressive plan to continue dismantling the Education Department, ending the agency’s role in supporting academics at elementary and high schools and in expanding access to college.

Those responsibilities will instead be largely taken over by the Labor Department.

Additional changes include moving a child care grant program for college students and foreign medical school accreditation to the Health and Human Services Department, and transferring Fulbright programs and international education grants to the State Department. The Interior Department will take over the Indian Education Office.

Shifting duties away from the Education Department aligns with President Trump’s goal of eventually closing the agency, a move opposed by teachers’ unions and student rights groups and one that can only be accomplished with an act of Congress.

Less clear was how moving programs to other agencies aligned with Mr. Trump’s reason for closing the Education Department, which he has said was to give states more power in shaping school policies. A senior official at the Education Department said the changes would streamline bureaucracy so that “at the end of the day, it means more dollars to the classroom.”

“Cutting through layers of red tape in Washington is one essential piece of our final mission,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon said in a statement, adding that the changes were an attempt to “refocus education on students, families and schools.”

The plan drew some immediate blowback from Republicans, including Representative Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, who said in a statement that the “department’s core offices are not discretionary functions.”

“They are foundational,” Mr. Fitzpatrick said. “They safeguard civil rights, expand opportunity, and ensure that every child, in every community, has the chance to learn, grow and succeed on equal footing.”

Kevin Carey, the vice president for education and work at New America, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington, said the changes were “wasteful, wrong and illegal.”

“Secretary McMahon is creating a bureaucratic Rube Goldberg machine that will waste millions of taxpayer dollars by outsourcing vital programs to other agencies,” Mr. Carey said. “It’s like paying a contractor double to mow your lawn and then claiming you’ve cut the home maintenance budget. It makes no sense.”

Administration officials have pointed to the recent federal shutdown to justify the moves, noting that schools remained open and students continued to be taught despite nearly all of the Education Department’s staff having been furloughed.

The department has posted several social media memes making such a point. In an X post last week, the department announced that federal workers were returning to the office, adding, “But let’s be honest: did you really miss us at all?”

Liz Huston, a White House spokeswoman, said the administration was committed to shrinking the agency “while still ensuring efficient delivery of funds and essential programs.”

“The Democrat shutdown made one thing unmistakably clear: Students and teachers don’t need Washington bureaucrats micromanaging their classrooms,” Ms. Huston said.

Republicans in charge of the House and Senate in Washington have signaled little enthusiasm for voting on a bill to close the department, which was created by an act of Congress in 1979.

Mr. Trump has also shown little interest in collaborating with Congress in his bid to reshape the federal government, and his administration has continued to seek ways to diminish the Education Department.

“We’re going to shut it down, and shut it down as quickly as possible,” Mr. Trump said in March after signing an executive orderthat directed Education Secretary Linda McMahon to start razing the department.

Ms. McMahon’s first act after joining Mr. Trump’s cabinet this year was to instruct the department’s staff to prepare for its “final mission” of shuttering the agency. The following week, Ms. McMahon fired 1,315 of those workers.

The layoffs decimated the department’s Office for Civil Rights, which was created to enforce Congress’s promise of equal educational opportunity for all students, and eliminated the agency’s research armdedicated to tracking U.S. student achievement, which for many students is at three-decade lows.

In July, after the Supreme Court cleared the way for mass layoffs at the department, the administration moved adult education, family literacy programs and career and technical education to the Labor Department.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Censorship, Disruption, Ethics, Extremism, Freedom to Learn, Freedom to Read, Health, Trump, U.S. Department of Education

Shutdown Over, But Staff at Ed Department Still Threatened

By dianeravitch
November 14, 2025 //
5

With the government shutdown over, staff at the U.S. Department of Education return with fear for what lies ahead.

Before the election, I assumed that Trump could not shutter the Department because he would never get Congress’s approval. Some Republicans would stop him. That’s why he never sought Congressional endorsement.

But it never occurred to me that he could fire almost all its employees.

