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department of education
Children Are in the Crosshairs of Trump and McMahon's Attack on Public Education
The pair's efforts to return education to the states appear motivated not by improving educational outcomes, but by creating tax breaks for the rich while privatizing public education and weakening teachers’ unions, a pillar of the Democratic Party.
Sep 27, 2025
After surviving a contentious US Senate confirmation hearing, Linda McMahon, the former World Wrestling Entertainment CEO turned secretary of education, received a profound first directive from President Donald Trump: “Put yourself out of a job.” Like other appointees, Mrs. McMahon has done exactly as ordered by a president who accepts nothing less.
As Secretary, McMahon has championed Trump’s executive order dismantling her department and delivering its K-12 responsibilities to state and local governments. She has fired 1,315 department employees, targeting jobs in the Office for Civil Rights and the Institute of Education Sciences, groups that investigate civil rights complaints in schools and provide advice on best practices in teaching. As a result, the department’s staff has been nearly halved since January.
And now Secretary McMahon is spiking the ball in a 50-state tour called “Returning Education to the States.” More than a celebration of the administration’s defeat of brainy bureaucrats at the Department of Education, the tour touts the passage of the “Educational Choice for Children Act” (ECCA) as part of the president’s “One Big Beautiful Bill.” The act creates a national opt-in voucher system for students to attend private or religious schools, to be funded by an extraordinarily generous dollar-for-dollar tax credit for donations to Scholarship Granting Organizations.
The problem is that in these related cases—the attacks on the department of education and the creation of a national voucher system—Secretary McMahon and President Trump are not acting in the interests of students, nor do they seem to be thinking about them at all. These efforts to return education to the states appear motivated not by improving educational outcomes, as we’ll explore, but by creating tax breaks for the rich while privatizing public education and weakening teachers’ unions, a pillar of the Democratic Party.
But First, a Little Backstory...
To fully grasp the stakes of the attack on the Department of Education, we must remember why the federal government got involved in education in the first place. Conservatives rightly note that the Constitution does not mention education, leaving it instead as a reserved power for the states. They’re also correct that despite providing only 10% of total public school funding, the role of the federal government in education has grown significantly over the past half-century.
Yet federal power in education grew neither by accident nor by conspiracy, but in response to systemic failures that states could not and in some cases would not address.
In 1965, following the Civil Rights Act and amid the War on Poverty, the Johnson administration sought to tackle two forms of intransigence: the South’s resistance to school integration and the persistence of poverty amid plenty. A former schoolteacher himself, President Lyndon Johnson proposed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), which directed federal funds, called Title I, to low-income schools and students. Crucially, it tied Title I funding to compliance with desegregation orders. This strings-attached model became the foundation of the federal approach to K-12 education and is critical to understanding its outsized voice.
When Secretary McMahon announced that her “Returning Education to the States” tour would kick off in Louisiana, Arkansas, and Tennessee, it sounded like yet another state’s rights dog whistle.
Flash forward a decade: When President Jimmy Carter created the Department of Education in 1979, conservatives saw it as the fulfillment of a politically motivated campaign promise to secure support from the National Education Association, the largest teachers’ union in the country. Politics was surely part of the calculus, which conservatives have long resented.
Yet beyond the politics of the moment, the new department was also created to increase efficiency and effectiveness, allowing the federal government to consolidate its education-related functions into a single agency. Navigating the two largest streams of K-12 funding—Title I and IDEA—would be less complicated under its purview. Continuing the strings-attached model, the department established an Office of Civil Rights to investigate whether schools receiving funds were in compliance with federal civil rights laws. But this last piece represented a continuation of federal oversight that some states resented, especially across the South.
So in 1980, when Ronald Reagan campaigned against the new department and called for returning control to the states, he appealed—intentionally or not—to two groups. The first were earnest conservatives who, after decades of government expansion, sought a renewed federalism that would respect greater state and local autonomy. The second were those who felt the federal government had overreached, in schools and elsewhere, by enforcing civil rights laws in the South. Reagan’s advisors seemed to understand this double-meaning and tapped into it with dog whistles, directing the Gipper to open his 1980 campaign with a “state’s rights” speech in Neshoba, Mississippi, a town made infamous by the 1964 murders of three prominent civil rights activists.
