Hi everyone!
Trump has been cleared by the Supreme Court to fire over 1,000 people in the Department of Education. Trump campaigned on this, and the court, after a lower court's ruling saying he could not fire a ton of people, voted 6-3, along party lines, in favor of letting the terminations go through. Linda McMahon is the first Education Secretary who was confirmed by the Senate into the position who promised to destroy the agency she was slated to lead.
The view of the Trump administration, per a Trump Truth Social post, is that by removing the DOE, the government is "giving the Power back to the PEOPLE." The determinations as to how schools and education departments will be handled at the state and local levels. Trump believes that this will mean that "America’s Students will be the best, brightest, and most Highly Educated anywhere in the World."
Congress would be the body that would need to officially shutter the department, since they were the ones that created it in 1979 under President Jimmy Carter. So what does the DOE do? The Department of Education administers federal grant programs like Title I, an $18.4 billion program for K-12 schools where there are high-rates of poverty. In practice, some of the funding is used for diversity programs and what's known as culturally responsive teaching. This is where teachers, instead of bringing students into the culture of education and academia, keep a student's education mired in their own limited backgrounds and bring their extra-curricular "culture" into the classroom. Funding for students with disabilities, as well as student loan programs, also fall under the DOE.
When I was in college, I had a part-time job at the school's Public Affairs Office, which was headed by a woman named Diane. Students on campus were protesting about something (it was always something) and while I was staying out of the fray, I did end up talking to Diane about it. The students were bothered by class distinctions at our very lefty, very small liberal arts school, and while I don't remember the nuances of their complaint, I remember what Diane said about class and education.
Part of education, she said, is taking on a new set of values, be they aesthetic, monetary, or goal-oriented, along with the rest of the class. By her estimation, once students graduated from our tiny school, they were all part of the same class—the educated class, steeped in essentially bougie values. By the time we graduated, we could all talk at length about Chaucer over brunch, we could get jobs in high-end fields, we could stand with poise and confidence, speak our minds—even if those views were a bit unorthodox, and hold our own with anyone. We graduated not just with a degree but a new position in the social order.
Education is not just about test scores, and the elevation that comes with more learning, as it has tended to in our society, is not just about knowledge but about comportment, competence, confidence, and versatility. For some graduates, that's simply the status quo, the college degree is a rite of passage to gain adulthood into the culture in which they were raised. For others, such as those helped by Title I, a degree should, and does, offer class mobility, which is a uniquely American opportunity.
When we tell students who come from poverty and backgrounds that do not value education that this culture from which they come is as essential to success as that of academic success, we are breaking the promise of education entirely. The concept of culturally responsive education does not elevate students but leaves them trapped in cultural conditions that do not have the same kind of opportunities for success. Perhaps with a remaking of the culture of education in the United States, which has been hijacked by socialist-minded ideologues, leaving scholars begging at the gates, we can return to education to what it should be: a knowledge delivery system that elevates students toward greater opportunities than they could have gotten had they stayed home.
Trump has said that the end of the DOE does not mean the end of funding, but that these funds would be distributed via other agencies. For example, Treasury could handle student loads, which the administration is cutting back on anyway under the Big Beautiful Bill. The Office for Civil Rights will see cuts, as will the Institute of Education Sciences, which oversees federal testing to essentially deliver the Nation's Report Card. American education, even in public schools, was far better prior to 1979 than after it. That Nation's Report Card has been in continuous decline ever since. When what you're doing isn't working, it's a bold but necessary move to try something else.