Day of the Cliff, Deneb, 29th of Hagwinter, 524 M.E.

The always astute and informative historian Heather Cox Richardson points out that the current political opposition to the federal Department of Education has its roots not in the actions of the department itself but in Supreme Court decisions declaring segregation unconstitutional and banning prayer in public schools.

As a reminder, the Department of Education does not set school curricula - that's done at the state and local level. "Return it to the States," Trump says, but the "it" in question is already done at the STate level. The Department of Ed provides federal funding for high-poverty public schools and for students with disabilities, and oversees the federal student-loan program. It also collects data on student performance and promotes practices based on the statistical evidence. 

Congress established the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare in 1953 under Republican president Dwight D. Eisenhower to improve Americans’ overall well-being in the post–World War II period. Congress later split the office into two departments, the Dept. of Health and Human Services and the Dept. of Education, in May 1980 under Democratic president Jimmy Carter.

What upsets the radical right, though, is that the Department of Education is also in charge of prohibiting discrimination on the basis of race and sex in schools that get federal funding, a policy Congress set in 1975. Between that policy, the May 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, and court decisions in 1962 and 1963 declaring prayer in schools unconstitutional, white evangelicals have became convinced that public schools are a menace. 

Ronald Reagan ran on a promise to eliminate the Department of Education. He failed, and Trump later put right-wing evangelical Betsy DeVos in charge of Education. Like Reagan before her, DeVos also called for eliminating the department and asked for massive cuts in education spending. Instead of funding, she promoted the idea of "vouchers" to reimburse parents for sending their children to private schools.

After Trump lost the 2020 election, Moms for Liberty began demanding that LGBTQ-themed books be banned from school libraries, and right-wing activists promoted the false idea that public-school teachers were indoctrinating their students with critical race theory, a theory taught as an elective in law school to explain why desegregation laws had not ended racial discrimination. Nevertheless, legislators considered laws to ban the teaching of CRT or to limit how teachers can talk about racism and sexism, saying that existing curricula caused white children to feel guilty.

During the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump focused on the idea that transgender students were playing high-school sports despite the already existing restrictions on that practice, and insisted that public schools were performing gender-transition surgery on students. As ludicrous as the idea is, former Fox News host Megyn Kelly insisted on HBO's Real Time that "we are chopping off the healthy body parts of young children —100 percent we are doing that." When audience members reacted with boos and hisses, host Bill Maher stated, "We are definitely doing that. That's what it is. I don't know what the ooing is about."

We're not doing that. Trump's campaign speeches talked about disappointed parents who sent their kids off to school only to have them return at the end of the day with a different gender. That's not happening. Anywhere. No matter how insistent Kelly and Maher and Trump are about it. 

So there I go again - another political rant despite my insistence to not. There's nothing I can do to change the incoming administration's attitude toward the Department of Education and to be honest, it doesn't affect me directly - I'm not in school and I don't have children in school. My only stake in this debate lies in the Jeffersonian ideal that education is fundamental to the functioning of a free and fair democracy, that only educated people can accurately evaluate the governmental policies that will truly benefit them. For instance, Richardson points out that Republican-dominated states receive significantly more federal money for education than Democratic-dominated states do, although the Democratic states contribute significantly more tax dollars.  

There's nothing I can do to change the incoming administration's attitude toward Education, but I can manage my own reactions better by calmly discussing it here.