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Cruel to Your School

Trump’s war on public education Dejan Krsmanovic

“No such department exists in the federal government,” Elon Musk pronounced recently of the Department of Education. While the official dismembering of ED—as it is referred to distinguish it from the other DOE, the Department of Energy—will require an act of Congress, Musk’s wrecking crew has already succeeded in hollowing out the beleaguered agency, laying off staff, shutting off funding, and winnowing its mission.

This isn’t the first time the department, a perennial target of conservatives, has been stripped for parts. The OG version of ED survived just one year before losing its department imprimatur. Roughly 150 years ago, a brand-new Department of Education had been chartered with an ambitious vision: evening out the quality of schools throughout the land in the aftermath of the Civil War and making the case for public education as a worthy investment.

But the project and its head, Henry Barnard, the nation’s first commissioner of education, quickly ran into the buzzsaw of Reconstruction politics. Abolitionists were keen on the new department, while the former Confederate states revolted against the idea that the federal government would now be monitoring the literacy rates of the formerly enslaved. Barnard barely survived long enough to deliver his first report on the state of the nation’s schools to Congress before his agency was demoted to a mere office, its funding reduced. Even Barnard’s own salary was cut.

“The tactics were very similar to what we’re seeing today,” says education historian Adam Laats. The funding cuts ensured that people would leave, the department’s programs withering in their wake, but the nineteenth-century version of the wrecking crew also understood the power of demonizing civil servants. If the cuts to his budget and staff made the job more difficult, his sense that he’d somehow become the enemy in the eyes of the officials he served made it impossible. “Henry Barnard felt personally humiliated. You can smell it in his papers,” says Laats.

Barnard resigned in 1870 and returned to his native Connecticut, his dream of transforming American education abandoned. In the words of present-day administrative state smasher Russell Vought, he’d been “traumatically affected.”

Fast forward a century and a half, and the same unresolved questions that torpedoed Barnard’s project haunt the current effort to do away with the Department of Education. Should the federal government be involved in education at all or is that a job for the states? What do we owe the students with the least? And is using state power to further equality the goal, or the problem?

The insistence that schooling can smooth out our inequalities is an exceptionally American idea. “Public schooling was arguablytheAmerican public investment of the early twentieth century,” argues Tracy Steffes in her history of modern U.S. education, School, Society, and State. Even when the Great Depression birthed the welfare state, Americans went with a stingier version of the sorts of social programs that took root in other industrial economies. In lieu of a more expansive and expensive social safety net, Americans plowed money into public education, says Steffes.

The idea that education could equalize society took hold with a vengeance, playing out in Congress and the courts. The landmark Brown v. Board of Educationdecision didn’t just strike down school segregation but laid the groundwork for laws prohibiting all kinds of discrimination against students. Lyndon Johnson’s landmark 1965 education law, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, took the agenda even further. Now the goal was to use federal power and purse strings to overcome the destructive legacy of racial segregation and to narrow the chasm between the country’s wealthiest students and its poorest.

The vision so feared by the Confederacy in Henry Barnard’s day would come to fruition. As legal scholar Derek Black explains in his new book, Dangerous Learning: The South’s Long War on Black Literacy, not just the prohibition of discrimination but the goal of racial equality is woven through federal education policy. “Education bureaucracy disaggregates every aspect of education by race–from basic attendance, test scores, and graduation rates to suspensions, expulsions, advanced placement opportunities, access to qualified teachers, and more,” writes Black.

Consider George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind law, enacted two decades ago with sweeping bipartisan backing. Bush took Johnson’s equalizing vision and updated it for the data era. All students would now have to meet the same goal of grade-level proficiency in English and math. States had to publicly report results for student “subgroups”: racial and ethnic groups, students in special education, English language learners, and low-income students. NCLB is largely remembered for the backlash it spurred against standardized testing, but at its heart was the inspiring vision that all kids couldreach the same level of academic achievement, no matter where they started. Today, we have a word for that sort of thinking: woke. Bush’s sales pitch on behalf of his signature law, studded with nods to equal opportunity and “the soft bigotry of low expectations,” would never make it past Elon Musk’s DOGE goons, nor most of Trump’s cabinet picks. “Equality is the pursuit of equal opportunity; equity is the false promise of equal outcome,” wrote now defense chief Pete Hegseth (along with coauthor David Goodwin) in his 2022 screed Battle for the American Mind. “It’s cultural Marxism and socialism.”

Making the case for the continued existence of the Department of Education requires explaining what it actually does, territory that bears little resemblance to the fervid imaginings of right-wing ideologues. There is Title I, the Johnson-era program that distributes more than $18 billion a year to schools and districts that serve low-income students. There is the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, the nearly fifty-year-old law that gives students with disabilities the right to attend public schools—a right they previously didn’t have. There is the Pell Grant program that helps low-income students attend college.

All of these functions are intended to give students the same opportunities. And because of that, they are essentially DEI under the Trump administration’s increasingly expansive definition. Under the new administration’s rule-by-key-word-search, both equityand equalityare now banned terms.

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Live Free or DEI

In late January, results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), known as the nation’s report card, revealed that achievement gaps between the most and least advantaged American students have become chasms in the wake of the pandemic. Among the few bright spots were the schools run by the Department of Defense. If these schools were a state, their student performance in math and reading would earn them the top spot. President Trump marked the occasion by directing Hegseth draw up a plan to enable students at the Pentagon-run schools to instead attend private and religious schools, a top administration priority. (This has come up again and again over the years, but it always gets rejected because it’s wildly unpopular with military families who see it as a big threat to these schools.)

