School's out, Indoctrination is in.
Death of the Department of Education
TAT readers,
I write this essay with a heavy heart. An essential piece of my life was murdered yesterday, via an EO/ Executive order to end the Department of Education, by Donald Trump. Although there is a bit of lip service from the Trump administration about keeping some core functions, no thinking person believes their promises.
"The order says the education secretary will, “to the maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law, take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education and return authority over education to the States and local communities.” It offers no detail on how that work will be carried out or where it will be targeted, though the White House said the agency will retain certain critical functions." - Trump orders a plan to dismantle the Education Department while keeping some core functions - The Associated Press - By COLLIN BINKLEY and CHRIS MEGERIAN - 03-20-2025
That lip service about retaining critical functions is just that, an unfilled promise just waiting to be acknowledged as Trump, Musk, Putin and the GOP firm up their Project 2025 coup’s control of the federal government. It is said that “doing the same thing over and over again while expecting different results, is the definition of crazy.” Expecting today’s MAGA GOP and their cringeworthy subservience to Trump and his far-right/ pro-Russian ideology to “do the right thing” is in fact, “crazy.”
Due to oft expressed frustration regarding me telling Trump voters that they voted for MAGA, let me briefly explain why. It has absolutely nothing to do with partisanship. It is not a condemnation of those upset with me and most importantly, my opinions are strictly common-sense analysis. The entire Republican Congress supports Trump, whose agenda is exclusively MAGA and based on Project 2025. This makes every single GOP member of Congress a partner in this unconstitutional and un-American agenda. So yes, if you voted R at all, it is simple logic that you voted for MAGA. This is not intended to hurt anyone’s feelings, but for heaven’s sake, someone must tell you the truth. In 2024, it is not like you didn’t know who he was and what he is capable of after the past decade plus.
For those who’ve read TAT essays for a while now, you’ve no doubt noted my deep affinity for public education. Yes, it is true that my father began his long-distinguished career in education in the classroom, that my wife, daughter, 2, daughters-in-law and a couple of dozen of my cousins and their children are educators as well. My earliest and very happy memories of my father and his work, involve sitting on the laps of his middle school history and government students while he taught. Schools until joining the Army after graduation, were the core of my life. Small town America revolves around school and not just for sports. It is the core of a community. The smell of a dusty gym before basketball practice or the warmth of the first rays of sun in Spring, streaming through school windows as the end of the school year beckoned us, and the laughter of my friends, are some of my most cherished memories as well.
At home, my parent’s closest friends were teachers, administrators, coaches and their spouses. To my family, teaching is a passion and a commitment to the tenets of their varied religious beliefs. Public education is the very foundation that our nation has continued benefit from, until the GOP decided to mount a strategic movement to undo our constitutional dedication to protecting public education and the lives of all students, minority, disabled, or otherwise. Destroying the Department of Education was a campaign promise of Ronald Reagan, before his first term. Now, under the guise of a racist euphemism called stopping DEI, they are standing public education in the public square and executing it. Too bad there are no historians in the Republican Party these days. If there were, they would know that our nation was founded on radically progressive thinking from the Scottish Enlightenment. That would not have been possible, without radically progressive thinking at the time. Yes, my friends, our founders were, “woke.”
Am I angry, hurt and deeply concerned for my grandchildren’s future? Yes, I am. Living in Texas, I have a birds-eye-view of what destroying public education looks like. Gov. Greg Abbott and his fake-patriots of the Republican Party of Texas, have been the prototype of not only murdering public education but, are also shaping it to become indoctrination centers. Think of these centers as something like the Soviet Union, China and yes, pre-war Germany in the 1930s. It didn’t work for them, despite rigid, oppressive control over their populations, and it won’t work in the US either. The problem is, we don’t have years to respond and still survive as a constitutional republic.
In 1958, halfway through his second term, President Eisenhower, our premier principled conservative, crafted a Special Message to the Congress, on Education. In the late 50s, the US was already deeply involved in a space race with the Soviets as well as a burgeoning nuclear arms race that soon expanded to other adversaries such as China. There was a significant deficit in science and technology training in US schools, primary, secondary and collegiate. The demand for language teaching blossomed under his tutelage so that the US could compete more effectively around an increasingly connected world, especially in regard to Cold War competition with communist nations. That investment paid off then and I would argue that with increasingly lower math and science scores relative to so many other nations, that this deficit once again exists. This especially in matters in a world evolving technologically, almost by the hour. In 1958, POTUS Eisenhower had the Office of Education at his disposal. The Department of Education would not come along for another 21 years.
