Eliminating the Department of Education

 This is Heather Cox Richardson's November 16, 2024, Newsletter Regarding President-Elect Donald Trump's Pledge to Eliminate the US Department of Education. https://open.substack.com/pub/heathercoxrichardson/p/november-16-2024?r=zf7p&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

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 schoolchildren 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–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, a policy Congress set in 1975 with an act now known as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). This was before Congress created the department.

The Department of Education became a stand-alone 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 Americans’ 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 v. 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 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 evangelism 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+ 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+ books from school libraries. Right-wing activist Christopher Rufo engineered a national panic over the false idea that public school educators were teaching their students 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+ 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 longstanding 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 Steven Rattner 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 is 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.”

Notes:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2024/11/12/trump-close-education-department-proposal-explained/

https://www.chalkbeat.org/2024/11/15/trump-abolishing-education-department-may-hurt-students-with-disabilities/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2023/09/26/home-schooling-vs-public-school-poll/

https://berkleycenter.georgetown.edu/responses/evangelical-homeschooling-and-the-development-of-family-values

https://www.npr.org/2020/11/19/936225974/the-legacy-of-education-secretary-betsy-devos

https://pulitzercenter.org/sites/default/files/full_issue_of_the_1619_project.pdf

https://glaad.org/moms-for-liberty-book-bans-anti-lgbtq/

https://www.edweek.org/policy-politics/map-where-critical-race-theory-is-under-attack/2021/06

https://www.chalkbeat.org/2023/4/6/23673209/trans-students-sports-participation-biden-title-ix/

https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-inquiry/how-a-conservative-activist-invented-the-conflict-over-critical-race-theory

https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-10-02-0162

https://www.reaganfoundation.org/media/130020/a-nation-at-risk-report.pdf

https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/just-visiting/nation-risk-and-re-segregation-schools

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The Novel, "Native Speaker,' Informs My Understanding of Critical Race Theory

I’m reading the novel, “Native Speaker,” by Chang-rae Lee. It was published in 1995, and was his first novel. He is the author of five additional novels, and has won numerous awards and citations.

My intent in this post is not to review the novel, but rather to quote liberally from it in order to illustrate why, given my previous post on critical race theory (CRT), I was so struck by a particular passage in the novel.

The passage I‘m referring to quotes a speech being given by “John Kwang,” a rising Korean-American politician serving the Flushing neighborhood of Queens, N.Y., as councilman. Kwang is standing on the steps of a church speaking to a throng of mostly working-class supporters standing half in the street. He’s talking about unrest between Koreans and blacks in the multi-ethnic cauldron that makes up Flushing.

“Let us think that for the moment it is not a Korean problem. That it is not a black problem or a brown and yellow problem, that it is not a problem of our peoples, that it is not even ultimately a problem of our mistrust or our ignorance. Let us think it is the problem of a self-hate.”

“Yes, let us think that. Think of this my friends: when a Korean merchant haunts an old black gentleman strolling through the aisles of his grocery store, does he hold even the smallest hope that the man will not steal from him? Or when a group of black girls takes turns spitting in the face and hair of the new student from Korea, as happened to my friends daughter, whose muck of hate do they muck up on their tongues? Who is the girl the girls are seeing? Who is the man who appears to be stealing? Who are they, those who know no justice, no fairness; do you know them? Are they familiar?”

Then Kwang says the problems is “what we loath and fear in ourselves.” He tells the crowd that the people who drives the buses, clean the streets, do their laundry, are like them, are them, and, “They want to live with dignity and respect! They want a fair day of work. They want a chance to own something for themselves, be it a store or a cart. They want to show compassion to the less fortunate. They want happiness for their children. They want enough heat in the winter so they can sleep, they want a clean park in the summer so they can play. They want to love like sweet life, this city in which they live, not just to exist, not just to get by, not just to survive this day and go home tonight and tend fresh wounds.”

He goes on to tell them that those who are a “different dark color,” who may seem strange, or who can’t yet speak their language, are not so different than who they are or used to be.

“If you are listening to me now and you are Korean, and you pridefully own your own store… that you have built up from nothing, know these facts. Know that the blacks who spend money in your store and help put food on your table and send your children to college cannot open their own stores. Why? Why can’t they? Why don’t they even try? Because banks will not lend to them because they are black. Because these neighborhoods are troubled, high risk.Because if they did open stores, no one would insure them.”

Kwang also speaks to how the blacks do not benefit from the same strong bonds that the Korean community does, because their people were, “broken and dissolved through history.”

