This article was originally published by The Emancipator.
President Donald Trump is escalating his McCarthy-esque ideological witch hunt against educators and federally funded programs that seek to ensure all of the nation’s learners have equitable access to what they need to succeed.
His latest move, according to an executive order draft, is to “take all necessary steps” to effectively neuter the Department of Education. This comes on the heels of a newly established “End DEI” portal – in which the public is encouraged to snitch on teachers and schools promoting inclusivity as promoting “divisive ideologies and indoctrination.”
Attempts to shutter the Department of Education are congressionally unlikely and legally questionable.
It is nothing short of an attempt to return the U.S. education landscape to a Jim Crow-era, apartheid state. The Trump administration is sending a clear message that it considers our children pawns in an authoritarian power grab aimed at erasing their culture, history, and identities.
In order to fully understand the modern-day threats to educational freedom, it is important to understand the fight for equity within the American public education system.
The Department of Education became a Cabinet-level agency in 1979, a move pushed by President Jimmy Carter, a Democrat, and congressionally approved. The very next year, Ronald Reagan, a Republican California governor who became president, proposed gutting it – including massive cuts in bilingual education.
Over the next 40 years, partisan squabbles over the agency’s funding, focus, and place in a democratic society continue to dominate Congress and the nation’s education discourse.
The Department of Education helps oversee a host of programs — many of which are aimed at helping ensure equitable access for more than 50 million of the nation’s students. It administers the $18.4 billion Title I program, which helps supplement funding to K-12 schools with students in poverty.
The agency also oversees the $15.5 billion in programmatic funding that supports equitable educational access to students with disabilities.
Billions in federal student aid help ensure that students who might not otherwise be able to do so, have a way to earn college degrees. While the agency has rolled out a number of pedagogically flawed initiatives, it has also sought to right itself in collaboration with education advocates.
Trump and Republicans in Congress are disingenuously promoting shuttering the Department of Education in favor of a return to state and local education control.
But state and local governments already largely control education — especially in matters of curriculum.
Further, a disproportionate number of so-called “red states” have long ranked at the bottom of most education measures, including high school graduation rates and the percentage of students who net collegiate degrees. This raises questions about creating a further educational divide.
Current political debates over the level of government control in education are unfurling against a historical backdrop of racist policies aimed at forcing children of color to conform to White, Christian, English-speaking societal norms.
The U.S. government funded abusive church-run boarding schools that severed Indigenous children from their families and their culture. Separate but equal policies forced Black children into under-resourced classrooms and robbed them of equitable opportunities.
The nativist English-only push at local, state, and now, even federal, levels, targets Spanish speakers (among others) and perpetuates a harmful narrative that White and English speaking is “right” and all others must conform.
Though the landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling declared racial segregation in schools unconstitutional, such practices continued to exist by default and design for decades.
The reverberations of structural racism are still felt today through the impact of the generations-long denial of access to equitable educational opportunities.
All of this amounts to one simple fact: Controlling how our children see themselves and what they learn leaves them ill-equipped with the necessary knowledge to fight back against a racist regime.
For the sake of this generation, and generations to come, we must resist.
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