Julie Vassilatos lives in Chicago, where she has been active as a parent in the resistance to privatization. In this post, she explains why Trump insists on closing the U.S. Department of Educatuon.

She writes:

What a difference a year makes. 

One minute you’re watching your city absorb tens of thousands of new residents, asylum seekers bussed up unannounced from Texas wearing shorts and flip flops in the dead of winter, watching your city do the best they can to make room, to make a home, to help integrate these new neighbors into our city of immigrants. 

Blink, and it’s the next winter. Now you see ICE snatching parents from school drop off, right in front of their kids. 

It’s a whole new world. But one, at least, in which deportation chief Tom Homan is really quite far behind in his local quotas because “the people in Chicago are too educated about their rights.” Apparently this makes his work difficult.

Or take another example. A year ago we lived in a country with a Department of Education. 

Blink, and that Department is in rubble on the ground, drastically defunded and illegally dismantled. 

We’re not quite there yet. But we’re about to be. The right has been hollering about shutting down the Department of Education almost since its modern inception. Now they get everything they have ever wanted with Elon Musk doing the chopping in the interest of cost savings. 

But even if it cost nothing, the DoE would have to be extinguished under our current regime. Because it only exists for one reason. It only has ever existed for one reason. It first came into a short-lived existence for only one reason. And that reason is really, really out of style just at the moment.

The only reason for the Department of Education is equity.

The very first time the idea of a national department of education came up was in the aftermath of the Civil War, when Congressman James A. Garfield—very much understanding the leveling capabilities of education—persuaded Congress to create a department whose sole purpose was to support public education for all Americans, particularly for new immigrants and formerly enslaved people. He thought that “improving the education of citizens was the wisest expenditure a government could make” (Goodyear, 171). And, sure enough, right off the bat, Democratic opponents of such a federal authority cranked and complained about Why do we have to support millions of lazy people who already are hogging at the government trough blah blah Why should Congress have to appropriate public funds for “illegal and improper political purposes” blah blah blah blah….ad nauseam (Goodyear, 173). 

(Cue the creepy Twilight Zone music as the reader slowly realizes that we may be permanently stuck in some kind of post-Civil War time loop)

In short order, Garfield’s embattled Department was whittled down to a Bureau; educational equity for all Americans went very out of vogue in the decades post-Reconstruction. 

Fast forward eighty years and the nation was still, unsurprisingly, mired in educational inequity. Segregated by race, schools for Black Americans were grossly underfunded and inadequate. 1954’s Brown v Board of Education established school desegregation, but after a painful 20 years and with public schools still not serving all Americans remotely equally, the modern Department of Education was created by Congress in 1979. 

This is its first stated goal: “to strengthen the Federal commitment to ensuring access to equal educational opportunity for every individual.”

It’s had a rocky life, with folks on the right wanting to kill it immediately upon birth, and ever since. But its goals have always remained the same: to advance educational equity in a nation sorely in need of it. 

Anyway you can see why it has to die now, for so many obvious reasons. Take your pick. 

Nothing that exists solely to promote equity must be allowed. 

That is a bad goal. 

Trump doesn’t like it. 

We already have it. 

The word “equity” makes white people feel bad and sad. 

If someone is horning in on my equity it’s not fair. 

Some people are more equity than others. 

Now we have a newly minted Secretary of Education, Linda McMahon, who on her first day sent out a missive concerning her department’s “final mission.” She knows little about its proper work and brings with her to the role, mainly decades of a white-dominant WWE culture that is steeped in racist tropes. Freshly confirmed, McMahon is here to burn it all down, and she is happy to. 

But what is this department that’s dying, anyway? What is this beast that needs to be sacrificed? Former IL congressman Adam Kinzinger shared a good, brief explainer last week, “The Grinch Who Stole Education,” about what it does and doesn’t do. It does financially support struggling schools, administer student loans, uphold federal laws supporting disabled students, and enforce civil rights laws in public education. It does not dictate curriculum or teacher standards or exercise local control, despite what Trump says. 

A much deeper dive, “Cruel to Your School,” comes from Jennifer Berkshire in The Baffler, for those interested in well-narrated, riveting history. Her conclusion is the same as Kinzinger’s—that the entire point of those who want to kill the DoE is to increase the wealth of the wealthy at the expense of children and the marginalized. Cutting this department, as well as all the others, will pay for a $4.5T tax cut for the wealthiest. “Children in need are in the crosshairs,” says Kinzinger, and the wealthy elites who stand to benefit the most are Trump, Musk, and friends. Berkshire notes that “Musk and his DOGE wrecking crew seek to deepen inequality by dismantling not just the federal Department of Education, but the institution of public education itself.” After all, in the world according to Musk, “a cognitive elite with the highest IQs deserves to rule over the rest of us, all in our natural places” in a “good and natural” hierarchy. “In this fixed economy of spoils, there is little point to an institution whose goal is ‘equalizing.’ It can’t be done.”

Peter Greene of Curmudgucation recently explained that these people hate the notion of equity so much that they have set up a tattle line for school districts. If you spot anything like equity happening at your school, you are to whisper your findings to a special website, promoted by Mom for Liberty Tiffany Justice. (I’ve written about her and her cronies….here.) So in the rubble of the former Department of Education, we will at least still have a federal mechanism to root out every last trace of equity from our public school system—as long as we have one. 

In this rather horrifying moment, in this context of the violent bludgeoning of a basic and centuries-long effort to create an equitable public education system, I’m giving the last word to Eve Ewing. When those with power strip everything away, shred every value, crush every intention toward a society of justice and equity, it is not enough merely to be angry about what has been taken away. We must—we MUST—dream a good and right future. There is no other way. 

“[I]t’s imperative to understand this nightmarish moment as actually being a reflection of someone else’s dream. Groups like Moms for Liberty and The Heritage Foundation have spent years bringing their most deeply held conjurations across the threshold into reality. Regardless of who prevails in the halls of power, who has more lawmakers and more funding on their side, in this one matter — the matter of imagination — we are equals. So how do we use our dreams as a map forward?

“It’s not enough to be afraid of the laws and rules we don’t want to see in schools. We have to clarify our visions of what, how, where and with whom see we want our beloveds to learn. What are we fighting for? Who are the young people you love most, and what do you dream for them? What are the values you hold dear that you want desperately for them to understand, to inherit? What are the histories, the legacies, the ancestors you need them to know? Where can you and the people you trust build collective power to make space for that teaching, for that learning?”

Beyond using your imagination in powerful ways, what are some things you can do?

There’s the ever-necessary Call Your Congressman.

Go to school board meetings. Go to PTA meetings or Local School Council meetings. Find your allies and band together. Throw in your lot with larger orgs and increase your power. 

Use that above-mentioned equity tattle line in ways that seem appropriate to the moment. 

Get acquainted with the work of the Journey 4 Justice Alliance and attend their upcoming national virtual town hall, “The Threats of Dismantling the USDOE on Black and Brown School Districts,” Thursday, March 20th, 7 pm EST. 

Listen to the outstanding Jennifer Berkshire/Jack Schneider podcast about public education, “Have You Heard?” You’ll learn a lot and it’s painless, even entertaining, and sometimes actually hopeful.