The African Diaspora

Chang-rae Lee published this novel in 1995, so he was creating the character of John Kwang, and his speech to the constituents of his Flushing district, well before critical race theory (CRT) became more than an academic subject for law school students to ponder. Lee wrote his novel as his thesis while studying for his Masters in Fine Arts at the University of Oregon. He was 28.

Jacqueline Jones, PhD, teaches History at the University of Texas at Austin. Jones received her Doctorate in History from the University of Wisconsin in 1976. She was 28.

Separated in time by some twenty years, and following very different personal and academic paths, Chang-rae Lee and Jacqueline Jones were discovering a common truth; racial bias in America is rooted in the institutions and structures of America, and persists whether individuals are biased or not — personal bias is, if not irrelevant, then certainly secondary.

As Janel George of the American Bar Association has written, “CRT recognizes that racism is not a bygone relic of the past. Instead, it acknowledges that the legacy of slavery, segregation, and the imposition of second-class citizenship on Black Americans and other people of color continue to permeate the social fabric of this nation.”

Last October, in a short talk in eastern Washington State in the predominantly conservative Tri-Cities, Dr. Jones summarized some of the ways the legacy of America’s slave era and lingering suspicion of minority populations, especially those relatively new to the “land of the free and home of the brave,” have marginalized those demographics. She spoke to, “the many ways that governmental entities and private interests have put racial ideologies into practice in the form of laws, taxation policies, public works projects, regulatory guidelines, profit-making schemes, hiring preferences, and more.” Examples of such policies and practices are both irrefutable and eye-opening, from the government’s “redlining” of predominately Black neighborhoods, to the predatory lending practices of high-cost lenders targeted at Blacks and minorities, to the mass incarceration of Blacks based on discriminatory drug laws, to the employment of prison labor as punishment. It is a shameful and complex interweaving of social injustice difficult to fathom, let alone accept.

And a large segment of the conservative, largely White sensibility from the U.K. to the U.S. to Australia isn’t accepting it. They say it pits, “white against black,” peddles damaging notions of "white privilege" and "white supremacy" and makes “a virtue of victimhood.”

Here in the U.S., Donald  Trump — still leader of the Party he co-opted — called critical race theory, “toxic propaganda,” and called for “patriotic education.” His Republican Party, sensing an opportunity to further inflame prejudices and energize their base has taken up critical race theory as a cause célèbre, charging adherents of CRT with attempting to brainwash their children, who are being taught to be ashamed that they’re white, and to reinvent America as a Marxist state.

The more inflamed critics of CRT refer to its adherents in especially colorful language as, “proto-fascists and black shirts masquerading as progressives,” and as a “counter-culture lynch mob,” that will attack those who may have the audacity to criticize CRT.

The Republican Party’s post-modern treatment of critical race theory has produced political successes across the nation, including here in the Tri-Cities, where in an off-year election for city council and school board positions, candidates espousing their opposition to CRT won election against opponents who seemed nonplussed by its seemingly sudden appearance on the heretofore largely ignored stage of a local election for “non-partisan” seats.

There’s no question that given their success, Republicans will continue and amplify their message surrounding critical race theory, purposely conflating it with “political correctness,” “cancel culture,” socialism, Marxism, communism, and the end of Western Civilization. As Nicole Gaudiano has said in her 11/19/2021 article for Business Insider, “Democrats are way behind in countering GOP messages about critical race theory.” So, how to catch up?

First, Democrats must familiarize themselves with the basic tenets of CRT. There are many versions and they are proliferating, but I have boiled them down to these:

1. Race is a social construct, not a biological reality (as demonstrated by the Human Genome Project); as such it arises out of a need to oppress “others.”
2. Identity within society is determined by a multiplicity of factors besides “race,” including gender, sexual preference, ‘abledness,’ etc., all of which subject people to varying degrees of inequality.
3. Racism is a regularized feature of society, embedded within systems, organizations, and institutions, such as the legal system, that perpetuate and extends racial inequality.
4. Embracing the lived experience of people of color and people considered “different” can inform research and add to and make richer scholarship.
   

Second, forget the basic tenets of CRT and focus on communicating positive messages about how Democrats hope to see our children educated in our K-12 public schools, i.e.; equally, truthfully, safely, and always with kindness and understanding.

How Critical Race Theory Became a Thing

Christopher Rufo

If you were surprised by the sudden rise of critical race theory as the latest object of outrage by the Republican Right, you weren’t alone. The CRT controversy seems to have sprouted like cheat grass from our carefully groomed lawns. However, the controversy is anything but grassroots. It’s the brainchild of a former Seattle City Council candidate, Christopher Rufo.

