Could 29, 2025
The Trump administration’s funding cuts and assaults on public schooling are just the start.
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Protesters stage a “study-in” in entrance of the Division of Schooling on March 21, 2025.(Kayla Bartkowski / Getty Pictures)
Burn it down. That’s what seems to be the guiding technique of the Trump administration—notably in relation to schooling. Cancel the grants and contracts. Fireplace the workers. Shred the mission assertion. Shut the division.
Within the coming months and years, nonetheless, our understanding of the story is prone to change. After we look again at what occurred after the administration minimize to the bone, we’ll seemingly see {that a} totally different technique was at play.
On the coronary heart of the DOGE-MAGA alliance are two organizational philosophies. The primary is Elon Musk’s puerile perception that trimming organizational “fats” can solely be performed by slicing away the “muscle” to which it’s connected. Organizations, in different phrases, could be made stronger via drastic elective surgical procedure. The second philosophy is Donald Trump’s view that CEOs rule from on excessive. Chief executives shouldn’t be hemmed in by rule-bound businesses and politically nonaligned civil servants.
Put these collectively, and what you get is a two-part technique. First, empty the establishments. Then, construct them again in a fashion that ensures whole loyalty to the person on the high.
In schooling, the general public has targeted principally on act one—the emptying of establishments—as if there have been no second act to come back. Largely, it’s because Donald Trump vowed to shut the US Division of Schooling, which he appears to be doing. It is very important recall, nonetheless, that this has been a Republican speaking level for practically half a century, starting with Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential marketing campaign. Closing the Division of Schooling has continued to play nicely with constituents; but it surely’s extra of a symbolic goal than it’s a substantive coverage goal. Sure, there have been large layoffs. Sure, cuts to grants and contracts have been devastating. Sure, the work of the company is being scattered to the winds. However that’s not the place the story ends.
In act two, the administration will start constructing again its schooling program. And, because it restores the so-called muscle—whether or not or not that occurs inside one thing known as the Division of Schooling—it is going to accomplish that with the goal of purely partisan policymaking. This, in the end, is what the general public ought to be monitoring, as a result of that is the much more threatening gambit. Leveling the Division of Schooling could be one factor; weaponizing it’s fairly one other.
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Indicators of what such a reconstituted schooling program will appear to be are already coming into view. Take, for instance, “patriotic schooling”—a preoccupation of Trump’s, which gave rise to the 1776 Fee within the waning days of his first time period. As signaled by the govt order banning “radical indoctrination in Ok-12 schooling,” the administration stays dedicated to precisely the kind of federal overreach that the president’s Republican enablers declare he’ll cut off. “Kids can be taught to like America. Kids can be taught to be patriots,” declared White Home coverage adviser Stephen Miller at a latest press convention. “Kids can be taught civic values for faculties that need federal taxpayer funding.”
Trump-loyal state officers are already doing their half to enact the administration’s curricular ambitions. In Oklahoma, new social research requirements require highschool college students to “establish discrepancies in 2020 elections outcomes,” together with broadly debunked claims about alleged voter fraud. After Oklahoma’s state Senate declined to vote on the controversial requirement, the brand new requirements handed by default. Ryan Walters, the state’s high schooling official, took a victory lap celebrating what he described as probably the most “unapologetically conservative, pro-America social research requirements within the nation.”
We are able to additionally count on the Division of Schooling to stress states, faculty districts, and faculties to desert the packages and insurance policies Trump opposes. The division’s revamped civil rights division, as an example, lately launched an investigation of a Denver highschool the place college students had lobbied efficiently for the creation of a gender-neutral rest room. Such politically motivated probes will grow to be extra commonplace within the months and years to come back. In live performance with compliant states, the administration will use its weaponized Division of Schooling to make unprecedented calls for on what’s taking place inside school rooms.
The administration will even use its schooling muscle to denationalise Ok-12 schooling. Tucked into the price range reconciliation invoice, the Academic Alternative for Kids Actis a private-school voucher scheme that additionally capabilities as a tax shelter for the rich. By channeling public {dollars} to non-public faculties, this system will instantly profit the nation’s wealthiest households at taxpayers’ expense, and can seemingly improve participation in state-funded voucher packages. On the similar time, it is going to make it potential for these contributing to voucher-granting organizations to take pleasure in an unprecedented one hundred pc reimbursement whereas additionally avoiding capital positive factors taxes on items of company inventory.
Lastly, the White Home will proceed working to reshape America’s faculties and universities. Trump’s warfare on Harvard has dominated the headlines, however what’s extra regarding is the administration’s plan to restrict entry to increased schooling. People have lengthy seen education because the main car for making the nation extra equal. But Trump rejects that view completely, seeing equality of alternative not as a worthwhile aspiration however, moderately, as a misguided effort to flatten out pure hierarchies. Within the administration’s view, the nation sends too many youngsters to school who don’t belong there—an instance of misguided social engineering. The White Home price range, together with a complementary array of GOP increased schooling proposals, would make scholar loans dearer and cut back scholar eligibility for Pell grants. And that’s seemingly simply the beginning. In an interview with The Wall Avenue Journal final yr, influential right-wing activist Christopher Rufo acknowledged that his objective is to cut back the variety of college students who attend school by half.
There was no small quantity of hand-wringing concerning the downsizing of the federal authorities, notably within the realm of schooling. Prior to now 4 months, we’ve got witnessed a retreat from institutional accountability, the degradation of organizational infrastructure, and sharp reductions in workers and budgets. However the actual drama is barely simply starting, and we should always not mistake this intermission for the tip of the manufacturing.
Having laid waste to each the animating imaginative and prescient for federal involvement in schooling and the structural capability for realizing that imaginative and prescient, the Trump administration has begun to lift the curtain on act two. And although the second half of this tragedy isn’t but written, the plot factors are clear. Until we intervene, it ends in disaster.
Jack Schneider
Jack Schneider is Dwight W. Allen Distinguished Professor of Schooling on the College of Massachusetts Amherst, and the coauthor, with Jennifer C. Berkshire, of A Wolf on the Schoolhouse Door and the forthcoming The Schooling Wars: A Citizen’s Information and Protection Guide. Additionally they cohost the schooling coverage podcast Have You Heard.
Jennifer C. Berkshire
Jennifer C. Berkshire hosts the schooling podcast Have You Heard. She is the creator, with Jack Schneider, of The Schooling Wars: A Citizen’s Information and Protection Guide.
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