Eisenhower made it very clear that what he was asking for, was a four-year emergency effort to close the gap required for our national security demands. Just prior in 1954, came the Brown vs. the Board of Education SCOTUS decision that desegregated American schools. Afterwards, we as a nation experienced the Civil Rights era where it became all too apparent for thinking Americans, that outside of white communities, access to quality education, was far from equitably available. Things were changing but the transition would be tumultuous. When government provided opportunities to give a step up to a wide variety of minority communities, including women, the Republican Party was just on the verge of their racist Southern Strategy, which challenged equal access. Now, it is if we are now entering a new Southern Strategy, 2.0. Also, the student loans to put more Americans into University and trade schools blossomed. Both have been profitable for the US as a whole.
Today’s GOP has long been an advocate of allowing states to take charge of many of their culture wars, when it suits their agenda. Trump and his propaganda team, continue to say that they are “sending education back to the states.” It’s been there all along, and mostly at the local level, where the taxes are used to pay for local public school. Their claims are like most everything else they say and do, either dishonest or are already in action, just like voter ID and voter vetting. Acting like they are doing something is not the same as actually doing it. Apparently, they simply want people to believe they are accomplishing something, whether true or not. This was the same argument that the Confederacy used to retain their “peculiar institution.”
Our Constitution is fairly clear on what powers belong to the states and which to the Federal Government. The federal government provides roughly 8% of local school funding and it’s for programs that support the needs of the schools, not the imposition of ideology on them. In states like Texas, it is the GOP that provides the far-right ideology.
Federal Role in Education Overview "Education is primarily a State and local responsibility in the United States. It is States and communities, as well as public and private organizations of all kinds, that establish schools and colleges, develop curricula, and determine requirements for enrollment and graduation. The structure of education finance in America reflects this predominant State and local role. Of an estimated $1.15 trillion being spent nationwide on education at all levels for school year 2012-2013, a substantial majority will come from State, local, and private sources. This is especially true at the elementary and secondary level, where about 92 percent of the funds will come from non-Federal sources. That means the Federal contribution to elementary and secondary education is about 8 percent, which includes funds not only from the Department of Education (ED) but also from other Federal agencies, such as the Department of Health and Human Services' Head Start program and the Department of Agriculture's School Lunch program. Although ED's share of total education funding in the U.S. is relatively small, ED works hard to get a big bang for its taxpayer-provided bucks by targeting its funds where they can do the most good. This targeting reflects the historical development of the Federal role in education as a kind of "emergency response system," a means of filling gaps in State and local support for education when critical national needs arise." - Federal Role in Education - US Department of Education
As we can see in the chart above, by far the largest part of the Department of Education is spent on student loans, but that is quite far from the whole story. Republicans wish us to believe, that the bulk of student loans are in default or have been forgiven. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, 82% of student loans are current in loan repayment plans or delinquent but not more than 90 days, where it would be reported to credit services. In other words, we are getting the money back. The expenditure issue is mostly irrelevant when we are trillions of dollars into our deficit and largly from giving tax breaks to the ultra-wealthy, paid for by those who wages never keep pace with price-gouging rather than inflation.
We also must understand that like the rest of the federal government, Education costs soared during the pandemic as the next graphic clearly shows. Those costs also dropped have dropped every year since the peak of he pandemic.
Like any federal agency, it nearly takes a economics major just to read all of the data required to be an informed citizen. Still, as we can see from today’s look at the Department of Education, the two primary points of contention by the Trump administration are for the most part, specious at best, overtly dishonest at worst. Based on their track record, I lean more towards the latter. So, what drives this Republican obsession with shutting down critical support to public schools?
There are plenty of reasons, but the two primary reasons stated are that since the late 1970s, the GOP has whined incessantly about “liberal bias” in public education. This is never quantified nor explained, but actions by states like my home here in Texas, point to their intentions to infuse public school instruction with Christian religious content, failure to provide equitable access to public education for pretty much anyone that is not a healthy Caucasian, and implement draconian curriculum that does not reflect the truth about our nation’s history. This is indoctrination, not education.
Now to be clear, I am not saying that every problem with public education is the GOP’s fault, but they are the only major player in the game, attempting unconstitutional acts to convert it into a indoctrination process that only produces ideological clones.
As a nation, we need public education as our founders provided for, that supports the needs of the nation and that inspires imagination, innovation and well-rounded and well-informed citizens. This is how we as a nation meet the future, rather than taking it back a century or more.
We are better citizens than those who would allow this administration to convert our republic into a Russian clone. No one is coming to the rescue. It’s up to us to reset our compass towards the bright horizon that our founders saw for us. We are capable of achieving this but must figure out how to limit that damage done by those now in power in our capital.
My very best for your weekend,
Paul
For additional essays about Public Education:
Columns like this remind me of three questions one must never ask:
Never ask a woman her age.
Never ask a man his salary
Never ask a Liberal why $3 Trillion dollars have been spent by the Department of Education since 1979 yet test scores,, reading rates, and the global education rankings for the US are significantly lower now than they were 40 years ago.