Letters from an American - November 16, 2024

Episode Date: November 18, 2024

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November 16th, 2024. One of President-elect Trump's campaign pledges was to eliminate the Department of Education. He claimed that the department pushes woke ideology on America's school children and that its employees hate our children. He promised to return education to the states. In fact, the Department of Education does not set curriculum, states and local governments do. The Department of Education collects statistics about schools to monitor student performance and promote practices based in evidence.

It provides about 10% of funding for K through 12 schools through federal grants of about $19.1 billion to high poverty schools and of $15.5 billion to help cover the cost of educating students with disabilities. It also oversees the $1.6 trillion federal student loan program, including setting the rules under which colleges and universities can participate. But what really upsets the radical right is that the Department of Education is in charge of prohibiting discrimination on the basis of race and sex in schools that get federal funding. funding, a policy Congress set in 1975 with an act now known as the Individuals with Disabilities

Education Act, or IDEA. This was before Congress created the Department. The Department of Education became a standalone department in May 1980 under Democratic President Jimmy Carter when Congress split the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare into two departments, the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Education. A Republican-dominated Congress established the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare in 1953 under Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower as part of a broad attempt to improve the nation's schools and America's well-being in the flourishing post-World War II

economy. When the Soviet Union beat the United States into space by sending up the first Sputnik satellite in 1957, lawmakers concerned that American children were falling behind put more money and effort into educating the country's youth, especially in math and science. But support for federal oversight of education took a devastating hit after the Supreme Court, headed by Eisenhower appointee Chief Justice Earl Warren, declared racially segregated schools unconstitutional in the May 1954 Brown versus Board of Education decision. Immediately, white southern lawmakers launched a campaign of what they called

massive resistance to integration. Some Virginia counties closed their public schools. Other school districts took funds from integrated public schools and used a grant system to redistribute those funds to segregated private schools. Then Supreme Court decisions in 1962 and 1963 that declared prayer in schools unconstitutional cemented the decision of white evangelicals to leave the public schools, convinced that public schools were leading their children to perdition. In 1980 Republican Ronald Reagan ran on a promise to eliminate the new Department of Education. After Reagan's election his Secretary of Education commissioned a study of the nation's public schools starting with the conviction that there was a widespread public perception that

something is seriously remiss in our educational system. The resulting report, titled A Nation at Risk, announced that the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a nation and a people. Although a later study commissioned in 1990 by the Secretary of Energy found the data in the original report did not support the report's conclusions, Reagan nonetheless used the report in his day to justify school privatization. He vowed after the

report's release that he would continue to work in the months ahead for the passage of tuition tax credits, vouchers, educational savings accounts, voluntary school prayer, and abolishing the Department of Education. Our agenda is to restore quality to education by increasing competition and by strengthening parental choice and local control. The rise of white evangelicalism and its marriage to Republican politics fed the right-wing conviction that public education no longer served family values and that parents had been cut out of their children's education. Christians began to educate their children at home believing that

public schools were indoctrinating their children with secular values. When he took office in 2017, Trump rewarded those evangelicals who had supported his candidacy by putting right-wing evangelical activist Betsy DeVos in charge of the Education Department. She called for eliminating the department until she used its funding power to try to keep schools open during the COVID pandemic and asked for massive cuts in education spending. Rather than funding public schools, DeVos called instead for tax money to be spent on education vouchers, which distribute tax money to parents to spend for education as they see fit.

This system starves the public schools and subsidizes wealthy families whose children are already in private schools. DeVos also rolled back civil rights protections for students of color and LGBTQ plus students, but increased protections for students accused of sexual assault. In 2019, the 1619 Project, published by the New York Times Magazine on the 400th anniversary of the arrival of enslaved Africans at Jamestown in Virginia colony, argued that the true history of the United States began in 1619, establishing the roots of the country in the enslavement of black Americans. That, combined with the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020,

prompted Trump to commission the 1776 Project, which rooted the country in its original patriotic ideals and insisted that any moments in which it had fallen away from those ideals were quickly corrected. He also moved to ban diversity training in federal agencies. When Trump lost the 2020 election, his loyalists turned to undermining the public schools to destroy what they considered an illegitimate focus on race and gender that was corrupting children. In January 2021,

Republican activists formed Moms for Liberty, which called itself a parental rights organization, and began to demand the banning of LGBTQ plus books from school libraries. of LGBTQ plus books from school libraries. Right-wing activist Christopher Ruffo engineered a national panic over the false idea that public school educators were teaching their children critical race theory. A theory taught as an elective in law school to explain why desegregation laws

had not ended racial discrimination. After January, 2021, 44 legislatures began to consider laws to ban the teaching of critical race theory or to limit how teachers could talk about racism and sexism, saying that existing curricula caused white children to feel guilty. When the Biden administration expanded the protections enforced by the Department of Education to include LGBTQ plus students, Trump turned to focusing on the idea that transgender

students were playing high school sports, despite the restrictions on that practice in the interest of ensuring fairness in competition or preventing sports-related injury. During the 2024 political campaign, Trump brought the long-standing theme of public schools as dangerous sites of indoctrination to a ridiculous conclusion, repeatedly insisting that public schools were performing gender transition surgery on students. But that cartoonish exaggeration spoke to voters who had come to see the equal rights protected by the Department of Education as an assault on their own identity. That position leads directly to the idea of eliminating the Department of Education.

But that might not work out as right-wing Americans imagine. As Morning Joe economic analyst Stephen Ratner notes, for all that Republicans embrace the attacks on public education, 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 a bigger game afoot though than the current attack on the Department of Education. As Thomas Jefferson recognized, education is fundamental to democracy because only educated people can accurately evaluate the governmental policies that will truly benefit them.

In 1786, Jefferson wrote to a colleague about public education. No other sure foundation can be devised for the preservation of freedom and happiness. Preach, my dear sir, a crusade against ignorance. Establish and improve the law for educating the common people. Let our countrymen know that the people alone can protect us against the evils of kings, nobles, and priests, and that the tax which will be paid for this purpose is not more than the thousandth part of what will be paid to kings, priests, and nobles who will rise up among us if we leave the people in ignorance.

["The Sound of the Music"] Letters from an American was produced at Soundscape Productions, Dedham, Massachusetts. Recorded with music composed by Michael Moss.