At some point, the ED building will have only a handful of people: wrestling entrepreneur Linda McMahon; her secretary or two; her speechwriter or two; and one person to clean her office at night. Oh, and Lindsay Burke, Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy and Programs. Lindsay is McMahon’s brain. She wrote the education chapter of Project 2025. As a fellow at the rightwing Heritage Foundation, Lindsay has been an avid proponent of closing the Department of Education for a long time. Lindsay has the wacky idea that the Department is responsible for raising test scores and it hasn’t.

Cutting the Department from 4500 employees to fewer than 10 is a feather in McMahon’s cap for those who want to abandon any federal reponsibilty for low-income kids and kids with special needs or enforcement of civil rights.

Education Week reported:

The reopening of the federal government promises to return hundreds of laid-off U.S. Department of Education staff to work—but employees fear that’s no guarantee they’ll return to business as usual.

The sprawling bill passed by the U.S. House of Representatives on Wednesday and signed by President Donald Trump concludes the longest government shutdown in history and funds the federal government through Jan. 30. It also contains a provision reversing the early October layoffs of thousands of federal workers across numerous agencies, and preventing further federal layoffs until the bill’s expiration.

At the Education Department, that means 465 staff members given reduction-in-force notices in early October are due to be reinstated to their positions. (A court order had temporarily blocked the department and other agencies from firing those employees.)

But Education Department staff—who have been a repeated target of the Trump administration’s efforts to wind down the agency and shrink the federal workforce overall—are skeptical that they’ll be able to return to work as usual. The department has been resistant to reinstating employees when ordered to do so over the past year, and has instead kept staff on paid administrative leave—at times paying out millions of dollars each week to employees who aren’t working.

“The continuing resolution language doesn’t do enough to protect public servants. The Trump administration has shown us repeatedly that they want to illegally dismantle our congressionally created federal agency,” said Rachel Gittleman, the president of the union that represents Education Department staff. “We have no confidence that the U.S. Education Department will follow the terms of the continuing resolution or allow the employees named in October firings to return—or even keep their jobs past January.”

Department officials did not respond to a request for comment. With the shutdown concluded, the department posted on X, “Government shutdown is over, and we’re baaackkkkk! But let’s be honest: did you really miss us at all?”

The laid-off workers come from six of the department’s 17 primary offices and include virtually the entire staff who work on key formula grant programs, including Title I for low-income students and Individuals with Disabilities Education Act grant programs.

Categories Education Reform, Trump, U.S. Department of Education

Tell Linda McMahon What You Think of “Patriotic Education”

By dianeravitch
October 16, 2025 //
20

Trump and Secretary Linda McMahon want to do something that is not only wrong but illegal. They want to mess with the history and social studies that are taught in the nation’s schools. They want schools to teach students only what is great about the U.S., while overlooking the shameful events of the past, like slavery, segregation, the forced removal of Native Americans from their homelands, discrimination against people because of their race, national origin, religion.

Federal law explicitly prohibits any attempt to influence the curriculum of public schools by any federal officer.

If you think it’s a terrible idea to whitewash history, take note of this chance to send a message:

Federal Dept of Education: Please Submit a Comment – Especially Social Studies Teachers – it is worth it.  Federal Dept of Education is  holding its public comment period for Sec. McMahon’s new supplemental priority, “Promoting Patriotic Education,” until this Friday. at 11:59pm Share your thoughts on why a “patriotic” education, especially as defined by the Trump administration, is harmful! As the National Coalition on School Diversity points out, this grant prioritization mobilizes deeply racist and harmful executive orders such as January’s Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling and March’s Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History

 Here is where to submit the comment – look at the comment checklist

https://www.regulations.gov/commenton/ED-2025-OS-0745-0001

 

Categories Curriculum, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Freedom to Learn, History, Trump, U.S. Department of Education

MIT’s President Rejects Trump “Compact” to Abandon Academic Freedom

By dianeravitch
October 13, 2025 //
9

The U.S. Department of Education invited 9 eminent universities to join a “compact” in which they would adopt Trump priorities in exchange for assurances of future federal funding. Trump priorities include abolishing any efforts to advance diversity, equity, and inclusion; assuring that rightwing views are accorded equal time; and agreeing that students would be admitted solely by merit (i.e. test scores). This “compact” means intrusion of the federal government into the internal decision-making of the university.