Mr. Rufo is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, and a former director at the Discovery Institute, which promotes “intelligent design,” and has called global warming, “a fraud.” Rufo currently acts as Contributing Editor for the Manhattan Institute’s quarterly publication, the City Journal.  

Rufo had become well known for the anti-progressive ideas he expressed in his 2018 Seattle City Council campaign, and in his white paper for the Discovery Institute, “The Politics of Ruinous Compassion,” in which he wrote of an “ideological war that’s currently being won by a loose alliance of four major power centers: the socialist intellectuals, the compassion brigades, the homeless-industrial complex, and the addiction evangelists.”

So, when in the Summer of 2020, a ‘right-thinking’ Seattle city employee participated in anti-bias training during a Zoom meeting, and sent copies to Rufo, the spurned candidate quickly recognized the opportunity for political WMD (weapon of mass disinformation). Using FOIA requests, Rufo started digging further, and found references to anti-racism books that pointed to academic scholarship of the 1990s by legal scholars, who “argued that the white supremacy of the past lived on in the laws and societal rules of the present.” They referred to their work as “critical race theory.”

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In her August 12, 2021, Perspectives on History, article Dr. Jacqueline Jones, referred to CRT as “an intellectual framework for understanding the many ways that governmental entities and private interests have put racial ideologies into practice in the form of laws, taxation policies, public works projects, regulatory guidelines, profit-making schemes, hiring preferences, and more.”

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Rufo quickly recognized critical race theory as something he could attribute to the “woke” culture, thereby painting, “stay woke,” as more than a black-activist catch phase; rather, it was the rallying cry for legions of “social justice” activists, which he saw attempting to reinvent American history not only to paint all Whites as racist, but to inculcate in them their inherent racism, shame them with it, and move them to make reparations, if not in monetary, then in policy forms.  

Rufo kept fleshing out his thesis, and by the time he appeared on Tucker Carlson he was ready with his thesis that the purveyors of “woke’ ideology planned to use critical race theory as the academically respectable underpinnings of curricula designed to indoctrinate America’s children through the K-12 school system. Rufo made it clear that he saw critical race theory as an existential threat to the Republic, and called upon then-president Trump, to “"immediately issue" an "executive order and stamp out this destructive, divisive, pseudoscientific ideology at its root.”

It’s widely known that former President Trump was at the time a devotee of the Fox menu of “news” and opinion (he has since jilted Fox for One America News Network). He was watching Tucker interview Rufo and the next thing the intrepid reporter knew  he was answering a call from Trump’s Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. Soon after that, Rufo was called to Washington D.C. to help draft an executive order limiting how contractors providing federal diversity seminars could talk about race.

Christopher Rufo is a committed, energetic, and ambitious conservative activist, and a prolific writer of invective, but he alone could not have brought about the explosion of outrage and coordinated assaults on the institutions of American education, which conservatives have long suspected of indoctrinating students in ‘wrong-headed,’ liberal thinking. Trump operatives in the White House clearly saw critical race theory as a promising way to distract Americans from Trump’s [first] impeachment, his disastrous handling of the coronavirus pandemic, and the lingering unease over his “very fine people on both sides” comment regarding the white-nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, that led to the death of the counter-protester, Heather Heyer.

White House operatives began working with and through the National Republican Committee, state Republican parties, and subsequently with quickly formed political action committees (PACs), such as the Education First Alliance in North Carolina (which offers “bootcamps” to train parents in how to fight against CRT), to raise the hackles of the Republican faithful and generate the energy needed to take back the House and Senate in 2022.

In my adopted home town of the Tri-Cities (population 244,000), in semi-arid, largely-conservative eastern Washington, the local paper, the Tri-City Herald, was so struck by the outpouring of grief and rage over the assault on their children by socialists wielding critical race theory that the Editorial Board felt compelled to publish an editorial in June stating that, “Contrary to a surge of misinformation online, there is no new law requiring Washington state public schools to adopt the controversial “critical race theory” curriculum.” According to the Board, parents in the Tri-Cities had already raised the issue to school boards, and the Herald had received letters to the editor expressing concern.

In the coming November 2nd local election Anti-CRT forces have chosen their leaders and they are running for city council and school board positions and their rallying cry is no masks, no mandates, no CRT, and no sex education [and by the way, no new taxes].

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“We have successfully frozen their brand — “critical race theory” — into the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions. We will eventually turn it toxic, as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category.”

Christopher Rufo
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