Trump loves the uneducated
Eliminating the United States Department of Education was one of the many pledges Donald Trump promised the voters. He proclaimed education should be left to individual states. The voters enthusiastically endorsed him in the full light of this promise. In their stupendous stupidity, they believed the lie Trump told them, that the Department of Education was a useless appendage that was good for nothing more than pushing a “woke” agenda on innocent children.
I’ve got some bad news for them. If anybody in Education is interested in “pushing a woke agenda” on kids, that is, if they want to teach children to respect the civil rights of others, they’ll have to do it with their own kids. The Department of Education has nothing to do with setting curriculum. Absolutely nothing. Whose job is it to design curriculum? Why, it’s already up to the states. So it was all a lie. What a surprise. And now the idiots who voted for this monster are going to have to pay a steep price for that lie.
The Department of Education collects statistics about schools in order to monitor student performance and promote practices based on improving education. It provides about 10% of funding for K–12 schools through federal grants of around 19.1 billion dollars. It provides around 15.5 billion dollars to help cover the cost of educating students with disabilities. So if a parent in a red state has a child in a wheelchair or with learning difficulties, congratulations, they’re going to have to find somewhere else to educate them. There will be no more funding for their child unless the state they live in decides to provide it.
But wait, it gets better. Because they’re so poor and so badly run, most red states have to depend on federal monies for resources, including education resources. That includes buses for special needs children, money for ramps and automatic doors and so on. They can forget about that. Trump needs that money for his rich friends. He’s planning more tax breaks for the richest 1%.
Why this hostility for the education department? Back in the day when it was called the Department of Health Education and Welfare (HEW), HEW oversaw school integration. This association with integration became a sticking point for racist Republican lawmakers and, in spite of all rationality, there has been a reactionary resistance to it ever since.
Trump plans to get rid of the Department to make his rich and White Nationalist Christian friends happy. In his last term, his evil, rich and stupid former secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, already did plenty of damage. Rather than fund public schools, DeVos called instead for tax money to be spent on education vouchers, which distributed tax money to parents to spend for education as they saw fit. This system deprived the public schools of much-needed funding and rewarded wealthy families whose children were already in private schools. DeVos also rolled back civil rights protections for students of colour and LGBTQ+ students. She then increased protections for students accused of sexual assault.
This time around Trump is simply going to flush the whole thing down the toilet. That should teach all those “woke libs” while simultaneously rewarding the very rich. At one of his rallies Trump once proclaimed that he “loves the uneducated.” He must, because by eliminating the Department of Education he’s about to make a lot more of them.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.