Earlier this month, the Trump Administration announced that it was laying off thirteen hundred employees of the U.S. Department of Education, in addition to the hundreds of workers who had already either lost their jobs or accepted buyout offers. Three areas of the D.O.E. in particular were disproportionately affected by the cuts: student aid, civil-rights complaints, and education research. Then, on Thursday, this slow-motion vivisection of a federal agency culminated in a symbolic death blow, when President Trump signed an executive order declaring the imminent closure of the D.O.E. Trump cannot legally shut down a government agency without an act of Congress, but, as seen in the recent decimation of the U.S. Agency for International Development, which had eighty-three per cent of its contracts and programs cancelled in February, his Administration could make it essentially impossible for the D.O.E. to function, at least for a time.
In a speech ahead of the signing, Trump lamented the D.O.E.’s “breathtaking failures”—above all, the nation’s dismal reading and math scores. He nodded to the latest results, published in January, of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), known as the “nation’s report card.” It found that forty per cent of fourth graders and one-third of eighth graders lack basic reading skills for their age level; in math, a quarter of fourth graders and thirty-nine per cent of eighth graders haven’t acquired basic skills. Given this bleak picture, Republican governors are eager, Trump said, “to take their children back and really teach their children individually.”
A hallmark of right-wing antipathy to the D.O.E., and to public education in general, is the notion that children and schools need to be “taken back” from their federal overlords. In fact, the D.O.E. does not decide what or how students are taught; it does not weigh in on whether a school should adhere to Common Core standards or how many books by Ibram X. Kendi should be found on its library shelves. One thing that does fall under the D.O.E.’s remit, however, is administering the tests and collecting the data for the annual NAEP report, under the aegis of the National Center for Education Statistics. As of the most recent cuts to the D.O.E., the statistics office has been reduced “from roughly 100 employees to a skeletal staff of just three,” according to reporting by Jill Barshay, of the Hechinger Report. If disembowelling a federal agency does somehow lead to higher reading and math scores, the federal workers who would have tracked this progress won’t be around to tell us about it.
Trump claimed in his speech that Title I funds to underserved schools, Pell Grants for low-income college students, and special-education funding will be “preserved in full,” and that allocating these funds would become the responsibility of other federal agencies. Speaking from the Oval Office on Friday, he explained that all student loans will be moved over to the Small Business Administration, and that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, “will be handling special needs” (presumably referring to special education). It’s unclear how any of these education offices—which were never handsomely funded or staffed in the first place—can meet their statutory obligations with a tiny fraction of their previous workforce, regardless of where they are situated in the federal bureaucracy.
Not knowing much about what he wants to destroy is something that Trump has in common with his Secretary of Education, Linda McMahon. Appearing on Fox News earlier this month, McMahon showed unfamiliarity with the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, or I.D.E.A., which requires that public schools provide appropriate services to children with disabilities, oversees how federal special-education funds are spent, and allows parents to be involved in developing their children’s education plans. “I’m not sure I can tell you exactly what it stands for,” McMahon said, of I.D.E.A., “except that it’s the programs for disabled and needs.” She added that it was only her fifth day on the job.
More seasoned education experts are worried that both Title I and I.D.E.A. funding will be rolled into block grants, which states can administer with little federal oversight. An earlier executive order, which the President issued in January, directed Cabinet agencies to review how states can use federal funds to “support families who choose educational alternatives to governmental entities, including private and faith-based options.” This is a barely veiled endorsement of K-12 voucher programs, which are already draining the budgets of seventeen states, and which reroute public money to private schools—where, for the most part, the rights guaranteed under I.D.E.A. don’t apply.
To set the stage for Trump’s speech on Thursday, in the East Room of the White House, a group of children sat at school desks that had been arranged in a half-moon facing the audience, with an empty Presidential podium at the center. In the minutes before the President arrived, the students sat patiently, some of them looking out at the assembled crowd with nervous smiles. When Trump showed up, he scarcely interacted with the kids, and, in his address, he offered no indication of who they were or why they’d been chosen to share the stage with him. Perhaps they were recruited from Trump’s central casting of the mind. After he concluded his speech and signed the executive order, he posed for a few photos with McMahon before making his way to the exit. The kids remained in their seats, out of the picture. ♦
