And Then They Came for the Students: Trump’s War on Public Education
Trump’s defunding of the US Department of Education (DOE) is an attack on the entire working class, especially those who require the aid programs that the DOE has been able to provide under previous administrations. The illusion that states will be a better arbiter for education reform than the federal government is an illusion that we see from rightwing grifters like DeWine here in Ohio and Milei in Argentina. We know through historical lessons that they will fail to make anything better and will, nine times out of ten, make things worse. Children are meant to learn, not earn. Free quality public education should be made available to every child no matter their race, disability, or socioeconomic status. Our capitalist system, however, cannot function without a permanent underclass of exploited workers. Attacks on public schools are one of the many fronts in the ongoing war of the ruling class to subjugate the masses. The Heritage Foundation’s proposed Project 2025 plan for the Trump administration seems to be taking shape in full force in the first 100 days of the administration, and performative politics like those of the House and Senate Democrats will be of no consequence or aid to the working class. We cannot imagine the liberation of education, and eventually the whole of the working class, without the refunding and removal of any profit incentive from the DOE or the US government as a whole.
On Thursday, March 20, President Trump, accompanied by a group of schoolchildren seated at prop desks, signed an executive order effectively crippling the DOE. This scene was intended to convey that this order will give access to quality education for all American children by returning the authority of education over to the states, but states already have control over students’ education. The DOE does not set curriculum. It funds low-income schools and special education services, manages student loans, and collects and analyzes student data. Trump claims that these functions will just be reassigned to other agencies: student loans will go to the Small Business Administration and special education will be assigned to Health and Human Services, but neither of these agencies have any experience managing education programs.
The problem with simply redistributing the functions of the DOE is that these programs don’t just handle funding. They also deal with issues like running FAFSA (which provides student loans to millions of people across the country), handling Individual Education Plans (IEPs), and various other specialized functions that these other agencies are not equipped to handle. Before the DOE existed, students and schools (especially those in Black and Brown communities) fell through the cracks, and without the DOE, it’s very likely they will, again, be left behind. While the DOE hasn’t been able to alleviate these issues across the country, the complete defunding of these programs is definitely not the answer. We see all around the world, in many different material circumstances, that the introduction of unified standards for education have led to drastically better outcomes for students across the board, thereby leading to better outcomes in their lives after school.
Trump has stated that current services provided by the DOE would be divided out to other existing agencies. Student loans would fall to the Small Business Administration (SBA). These loans are currently in limbo as orders from the Biden administration are put on hold by federal judges. Loans cannot currently be taken out, and income-driven repayment plans have currently been wiped from the website. The SBA itself plans to cut staff by 40%, making the management of these loans difficult and hard to predict as time rolls on. As far as student disabilities services and special education, Trump has delegated these programs to Health and Human Services, run by RFK Jr. This news is alarming in itself! This is the same cabinet member who has stated that children and Americans diagnosed with ADHD should go to “wellness camps” and has made previous false claims that vaccines cause autism. The downsizing of the DOE in the meantime cuts funding and the overall amount of workers available to assist families currently receiving these services.
The “school choice” programs, that conservatives tout as the solution, only serve to benefit wealthy families who were already paying for private schools, leaving behind low-income, disabled, and minority students in public schools surviving on already anemic budgets that are only going to continue to be more and more inadequate. Property taxes make up about 45% of public school funding. Schools in neighborhoods with low property values—rural areas containing mostly farmland and urban areas containing mainly apartments, rentals, and low-income housing—find themselves frequently underfunded, understaffed, and underperforming. The communities they serve are made up of the underprivileged, minorities, or the working poor who have little choice in where they live. Neighborhoods with higher property values, such as majority white suburbs filled with single-family homes surrounded by successful businesses, receive more funding and are better able to provide a high quality education to their students. These desirable schools draw in more families, increase the value of the surrounding neighborhoods, and contribute to rising property taxes. Instead of increasing funding to urban and rural schools to make up for the shortfall, public education critics continue to lobby for policies that further defund public education.
The fact is, even with these vouchers that the federal government does manage to distribute, low-income families can’t afford to send their children to private schools. Many of these programs don’t include transportation, don’t cover extra program fees above and beyond the cost of tuition, and often don’t even fully cover the cost of the tuition itself. Furthermore, many private schools have responded to the expanded voucher programs in their states by significantly raising their tuition fees. While the majority of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck, their ability to cover these costs is extremely limited.
Nationwide voucher programs will inevitably fund the tuition of wealthy white families who were already sending their children to private schools at the expense of low-income families that public schools must continue to serve even as their budgets are being drained. Public schools across the country are already struggling. The solution is to increase funding to public schools, not run away from the problem and retreat to private and charter schools. Free quality education for all doesn’t serve the interests of the ruling class, for whom the oppression of the masses is required to keep their profit margins high.