In a previous era, pundits and education officials might have rushed to one of the 161 DoDEA schools in search of what is going so right—what school reformers like to call the “secret sauce.” Is it the school system’s top-down structure, so at odds with our radically decentralized education system? Or the fact that teachers are paid handsomely, at least comparatively speaking? Or might the secret lie in the original recipe, one that committed the schools to equality by design?

Desegregation came to the U.S. military beginning in 1948, by way of an order from Harry Truman. With schools still segregated, especially in the South, the military set up its own integrated schools. Today the DoDEA’s schools are a model of integration, by race as well as class. “Children of junior soldiers attend classes alongside the children of lieutenant colonels. They play in the same sports leagues after school,” noted a New York Timesstory in 2023, entitled “Who Runs the Best U.S. Schools? It May Be the Defense Department.” In other words, a likely reason that these schools do so well is because they are “woke” in the most expansive version of the term. They start from the belief that equality is a worthy goal and that education should be organized in a way that reflects that goal. That is exactly the vision that is on the chopping block today.

Trump’s early education-related orders have been heavy on faux outrage and doublespeak. In the name of “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling,” schools must now teach “patriotic education” or risk punishment from the federal government. At least fifty-five Department of Education employees were immediately put on indefinite paid leave, most for having attended a DEI training seminar offered by the department since at least Trump’s first term.

In less spectacular fashion, the administration has been taking aim at the true function of the department: its enforcement of equality as a goal. ED’s Civil Rights division, which exists to protect the rights of the most vulnerable students, will now prioritize investigations into reverse racism against white students, and antisemitism, which, as defined by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), often includes criticism of the state of Israel. Another target: so-called gender ideology. The division’s first official case will investigate a gender-neutral bathroom in a Denver high school, constructed in response to student demands, for which the district is said to be “discriminating against its female students.”

Of the thousands active complaints under investigation when Trump took office, those pertaining to race and gender discrimination have been indefinitely paused. Meanwhile, the division’s incendiary “Dear Colleague” letter, sent to every public K-12 school and college, threatens institutions that defy the administration’s crusade against DEI with the loss of funding.

Musk’s DOGE team has also taken a chainsaw to the department’s research arm, the Institute of Education Sciences. The cuts, totaling nearly $1 billion, fall heaviest on research focused on “what works” in public education. The answer to the question of which practices and approaches improve a broad range of outcomes for all kids has long proven frustratingly elusive. Now it won’t be asked at all. The Department also announced recently that it is canceling one of the tests that has been used to measure student performance since the 1970s.

“At the very least, government should not be into the race, sex, and LGBT bean counting business,” opined anti-DEI crusader Richard Hanania recently. Hanania was taking something of a victory lap. It was his argument—that “woke” is essentially civil rights law, and therefore the latter is bad—that informed Trump’s early executive order ending affirmative action for government contractors, which had been in place since 1965. Hanania, who once dabbled in online white supremacy, makes the case in his book The Origins of Wokethat Lyndon Johnson started the trend of the government “considering race and sex and being woke all the time.” Other figures in the Trump-o-sphere take Hanania’s argument one step further, foreshadowing where the administration might go next. The Claremont Institute’s Scott Yenor, an influential advisor to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis on higher education who was recently appointed chair of the board of trustees at the University of West Florida, has pushed to make state employees civilly liable for collecting data on the basis of race or sex, as a challenge to what he describes as “the country’s corrupting ‘civil rights’ regime.” Yenor, by the way, is best known for his loud insistence that women should forego college in favor of motherhood.

Hanging over all of these claims, of course, is the putrescence of race science, and the belief, shared by Musk and his fellow oligarchs, along with many Trumpian intellectuals, that hierarchy is both good and natural. In this view, a cognitive elite with the highest of the high IQs deserves to rule over the rest of us, all in our natural places. In this fixed economy of spoils, there is little point to an institution whose goal is “equalizing.” It can’t be done.

Two decades before the original Department of Education met its untimely end, Horace Mann penned the report that contained the quote that he is best, perhaps exclusively, known for: “Education, then, beyond all other devices of human origin, is the great equalizer of the conditions of men, the balance wheel of the social machinery.”

Today, his words land as the sort of human capital thinking that has dominated education and career discourse for decades. Study STEM and prosper, youngsters. And yet Mann’s famous line was intended as a warning about the dire inequality that threatened to consume the country. “The distance between the two extremes of society is lengthening, instead of being abridged,” Mann also wrote. “With every generation, fortunes increase on the one hand, and some new privation is added to poverty on the other.”

It was 1848 when Mann, then the secretary of education in Massachusetts, delivered his twelfth annual report to the state Board of Education. Revolution was sweeping across Europe, and Mann clearly feared that a similar fate was inevitable in this country. His report, what would typically have been a bureaucratic affair, is full of lurid images of populists in revolt: the “wanton destruction” of property, burning haystacks, the demolition of machinery, acid sprinkled on the finery of the well-to-do. Invest in public education, “universal and complete,” was his message to the elites of the day—or this will be your fate.

Today’s fake populists, Musk and his DOGE wrecking crew chief among them, seek to deepen inequality, in part by dismantling not just the federal Department of Education but the institution of public education itself. They may find that Mann’s prediction comes back to bite them. Deprive your lessers of learning, and before long, the pitchforks will come for you.