President Reagan was ultimately unable to get rid of the Department of Education. Instead, Reagan decided that if he couldn’t kill the department, he would render it useless by appointing leaders, like Secretary William Bennett, who did not believe in its purpose. This was the template for Trump’s appointment of both Betsy Devos and Linda McMahon.
Back to the Present
When Secretary McMahon announced that her “Returning Education to the States” tour would kick off in Louisiana, Arkansas, and Tennessee, it sounded like yet another state’s rights dog whistle. Compounding that feeling is the fact that the secretary’s layoffs in March targeted the department’s Office for Civil Rights, leaving it unable to perform its oversight and investigative duties and leading to a long list of civil rights cases that may never be reviewed.
But more than civil rights oversight is at stake. The Institute of Education Sciences, which researches best practices in teaching and provides comparative data about educational outcomes, was also targeted in the Secretary’s layoffs. The institute additionally oversees the National Assessment of Educational Programs (NAEP) tests, which are used to gauge academic achievement by various measures across the country.
None of this is in the interests of students.
President Trump and Secretary McMahon have shown no consideration of the fact that, as research suggests, many of these programs will fail students, affecting millions of children nationwide.
The growing backlog of cases in the Office for Civil Rights does nothing to protect vulnerable students, just as the effective shuttering of the Institute of Education Sciences does nothing to improve teaching and learning. But rendering the Office for Civil Rights useless does give cover to states to do as they please—and if doing so hurts test scores, a dataless Institute of Education Sciences will lack the information critical for accountability.
Secretary McMahon and President Trump have also expressed interest in turning Title I, the largest stream of federal money for K-12 education, into block grants. Doing so, as Project 2025 advises, would give states greater discretion over how the funds are used. Without vigorous oversight, it is likely that some states would not direct the money toward low-income schools and students. The president has already issued guidance for how states can redirect Title I money into voucher programs and, according to Politico, has worked with House Republicans to propose a $5.2 billion cut to the program for fiscal year 2026.
But the most immediate push for vouchers comes in an overlooked part of the “One Big Beautiful Bill,” called the “Educational Choice for Children Act” (ECCA). It establishes the first national voucher system, allowing students in states that opt in to use vouchers to send students to private or religious schools. The program is funded through federal tax credit. These breaks are an unusually generous dollar-for-dollar credit on any donation to Scholarship Granting Organizations. And, shockingly, donations can include stocks that will be valued at their pre-capital gains amount, meaning donors will save more from the donation than they would make from cashing out the stock.
More than an appealing program for the wealthy, the ECCA voucher program is politically appealing to Republicans because it undermines public schools—and their teachers’ unions—in states that opt in. When students accept vouchers to leave for private schools, the traditional public school they previously attended loses that money, forcing them to continue providing the same services for all students but with less funding. And while conservatives frame this as “school choice,” the choice lies equally with private schools that, unlike public schools that are required to educate every student, have the right to reject applicants on the basis of talent, character, and even disability—leaving public schools to educate only the most challenging students.
In other words, the program sets up public schools to fail—and when they do, they will likely be blamed for their own failure, leading to additional disinvestment and greater failure.
One thing is clear: The ECCA voucher program, like the rest of Trump and McMahon’s K-12 policy, isn’t about helping students, nor is it even about education; it’s about fattening pockets and weakening political opponents. The tax credit is a boondoggle for the wealthy at a cost of billions to the public. But the credit is also a tool for attacking a pillar of the Democratic Party by undermining traditional public schools and teachers’ unions. Children are in the crosshairs of this battle but under Trump, the Republican Party is unwilling to value them above entrenching their own political power and financial interests.
