Backlash Politics and the Dismantling of the U.S. Department of Education

In March, Donald Trump signed an executive order to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education (USED).  Thousands of employees were fired without notice and billions of dollars in grants and research projects were abruptly canceled. The administration also threatened to withhold federal funds from states and districts that refused to sign on to its bigoted crusade against diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs. 

The gutting of USED was part of a shadowy campaign to upend the federal government that had many rightly sounding alarms about fascism. But it was also a reminder that the historical parallels for what’s happening today in the United States include not only Nazi Germany in the 1930s, but the United States in the post-Civil War period, when the forces of reaction and white supremacy attempted to reverse the outcome of a war they had lost. Both the original creation and the recent demise of the Department of Education are part of the backlash politics that have been a defining feature of U.S. political life since the Civil War.

USED: Born in Struggle, Shaped by Backlash

In 1867, two years after the Union defeated the Confederate army, Congress created the first Department of Education. It was a tiny agency with a commissioner and three clerks charged with gathering statistics about school attendance and taxes. But it reflected an understanding among victorious abolitionists and radical Republicans that providing education to the newly free Black population was a key to rebuilding the nation on more democratic terms. Radical Republicans in Congress similarly demanded that former Confederate states guarantee universal access to free public education in their state constitutions as a condition of re-admission to the Union. Within a few years, the “Reconstruction Amendments” banning slavery, establishing birthright citizenship, and extending the right to vote to Black men were added to the Constitution, radically redefining U.S. society.

These developments terrified white supremacists, including then-President Andrew Johnson, who sought to block progress toward a multiracial democracy. Out of such fears emerged the Ku Klux Klan, Jim Crow segregation, and another hundred years of separate and unequal treatment for U.S. citizens based on race. A year after it was created, the Department of Education was downsized to an “office” with minimal resources and impact where it remained for more than a century.

In 1979, when the modern Department of Education was created during Jimmy Carter’s presidency, it was also a response to mass struggle for equality. The Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and ’60s had faced down Jim Crow justice and challenged the country to live up to its unrealized democratic ideals. Under mounting pressure from decolonization abroad and militant protest at home, the Supreme Court declared separate and unequal schooling illegal. This was soon followed by passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts that opened a path to a genuine multiracial democracy for the first time in the country’s history, just 60 years ago.

During this same period, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 initiated the first significant streams of federal funding for education through programs like Head Start, Title I, and later IDEA (Individuals with Disabilities Education Act). As the department’s website still says — before it disappears down the administration’s Orwellian “memory hole” — the Civil Rights Movement “of the 1960s and 1970s brought about a dramatic emergence of the department’s equal access mission” and “made civil rights enforcement a fundamental and long-lasting focus of the Department of Education.”

Perhaps more than any other U.S. institutions, public schools were transformed by the Civil Rights era. The growing diversity of the country and the public school population were slowly reflected in school practices, curriculum, and access: Affirmative action, culturally relevant preparation for teachers, and mandates about diversity, equity, and inclusion all echoed struggles beyond the schoolyard that reached into our classrooms. 

At the same time, social movements for the rights of women, disabled people, gays and lesbians, transgender people, and others forced changes in cultural sensibilities and federal and state law. Decades of academic and critical scholarship revised traditionally narrow versions of literature and history. Lumbering school bureaucracies, rarely on the cutting edge of change, responded by gradually revising their textbooks, course outlines, and bulletin boards. 

The tension between the country’s democratic mythology and its racist history and institutions came to the fore again in the early 2000s. Although the Supreme Court had already begun to erode its impact, in 2006 the Voting Rights Act was reauthorized for 25 years by a Senate vote of 98-0, a level of consensus that seems unimaginable today. The reauthorizing legislation was named to honor Fannie Lou Hamer, Rosa Parks, and Coretta Scott King. The election of the nation’s first Black president followed just two years later. 

But in an echo of the dynamics that saw the forces of white supremacy defeat Reconstruction during the post-Civil War “Redemption,” the arc that runs from Brown v Board of Ed through the Civil Rights Movement to Obama’s election generated a similar reactionary response. Donald J. Trump, a corrupt grifter, lifelong racist, convicted con man, and serial sexual abuser, emerged under the banner of racist “birtherism” to lead a modern Redemption movement of MAGA reaction and white supremacy. 

The only thing Trump is returning to the states is chaos designed to upend the modest steps taken by the federal government to address the massive inequities in our public education system.

A Short-Lived “Reckoning”

In the summer of 2020, the Black Lives Matter rebellion following the murder of George Floyd once again put the nation’s deepest fault lines on stark display. The largest mass multiracial protests in the history of the country were prematurely credited with sparking an historic “reckoning” with the country’s racist past and current practices. The reckoning was short-lived, but the fault lines were as clear as ever.

As it had for those on the losing side in the Civil War, this uprising for justice terrified the forces of racism and reaction. In the words of Sherrilyn Ifill, former head of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, “The multiracial outpouring of protests after the murder of George Floyd was deeply traumatizing for these people as well. They saw the awakening of empathy in their own communities and children, who marched together with Black activists in all 50 states against the injustice they watched over nine minutes on that video [of George Floyd’s murder]. It is fear of the empathetic response of white children to injustice that has driven the demand that Black history and the stories of marginalized groups be excised from schools and libraries.”