Private religious schools are exempt from following the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). The IDEA, in particular, gives disabled students access to a Free and Appropriate Public Education (FAPE) in the Least Restrictive Environment (LRE), ensures special education and related services to those students, supports early intervention services for infants and toddlers and their families, and awards discretionary grants. These grants usually follow the student if they are referred to a private school by the public school district, but private schools are still only required to provide “equitable services'' that often don't fulfill the student’s right to an accessible education. They lack trained and experienced special education teachers and aides, and often isolate disabled students away from their classmates in restrictive environments to prevent “disruptions.”
Disabled students fare no better in private special education schools. Many of these schools have been found guilty of excessive and harmful disciplinary practices, including prone (face-down) restraint and seclusion. Shrub Oak International School, a private autism school in New York State that operates without any meaningful oversight, was found to have fallen significantly short of its promises that included around-the-clock care, an equestrian stable, and a cutting-edge education for autistic students. Instead, a ProPublica investigation found reports of “unexplained black eyes and bruises on students’ bodies, medication mix-ups, urine-soaked mattresses, and deficient staffing.” They also claimed to “help students with intense behavioral challenges” while only employing one certified behavioral therapist for the whole school.
Even with voucher dollars, most disabled students are rejected from private schools for reasons ranging from lack of adequate accommodations to a student’s disciplinary history. If they are accepted into a private school, any required evaluations and assessments are still the financial responsibility of the public school district. As we have shown, these voucher programs drain the already inadequate resources from public schools, limiting a school’s ability to support the disabled students they still serve. It’s sadly ironic that voucher programs which claim to provide assistance for underserved special education students actively harm them instead.
We shouldn’t be surprised that the expansion of “school choice” initiatives across the country is happening at the same time as increased attacks on public schools. Both claim to support “parental rights'' and are responses to the desegregation of public schools. The fight for “parental rights” is responsible for the banning of transgender students from taking part in school sports, transgender bathroom bans, censorship of books discussing race, gender and sexuality, and attacks on teachers for teaching any of those subjects. Trump claims that the DOE is responsible for pushing a “Marxist” agenda through the teaching of “woke” Critical Race Theory (CRT) and the nebulous bogeyman “gender ideology.” Combined with the draining of public school funds through voucher programs, it’s clear that the end goal is the eventual collapse, or at least severe crippling, of the public education system.
Advocates for school choice and parental rights would have us believe that these are grassroots movements. In reality, these efforts are funded by extreme right wing organizations and think tanks connected to former Trump Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, the Koch Brothers, and the Heritage Foundation. These organizations play on the fears and anxieties of well-meaning parents by spreading baseless accusations of indoctrination and “grooming” by public school teachers who dare to acknowledge the existence of LGBTQ+ people. On more than one occasion, thousands of books were pulled from school libraries based on complaints from only a small handful of people with clear connections to these groups. The Heritage Foundation in particular is the originator of Project 2025, which lays out a plan to fully privatize the education system by expanding school voucher programs and dismantling the Department of Education, a plan the Trump administration is faithfully carrying out with this executive order.
The worst nightmare of the ruling class is an educated working class. Roger Freeman, advisor to then-Governor Ronald Reagan, made this clear in 1970 when he defended Reagan for shutting down California’s public college campuses in response to anti-war student protests: “We are in danger of producing an educated proletariat. That's dynamite! We have to be selective on who we allow to go [to college].” He didn’t want working class students getting their hopes up about improving their conditions, and he’s not alone in this mindset. So many bourgeois idealogues and politicians use this line of thinking and argument in order to disenfranchise millions of students in the US while giving their and their buddies’ children a leg up in their educational journey. This sets the stage for the implementation of predatory student loan policies that restrict access to higher education for working class students and trap them under mountains of debt. It also benefits the ruling capitalist class to gut the public education system, where they receive no meaningful returns on investment, and actively redirect the funds into for-profit private schools from which they can extract surplus value. Instead of a robust education for all children, the ruling class intends to restrict it to those who can afford to pay for it and teach poor children only what they need to know to be good employees.
Even though the DOE cannot be fully dismantled by executive order, Trump can still deprive it of the resources it needs to function, effectively crippling it for the next four years and setting it back for generations to come. Several Republican members of Congress have promised to—or have already—introduced bills to abolish the Department completely, including Northern Kentucky representative Thomas Massie. Countries that defund the federal oversight and funding of educational programs experience overall worse outcomes after schooling, increased poverty and crime rates, and less-qualified individuals in fields that require secondary and tertiary schools in order to train people on the different aspects of their future work.
This has always been the intention of the Trump administration. They want to reduce the overall amount and quality of learning opportunities for the working class by privatizing education and making it available only to those who can pay for it. We must call this order what it is: a fascist attack on the poorest, most disabled and marginalized groups of the working class to keep them impoverished, immiserated, and vulnerable to exploitation. We must fight for the freedom of the working class to access higher education without the burden of crushing debt and financial ruin. We must fight for the futures of all children, no matter their socioeconomic status, race, gender, or ability.