It is a tragic moment in K-12 education. To be clear, there are valid debates about school choice and vouchers. There have even been successes in certain targeted voucher studies, and we should learn from them. But overwhelmingly, recent studies show that voucher programs have yet to scale well and have consistently led to lower test scores. Indiana, Louisiana, and Ohio have large, longstanding voucher programs. In the past decade, each has witnessed a decline in math and reading scores for students entering from public school.
In 2016, researchers at Tulane University found that voucher users who performed “at roughly the 50th percentile” before entering the program fell “24 percentile points below their control group counterparts in math after one year.” Martin West, professor of education policy at Harvard and a 2012 campaign adviser to Mitt Romney, described the results as “as large as any” he’s “seen in the literature.” Results are similarly poor in Ohio, where the erstwhile voucher-supporting Thomas B. Fordham Institute concluded, “Students who use vouchers to attend private schools have fared worse academically compared to their closely matched peers attending public schools.”
Even in the best cases of scaled-up experiments, as in Florida and Arizona, results are mixed. Some studies suggest slight academic improvement while others range from no benefit to moderate academic decline. And yet without nuance or humility, the Trump administration is all-in on vouchers as the future of education, at least in the Republican-led states. President Trump and Secretary McMahon have shown no consideration of the fact that, as research suggests, many of these programs will fail students, affecting millions of children nationwide.
If the administration truly had a non-ideological interest in vouchers as part of a commitment to improving educational outcomes, they would recognize the shortcomings of many recent voucher experiments and propose more targeted voucher programs that expand on areas where they’ve shown some success.
But they haven’t done that because it’s not about students. And for all the wrong reasons, we’re about to scale vouchers across much of the country at a time when the Department of Education, the leading K-12 oversight body, is on life support.
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'We Will Fight': Denver Schools Defy Trump's Attacks on Trans Students Despite Threats to Federal Funds
"The district has made clear it will not fold quietly, signaling that some institutions still have the resolve to stand against a federal campaign of erasure," wrote one LGBTQ+ rights journalist.
Sep 03, 2025
As educational institutions around the country capitulate, Denver's public school system said Tuesday that it would defy demands from the Trump administration to discriminate against transgender students even if it means losing federal funds.
Alex Marrero, the superintendent of Denver Public Schools (DPS), said the school "will protect all of their students from this hostile administration," by refusing to implement a ban on gender-neutral bathrooms mandated by Trump's Department of Education.
On Thursday, the department's Office for Civil Rights (OCR) sent Denver Public Schools an email demanding that the school remove a multi-stall, gender-neutral restroom at one of its high schools, which it claimed violated Title IX of the Civil Rights Act.
As Erin Reed, an independent journalist who covers LGBTQ+ rights, notes, the facility built by DPS and other schools is "similar to facilities in major airports, European cities, and increasingly across the United States." The school, meanwhile, has said that the facility was requested by students themselves and has 12-foot high partitions to protect their privacy.
The OCR went further. To be compliant with Title IX, it said, the school also had to "adopt biology-based definitions for the words 'male' and 'female'," meaning they needed to classify transgender students by their biological sex at birth rather than their preferred identities, including banning them from restrooms that do not correspond to their biological sex.
The Trump administration also called on the school to eliminate components of its "LGBTQ+ Toolkit," which includes guidance on how students and faculty can create a welcoming environment for their trans peers. Among other things, the document encourages members of the school community to step in to stop bullying of LGBTQ+ students, respect the preferred pronouns of all students, and for faculty to enforce dress codes in a gender-neutral way.
As Reed put it, the department was effectively "claiming that Title IX actually mandates discrimination against transgender students."
If DPS refused to comply within 10 days, the department threatened to strip the district of federal funding, which makes up 7% of the school's annual budget, according to Chalkbeat. A large portion of that federal money goes toward low-cost school lunches for poor children.
In a statement issued Tuesday, DPS's school board and administration put out a statement "disagreeing unequivocally" with the government's interpretation of the law.
