What The Hell America!

The Trump administration’s war on public education is a war on our kids. Don’t let politicians strip our schools of resources and set U.S. students up to fail.

Originally published on Maya Wiley’s Substack.

You don’t have to be an education expert to know that money that allows a school to hire teachers, increase teacher training, hire paraprofessionals to support students with disabilities, provide after-school programs and to support schools to learn and use what works to teach kids, are good things.

We don’t believe kids should be bullied to suicide or their learning disabilities ignored. We believe racism is a bad thing, that attacking children is wrong and that schools should not be places for indoctrination. As Americans we deeply value education and consider it important for producing thinkers, productive people at work and in society. I never met a parent who thought their public school should have fewer resources.

So why is Donald Trump so enthusiastically disemboweling the U.S. Department of Education (DOE)?

He already took a chainsaw to almost half of its staffing and has promised to close the DOE, as requested by Project 2025, despite its unpopularity. Sixty percent of American voters oppose President Trump’s plan to close it, with only 33 percent supporting it.

The easy answer is that authoritarians do not care what we, the majority, believe or want. It is true, but it is also not that simple.

Trump’s backing comes from a minority of radical ideologues who want a very different America—one that is significantly less diverse, less rich in rights, more indoctrinated to their extremist version of Christianity, steeped in a history of white-ethno-Christian nationalism. The authors want an unraveling of a system that has been partially, though not completely, transformed by the civil rights movement. The end game is clear: Charter schools, religious schools and private schools will benefit from a much greater share of public education dollars with less accountability. This will hurt all students, white and Black, English speakers and students who are not, the millions of children with learning disabilities and all families who don’t have the resources to buy their way out of the problems the Trumpian project will create for their kids and for our society.

The evidence that Project 2025 seeks to indoctrinate children is clear. They Project 2025 blueprint states, for example:

“Families comprised of a married mother, father, and their children are the foundation of a well-ordered nation and healthy society. … The male-female dyad is essential to human nature and … every child has a right to a mother and father.”

—p. 451 and 461.

Gay and lesbian couples and single parents apparently undermine a “well-ordered nation.” The attacks on transgender students is rife in the document and a major focus of fearmongering for what amounts to a miniscule 3.3 percent of high school students, who are too often badly bullied. It calls “critical race theory” and “diversity, equity and inclusion” racist. That just means that to talk about race or acknowledge its impacts on society is itself racist against white people.

Kevin Roberts, who headed the Project, writes his endorsement of book banning in his forward, calling for the criminalization of “pornography” without providing a specific definition of pornography. He states, “Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders.” He doesn’t define his concerns but the fact is that the book bans have mostly targeted books by or about Black and LGBTQ people.

The fearmongering and claims of racism that amounts to teaching history that includes slavery and racism, and that seeks to build a more inclusive curriculum and social skills of students, is also aggressively attacked in Project 2025. There should be no surprise here. Some contributors to Project 2025 have a history of racist writings. Seven organizations on its advisory board have been listed as “extremist” or “hate groups” by the Southern Poverty Law Center, so it should be no surprise that their public agenda is a reversal of civil rights gains that have helped students of all races.

Trump’s executive order on “parental rights and educational opportunity” will ensure states get help to drive resources to all these schools that a fraction of students attend. Project 2025 sees a process by which federal funds turn into no-strings-attached block grants. Trump’s massive staff cuts and promise to shutter the DOE means no staff capacity for oversight, like data collection and research, and no way to tell if children are getting services for their learning disabilities or are achieving and no way to protect them from discrimination.

Parents want options of schools for their children and why shouldn’t they. They want solutions and they want public schools to be great options. To take money away from traditional public schools, they must be attacked rather than understood. So, we watched the machinery of the minority claim children were being indoctrinated with … history… and award-winning books by Black and LGBTQ authors and tolerance-producing programs.

The question isn’t whether charter or private schools are bad. Like all schools, some work and add value, and some fail, just like traditional public schools. Many parents, frustrated with the challenges of schools who have a large population of low-income students—economic segregation—and inadequate resources understandably look for alternatives. The fact remains that the vast majority of U.S. students, about 83 percent, are enrolled in traditional public schools. There are almost 100,000 public schools, of which the vast majority, about 91,000, are “traditional” meaning they are not public charter schools.