The first institution to respond was the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Its president Dr. Sally Kornbluth, a cell biologist, wrote this letter to Secretary of Education Linda McMahon, a wrestling entrepreneur:

Regarding the Compact

October 10, 2025

Sally Kornbluth, President

Dear members of the MIT community, 

The U.S. Department of Education recently sent MIT and eight other institutions a proposed “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education,” along with a letter asking that MIT review the document.

From the messages I’ve received, I know this is on the minds of many of you and that you care deeply about the Institute’s mission, its values and each other. I do too. 

After considerable thought and consultation with leaders from across MIT, today I sent the following reply to U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon. 

Sincerely,
Sally Kornbluth

Dear Madam Secretary,

I write in response to your letter of October 1, inviting MIT to review a “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education.” I acknowledge the vital importance of these matters.

I appreciated the chance to meet with you earlier this year to discuss the priorities we share for American higher education.

As we discussed, the Institute’s mission of service to the nation directs us to advance knowledge, educate students and bring knowledge to bear on the world’s great challenges. We do that in line with a clear set of values, with excellence above all. Some practical examples:

These values and other MIT practices meet or exceed many standards outlined in the document you sent. We freely choose these values because they’re right, and we live by them because they support our mission – work of immense value to the prosperity, competitiveness, health and security of the United States. And of course, MIT abides by the law.

The document also includes principles with which we disagree, including those that would restrict freedom of expression and our independence as an institution. And fundamentally, the premise of the document is inconsistent with our core belief that scientific funding should be based on scientific merit alone.

In our view, America’s leadership in science and innovation depends on independent thinking and open competition for excellence. In that free marketplace of ideas, the people of MIT gladly compete with the very best, without preferences. Therefore, with respect, we cannot support the proposed approach to addressing the issues facing higher education.

As you know, MIT’s record of service to the nation is long and enduring. Eight decades ago, MIT leaders helped invent a scientific partnership between America’s research universities and the U.S. government that has delivered extraordinary benefits for the American people. We continue to believe in the power of this partnership to serve the nation.

Sincerely,
Sally Kornbluth

cc
Ms. May Mailman
Mr. Vincent Haley

Categories Academic Freedom, Accountability, Ethics, Higher Education, Trump, U.S. Department of Education

Jan Resseger: Senate Appropriations Committee Rejects Trump Plan to Slash Education Funding

By dianeravitch
August 5, 2025 //
4

Good news!

Jan Resseger reports some surprisingly good news: the Senate Appropriations Committee passed an education budget that restored Trump’s cuts to education and disregarded his plan to eliminate the U.S. Department of Education.

Jan sees their action as evidence that public protest works and that the public does not want to abandon federal funding of schools. Jan also cautions that education may yet be imperiled by Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget, and Secretary of Education Linda McMahon. Vought was overall writer and editor of “Project 2025” and McMahon is a dedicated ideologue.

Nonetheless, it’s heartening to know that some Republicans were willing to stand up to Trump and Reject one of his worst ideas.

She begins:

On July 31st, K-12 Dive’s Kara Arundel reported some very good news: “The Senate Appropriations Committee on Thursday approved a bipartisan spending bill for fiscal year 2026 (FY 26) that would prevent the executive branch from removing Title I and special education programs to agencies outside the U.S. Department of Education. The legislation also rejects several other funding reforms proposed by the Trump administration… In total, the Senate Appropriations Committee recommends funding the Education Department in FY 26 at $79 billion…. That’s $12.3 billion more than President Donald Trump’s proposal of $66.7 billion.  In the current fiscal year, the Education Department is funded at $78.7 billion.”

Open the link to read the details.

Categories Funding, Resistance, U.S. Department of Education
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