"Title IX permits schools to provide sex-separate restrooms. It does not require that to be the only option," DPS argued. "The interpretation put forward by OCR would undercut our equity commitments, contradict our mission, harm the very students we are entrusted to support, and would have a devastating impact on East High School and the broader LGBTQ+ community. What matters most is that students are safe, have privacy, and can learn without fear."
"The decision to implement gender-neutral restrooms at East followed direct feedback from LGBTQ+ students who reported they did not feel safe," the statement continued. "For these students, access to a restroom where they feel secure is not symbolic. It is about dignity, health, and the ability to learn. When students speak, we listen and we act."
Superintendent Marrero, meanwhile, put out a short video on Instagram expressing his support for the district's LGBTQ+ students.
"As you might have seen in the news, the federal government has decided to take a firm stance and have us roll back our support to the LGBTQ+ community, and of course, we're not having it," Marrero said. "We will continue to stand in solidarity, and as you engage this weekend and beyond, I just wanted to let you know that we got you, and everything is going to be ok."
In a statement published alongside the video, Marrero wrote: "We will fight. In the courts, if we must. In the public square, when necessary. Always in partnership with those who believe that every student deserves to show up to school ready to learn, free from fear."
With this pledge to stand by its LGBTQ+ students, DPS joined five school districts in Virginia that last month responded with similar defiance when the Trump administration ordered them to stop allowing trans students to use bathrooms matching their gender. Those districts—which include Loudoun, Arlington, and Fairfax Counties—have launched a lawsuit against the Trump administration to keep their federal funding.
"Elite institutions like Brown, Columbia, and Penn—as well as multiple hospitals serving transgender youth—have already capitulated, signing away protections through bathroom and sports bans or cutting off medical care entirely," Reed wrote. "Denver Public Schools, by contrast, has drawn a line. With the Department of Education's deadline looming next Monday, the district has made clear it will not fold quietly, signaling that some institutions still have the resolve to stand against a federal campaign of erasure."
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Fear and Loathing in the Preseason: Democracy on Thursday Night
Three days. Three moves. Ballots declared scams. Registration ruled improper. Maps tilted. The point isn’t just to block opponents. It is to shred the idea that there are fair rules at all.
Aug 23, 2025
It’s preseason football. The games don’t count, but the plays do. August is when coaches test the roster, run experiments, and flash just enough of the playbook to hint at what’s coming. Starters run a series or two. Rookies play like their careers depend on it. Veterans jog through familiar routes. Preseason is rehearsal and preview, a low-stakes glimpse of how the coach plans to run the real game.
That’s also what American politics looked like this week. US President Donald Trump was the coach. His team was on the field. And nothing he called was random. These weren’t scattered plays. They were practice runs for one central move: Erase the idea of neutral rules, brand every referee a cheat, and make only one result possible.
On Monday, he declared mail ballots and voting machines a scam and promised to federalize state elections with the stroke of a pen. His Truth Social post read like a coach screaming the scoreboard itself was rigged. Mail ballots? Fraud. Voting machines? A “total disaster.” His cure-all: government-issued paper ballots with watermarks, counted by hand, supposedly faster, cheaper, flawless. But the real twist was his insistence that states are “merely agents” of the federal government, bound to obey his executive order. That isn’t just trash talk. It is a constitutional mugging. Elections have always been state-run under federal guardrails. Trump wants them president-run, with states reduced to clerks.
The deeper move is psychological. Mail voting has been around since Union soldiers cast ballots during the Civil War. Voting machines have been in use for more than a century. Neither exotic. Neither inherently insecure. Yet Trump brands them counterfeit by definition. He isn’t accusing Democrats of bending rules. He is saying the rules themselves are a scam. Once the scoreboard is declared broken, only he can decide the final score.
In American democracy, the season has already begun, the field is tilted, the scoreboard is broken, and the refs have been run off.
