De-Valuing Education
Terry H. Schwadron
Oct. 29, 2024
It would seem obvious that education is the single most-focused responsibility for governments to shape the nation’s values for the future.
Right after securing communal police and fire services for public safety, educating the next generations would seem the biggest priority any society has — even though countries handle that question a lot differently from one another. If we’ve learned nothing else in this election period, our kids need to know more about everything we used to lump as civics.
Hell, the obvious racism and hate displayed at Donald Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally on Sunday should reflect just how far off-base our public displays of distaste for diversity and inclusion conversations in the classroom have taken us as a society.
In that sense, it is remarkable that Donald Trump and Republicans up and down the ballot across states have targeted the federal Department of Education for elimination, much as they have for decades. It is a theme in the most competitive Senate and House races, it is a focus for the Project 2025 document drawn by former Trump appointees.
Former Trump Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, who served a term universally regarded as disastrous for public education, says she would come back for a second term if Trump’s mission was closing her former department.
Let’s acknowledge that it is states and localities that run most public schools in the nation and raise the money to operate schools, but since the President Jimmy Carter era, it has been the federal education department that has taken the lead role in setting standards and testing, has fed students breakfast and lunches under the $18-billion Title I program, has offered student loans that run to $1.6 trillion, has pursued Civil Rights enforcement and generally has evangelized for education needs as state efforts have fluctuated in myriad ways that show marked patterns of difference, whether by race, class or geography.
Republican Campaign Over Time
In part, the promises to target the U.S. Education Department are a continuation of traditional Republican concerns about cutting federal spending and moving authority to states, if not more local district boards. The vows blare that the federal department is duplicative and that they set objectionable regulations that local authorities must fulfil.
But there is a deeper mistrust here for federal authority of all kinds, and a specific line of criticism of increasing strength that is arguing to squeeze public education for support of private and parochial schools. In that regard, the discussion about how to structure support of education in our country is really a battleground for the culture wars — whether over books and curriculum, church-state issues or support for student loan amelioration.
Around the country, there are similar messages we hear from Trump and Project 2025 among Republican candidates.
Wisconsin’s Eric Hovde, Republican Senate candidate, called the Education Department “one of the worst monstrosities that’s ever been created” and a target to save money. Ohio Senate candidate Bernie Moreno wants “to get rid of some of these agencies that don’t make any sense, like the Department of Education and just move that money to the states.” In Montana, Republican Senate candidate Tim Sheey said, “We have a Department of Education, which I don’t think we need anymore. It should go away,” specifying that Civil Rights enforcement is no longer needed. “We formed that department so little Black girls could go to school down South, and we could have integrated schooling. We don’t need that anymore,” he said.
Of course, those Civil Rights efforts also include issues of gender and identity, including the endless controversies over transgender student policies.
Closing the agency would require congressional action, people in both parties agree, and likely require a supermajority of 60 votes in the Senate, making it a political impossibility for now. Democrats, who are supported by public teacher unions, are opposed. Even among Republicans dissented in a 2023 vote in the House to abolish the department when it was offered as an amendment to a parents’ rights bill, failed.
Partisan Split in Education
Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., head of the Senate Appropriations Committee, said if the department is eliminated, it would “unleash absolute chaos in the daily lives of millions of families” who depend on public schools.
Project 2025, the conservative Heritage Foundation document, outlines sending programs in Education to other departments.
A survey by the Pew Research Center in July Democrats (64%) said they have a favorable opinion of the Education Department, compared to 26% of Republicans. Again the opinions curiously were the exact opposite for government’s role in, say, the abortion argument. Those favoring elimination see undue federal involvement in education issues that should be decided by parents, not bureaucrats.
But the voices also reflect that efforts to promote diversity in curriculum, racial equity in daily life and to protect rights of transgender students is grating for many. As candidate Hovde in Wisconsin voiced it, “They’re trying to push gender ideology, which is just nuts. They’re trying to social engineer your children. So I am just so fundamentally opposed at this.”
As president, Trump proposed cuts to federal education spending. But he made no effort to eliminate the department, and Congress did not go along with his request for huge cuts. DeVos, his education secretary, said repeatedly that she wanted to take public money for private schools, and personally saw education as a path to bring about a Christian nation.
As an issue, this won’t stop with voting on Nov. 5.
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