This is the legacy the Trump regime wants to erase, and of which the destruction of the Department of Education is a part. It’s true that USED has often been a source of dubious policy and lax enforcement of civil rights. But at bottom it represents a federal commitment to public schools and equity in education that Trump wants to eliminate. Trump has framed his illegal efforts to shut down USED by claiming he is “returning education to the states.” But the states have always controlled U.S. public education, supplying 90 percent of the funding and retaining full legal authority over school curriculum, governance, and teacher licensing. The only thing Trump is returning to the states is chaos designed to upend the modest steps taken by the federal government to address the massive inequities in our public education system. By threatening to turn targeted programs for the highest poverty schools, like Head Start and Title I, into block grants that can be used for vouchers and tuition tax credits, Trump is creating new ways to dismantle public education. He is also using caricatures of DEI programs to fuel a new era of McCarthyite witch-hunts based on censorship and lies.

That’s why the first move by Trump’s manifestly unqualified secretary of education, wrestling billionaire and accused accomplice to sexual harassment Linda McMahon, was to shut down the USED’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR). OCR provided the primary federal avenue of accountability and redress when states and schools discriminate or violate the rights of students and families.

According to ProPublica, the OCR was investigating about 12,000 complaints when Trump took office, about half from students with disabilities. Since Trump’s return, these cases have been put on hold while the rump department has opened bogus, hate-fueled “investigations” into curbing “antisemitism,” attacking transgender students, and combating alleged discrimination against white students.

“This is devastating for American education and our students,” said a former OCR deputy director. “This will strip students of equitable education, place our most vulnerable at great risk, and set back educational success that for many will last their lifetimes.” 

Tsunami of Disaster

To be sure, the destruction of USED is just a small part of the tsunami of disaster that the Trump/Musk coup has unleashed on the country. Musk and his “tech bros” have destroyed and disrupted essential pillars of modern society threatening public health, basic science, medical research, education, environmental protection, climate science, disease control, occupational health, food and drug safety, agricultural sustainability, aviation safety, national parks, the national archives, libraries and museums, even the post office and the national weather service. Institutions and systems that have taken decades to build were dismantled overnight while our elected representatives cheered or stood by and did nothing.  As reporter Elizabeth Lopatto wrote, “The degree to which we have failed not merely ourselves but also our children and grandchildren is breathtaking.” 

This corruption, cruelty, and reckless stupidity may take generations to reverse. It will also claim countless lives. One survey of just the cuts in foreign aid programs projected millions of deaths from the denial of AIDS drugs, vaccines, and food aid to the world’s poorest people. It is a catalog of depravity championed by the world’s richest man and his addled enablers.

In many ways, we are in scary and uncharted territory, but the only way forward is clear. Social movements for democracy and justice must fight from below through the wreckage of this dying and dangerous system and create a new one. We are just beginning to learn what this means and requires, but we know that teachers and schools will necessarily be at the center of such efforts.

Despite the daily firehose of grim news, we can glimpse signs of what such movement-building resistance looks like:

• In Idaho, Sarah Inama, a 6th-grade history teacher at Lewis and Clark Middle School in Meridian, refused a district order to take down a classroom sign proclaiming “Everyone is welcome here.” The district said the poster’s illustration of hands with different skin tones was too “controversial.” Inama responded, “There are only two opinions on this sign: Everyone is welcome here or not everyone is welcome here.” As media coverage of the incident spread, Inama received hundreds of messages of support from teachers and parents.
• In Washington, D.C., as described by Nation columnist Dave Zirin, “a mix of masked and unmasked ICE shock troops attempted to abduct the school nurse at Cooke Elementary School, located in the densely populated Adams Morgan section of D.C. Workers at the school intervened, demanding a warrant and holding up their phones and ICE scurried off without making their arrest. . . . ICE was there for an abduction, people ran out and confronted them, so they left. Adams Morgan then saw a march and a community meeting afterwards . . . school workers, parents and kids are shaken. Imagine how shaken if the school nurse had been disappeared. To protect our kids and our colleagues, every school needs a plan as to what to do when ICE comes calling.”
• In Oklahoma, the legislature outlawed the teaching of Black history. So Kristi Williams, a Black woman whose aunt survived the 1921 Tulsa Massacre, started a Black History Saturday program. The free community program offers breakfast, lunch, and Black history education for children, teenagers, and adults every month. It is one of numerous such programs sprouting up in the face of book bans, curriculum censorship, and attacks on free speech.
• In Chicago, amidst Trump’s multi-sided attack on public education, the Chicago Teachers Union won a contract that includes significant wage gains, reduced class sizes, increased prep times, and increases in the number of librarians and special education case workers, while also reaffirming sanctuary school protections and protecting the academic freedom of teachers to teach truth. “We’ve resisted the impacts of privatization and created spaces, through the strike, through negotiating, through the coalition space, to create power, power that enables us to do a lot of things,” says Stacy Davis Gates, president of the Chicago Teachers Union. “Yes, we can fight. We do that very well. And it is that fight, the equity that we build in that struggle, that has enabled this opportunity to push for something that has been more transformative.” (See “The Chicago Teachers Union Is Showing Us How to Fight Trump”.)

While litigation over the elimination of the Department continues, the administration is threatening to withhold congressionally approved federal funds from states and districts that refuse to go along with its illegal ban on “DEI programs.” Both national teacher unions have sued to overturn Trump’s executive order on DEI and state education departments are starting to publicly refuse to comply. As of this writing, 22 states have said they will not sign the anti-DEI “certification” demanded by the administration, which one superintendent described as having “the subtlety of a ransom note.” Defiance of these bans from the classroom to the statehouse can defeat this assault on democracy and the gains of the Civil Rights era.

Teachers alone won’t defeat Trump, Musk, and their billionaire backers. But in these dark times every act — large or small — defending public education and protecting the students and families who depend on it is a step in the right direction.