The next day brought a subtler drill, but the same logic. In a “Dear Colleague” letter, the Department of Education barred colleges from using federal work-study jobs for voter registration, even if the work was nonpartisan. Registration, they argued, was “political activity.” Political activity cannot be paid with federal funds. Which wipes out the kids at folding tables in student centers, the ones passing forms in dorms, the reminders before deadlines. Without them, colleges are still technically required to hand out forms, but the mandate is toothless. The memo even lets schools withhold them from students they “reasonably believe” are ineligible, like international students. In practice, discretion becomes exclusion.
This isn’t mobs storming the field. It is the authoritarianism of memos: quiet, technical, bureaucratic. A faceless letterhead does what the riot could not. Clipboards become contraband. Neutral acts—handing out a form, reminding someone of a deadline—are suddenly reclassified as dirty tricks. The players who kept the drive alive are ruled out of bounds, whistled for fouls that do not exist.
By midweek the action shifted to Austin. Texas Republicans, at Trump’s demand, rammed through a new congressional map. Democrats tried to deny a quorum by fleeing the state. They were threatened with arrest and ended up sleeping on the House floor. “I want to cry, but I am too angry,” said state Rep. Nicole Collier (D-95), exhausted and furious. The maps weren’t surprising, but they were ruthless: Communities of color carved into ribbons, cities lashed to rural strongholds, Republican dominance welded in place for years. Gerrymandering is an old sport. What’s new is how openly it is played as loyalty to Trump. Gov. Greg Abbott congratulated his party for “staying true to Texas.” Democrats called it dictatorship by district. Both were right. The field itself had been tilted until one team always played uphill.
Three days. Three moves. Ballots declared scams. Registration ruled improper. Maps tilted. The point isn’t just to block opponents. It is to shred the idea that there are fair rules at all. Once the referees are branded cheaters, every loss looks stolen and every victory feels like divine justice. That is how a system loses the ground it plays on.
We’ve seen this game before. After Reconstruction, Black political participation itself was cast as fraud. The sight of Black officeholders was derided as “Negro domination.” Literacy tests and poll taxes were marketed as neutral “integrity measures,” though their purpose was exclusion. Everyone knew the score was rigged. The trick worked anyway because neutrality had already been redefined as corruption.
The pattern repeats. In the 1960s, psychiatrists described civil rights activism as “protest psychosis.” In the Soviet Union, dissidents were diagnosed with “sluggish schizophrenia.” In Hungary, Viktor Orbán branded NGOs as “foreign agents.” Different fields, same tactic: Erase the baseline of neutrality so only raw power remains.
What makes this moment distinct is the speed and coordination. In 72 hours, Trump called the game crooked, the Department enforced it on paper, and Texas locked it into law. History shows that once neutrality is redefined as fraud, procedure alone cannot fix it. Reconstruction faltered not only because of violence but because federal enforcement was itself declared illegitimate. Jim Crow endured not only because of poll taxes but because Black citizenship itself was rebranded as a scam. Once the field is said to be broken, every call looks rigged.
And the breakdown isn’t just on the field. It is in the stands. Pew finds nearly half of Republicans now say mail ballots are fraudulent by definition. Trust in voting machines has cratered. Gallup reports confidence in federal institutions at record lows. Even basic registration drives—students handing out forms, neighbors reminding each other of deadlines—are increasingly seen as partisan cons. Some call this polarization. It is worse. Polarization assumes the same field, however bitterly contested. What is dissolving now is belief in the field itself.
Trump’s conditioning drill is simple: Teach the fans to boo the refs before kickoff, and every call looks crooked. A loss feels stolen. A win feels ordained. That isn’t healthy mistrust. It is training people to believe the scoreboard only works when their side is ahead.
And that is the whole horror of preseason. You think it is rehearsal. You think the game has not started yet. You think this is just your team practicing, that things will get better once the season starts, that you will pull it together. But in American democracy, the season has already begun, the field is tilted, the scoreboard is broken, and the refs have been run off. The loudest man on the sideline is calling the score, daring anyone to say otherwise.
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