We should not forget what began to improve education and what undermines gains. Thanks to the fight for better public schools mounted by the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s, and especially during the desegregation efforts of the 1960s through the 1980s outcomes improved. Research shows that attending integrated schools improved high school graduation rates for Black students by 15 percent and reduced their likelihood of living in poverty by 11 percent as adults. We achieved more fairness in per pupil spending, smaller class sizes and more support for better trained teachers and more rich curricula. It made spending for classrooms fairer and more money for teacher training and smaller class sizes. None of these gains came without costs. Black students suffered horrifying racism and mistreatment and Black teachers in the South who fought for desegregation were thrown out of their jobs in high numbers. The progress has also been real and meaningful.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited discrimination in education based on race, color or national origin. This legislation helped ensure that all students, regardless of their background, had equal access to educational opportunities and resources. Its ends were not just to stop bad things from happening to Black children, but to promote good things for all children. It wasn’t just about the South either. The largest protest march of any in the recorded history of the civil rights movement is not the famous and important March on Washington in August of 1963. That was the march during which Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech. It helped us demand and win passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

But 1964 was also the year that almost half a million students, teachers and parents in New York City held a school march. They protested the fact of segregation and demanded quality education in desegregated schools—more resources, smaller class sizes and better trained teachers. These resources demands were eventually part of the success of the movement.

The result was the creation of what today is an $18 billion federal funding program for schools with high numbers of low-income students of all races. The largest funding programs that go to schools and classrooms are victories of the civil rights movement, include the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (Title I) and, eventually, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), first signed into law in 1975 by President Gerald Ford. They are the two largest federal funding programs, totally about $32 billion between them.

These resources, along with other programs that send federal dollars to states and schools that are low-income schools and to students with disabilities may well be cut. Whether they are or not, at best, the plan is to give blocks of money to states to do with what they will, while ending federal accountability, civil rights protections and data and research to tell us how our schools are doing. This is going to be bad for many students unless they are in rich or very well-off families. It’s that simple.

These programs have an uneven record but at least reason is that we have not properly funded the IDEA and federal funds cannot add benefits when used to plug holes in state level funding. The National Education Association pointed out that IDEA, for example, which requires and is supposed to support students with learning disabilities being assessed and given an individualized plan to get their needs met, has only received about 40 percent of promised funding. Thirty-four states have not kept funding levels up.

The deficit hawks in Congress came gunning for federal education dollars for low-income students in November 2024 during budget fights, which is one reason many of us were disturbed that opposition leaders didn’t demand spending protections in this government shutdown showdown with the Trump administration and Senate leaders.

One ugly truth that we haven’t confronted is that the wealthier neighborhoods of this country have much better schools because they are locally funded, and parents have more personal resources to pump into the schools or to pay for services and supports out of deeper pockets. This was true before the civil rights movement, and it remains true after. Income levels have a lot to do with student performance, even in private schools and that should tell us that trashing our public options make little sense, not to mention that private options can have less accountability, come with many out-of-pocket costs, like transportation, and also benefit those already in private school.

The ugly truth is that we never had a day when the forces opposed to integrated public schools stopped fighting civil rights gains. Now, not only have schools been resegregating since the 1980s and the lifting of court monitored consent decrees to ensure enforcement, but the charter school movement in the Southern U.S. also started to become a force for resegregation as well.

As one research report found, “The growth of charter schools in the south is outpacing the nation as a whole in terms of the number of students enrolled in charters… [C]harters are more segregated for black and Latino students than the increasingly segregated public schools.”

Economic segregation increased, particularly in the last 15 years. Because of federal data that the Trump administration is dismantling, we learned that the gap in education funding between wealthy and poor schools grew by 44 percent between 2001 and 2012. In fact, the schools made up of the top 1 percent have increased funding significantly over other schools. No wonder parents are frustrated.

Americans of all races express both aspiration for and pessimism about the future of our schools, and therefore our kids. But we have lessons and choices about what works. We can and must return to our strategies for getting more for our public-school students who are low-income, who are Black, who benefit from multi-lingual learning, who have disabilities and all of whom live in every zip code and come from every community.

Show up with neighbors at school board meetings and demand answers and accountability. Go to your elected leaders’ town halls and make demands for public resources for public schools. Demand an end to curriculum policing and book bans and demand investing in teachers, in programs and in our future. Refuse division and demand solutions that work for all our kids.

We did it once; we can do it again!