SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
teachers union
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.
Keep ReadingShow Less
This School Year, Let’s Recommit to Standing Up for Public Schools
We need unions that can make the case for the public good that public education provides, unions that are unabashedly of and for the educators.
Sep 06, 2023
Where does the spirit of Red for Ed, the teacher-led labor movement that began in 2018, stand today?
Red for Ed began that February when educators and staff at schools across West Virginia went on strike to demand better pay. Their direct action inspired strikes in other states, especially those with majority Republican legislatures (hence the name “Red for Ed”). Educators in Arizona, Kentucky, and Oklahoma went on illegal wildcat strikes to fight against the poverty wages and chronically underfunded schools that were resulting in both intolerable working conditions and learning conditions.
Since then, the movement has seen ebbs and flows. But that’s the nature of organizing. There is no straight line of progress, but instead waves that slowly and determinedly wash against the shores—little by little changing the landscape.
For those of us who will be in the classroom this coming year, we need the public to see what we see.
Of course, there have been other big waves too, such as the solidarity strike in Los Angeles in March of this year that saw members from United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) show up for support staff. The result was major wage gains for support staff, like bus drivers, teaching aides, special education assistants, and other workers who contribute to functioning schools. The strike also influenced a significant contract settlement for UTLA members as well.
Still, inflation, limited housing options, and political attacks against educators striving to just do their jobs have driven educators to leave the profession.
For those of us who will be in the classroom this coming year, we need the public to see what we see. Throughout my state of New Hampshire, public educators are confronting a new school year without enough guidance counselors, with support staff getting crushed by the cost of living, and with money that could be used to help our students being used to fund voucher programs. It’s the same scenario playing out all across the country.
The question now, it seems to me, is what do we do about all of this?
For one, we can’t stand idly by. We can’t believe that officials above us will save us. We must see opportunities to build something new, to create resilient communities, to strengthen relationships between educators.
We cannot close our classroom doors and expect the problems of the world to go away. We have seen too many times before that there is no stopping the downward slide of gloom unless we meet it with the kind of positive energy force that we bring to classrooms—we need a collective energy that exceeds the force of the push for privatization.
This energizing force can only come from one place and from one direction: from the grassroots.
It was the animating force of Red for Ed, it is the power of organized labor, it is the simple idea that everyday folks can come together to address the issues that they see everyday—issues that other folks don’t seem to acknowledge.
Each time teachers and support staff stand together to bring issues of working people to light, we bring meaning to the idea of a union as a collective working toward a common goal and sharing the same collective fate.
Unions, at their best, are built around a love for our fellow colleagues and our fellow workers. It is expressed when the voices of the seldom heard echo in the halls: the halls of schools, of board rooms, and ultimately, in the halls of power.
Voucher schemes in states like my own are evidence of the need to build stronger unions. We need unions that can make the case for the public good that public education provides, unions that are unabashedly of and for the educators who go the extra mile each day for kids, communities, and the common good.
We cannot ignore the ugliness of the status quo, with fear driving people apart, books being banned, and teachers training for active shooter drills. Each one of our students are too precious to turn our attention away from the work that we must do together to bring about change.
This school year, let’s recommit to the labor of love that is standing up for public schools, our students, and the communities we serve by building stronger and more inclusive unions. The movement for public schools isn’t dead. It’s just getting started.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Give Them a Raise! Teachers Deserve Much More Than a Week of Appreciation
We must do more than take a week to say thank you. We must pay teachers for the work they do to support our society. The evidence is clear that we have been failing in this regard.
May 12, 2023
To this day, I have yet to meet a person incapable of naming a teacher who made an impact on their life. No matter if they attended an under-resourced or well-off school, nearly everyone has had a teacher who made them believe in themselves, taught them to love a subject they thought they were terrible at, or opened up their view of the world.
Whether it was the teacher of my Pastor Bernard in Oakland who taught him to read and write through lived experiences rather than textbooks; or my fiancé’s who recognized her potential and fast-tracked her into more advanced courses; or my history teacher who helped me believe in my abilities and cultivate my love of social studies—teachers change lives. They deserve to be paid fairly for their impact on all of us.
Teachers—alongside emergency responders, doctors, and the military—represent a profession that is critical to the lifeblood of society. Yet unlike these other professions, which provide sustainable salaries, our nation gives thanks to our teachers with a week of appreciation. Even then, the burden of that thanks is often placed on our kids or parents to bring them gifts.
The problem is not with our children bringing tokens of thanks; the problem is with the policies we have allowed to underpay teachers, and thus, undercut the entire value of the teaching profession.
Now this is not to discredit those gifts. I still have the homemade gifts from my students when I was a teacher in Hawai’i. The problem is not with our children bringing tokens of thanks; the problem is with the policies we have allowed to underpay teachers, and thus, undercut the entire value of the teaching profession.
We must do more than take a week to say thank you. We must pay teachers for the work they do to support our society. The evidence is clear that we have been failing in this regard.
Even before the pandemic made teaching even more difficult, teachers were leaving the classroom at harrowing rates. More than half cite low compensation as what is driving them out the door. In California, which has the largest number of public school students in the US, 80% of districts reported a shortage of qualified teachers in 2017-2018. The problem is compounded by the fact that we can’t fill these spots with new teachers as enrollment in teacher education programs fell by 35% between 2009 and 2014.
\u201cTalk is cheap. It\u2019s high time we show teachers our appreciation by giving them a well-deserved raise. #AmericanTeacherAct\u201d— Rep. Frederica Wilson (@Rep. Frederica Wilson) 1683663898
Teachers are so undervalued in America that 62% of parents do not want their students to become teachers, citing low-teacher salaries as the number one reason why.
We have the power to show teachers that they matter. This starts by paying them a minimum nationwide salary of $60,000. There is a bipartisan bill in congress right now that can help make this a reality. We should not be a society where the correction officer who is responsible for keeping people in jail gets paid more than the teachers who can help keep the kids out of jail.
While paying teachers a minimum national salary of $60,000 is far from the silver bullet that will fix teacher shortages, it is an integral improvement that can help demonstrate to teachers that they matter and are deeply valued.
Let’s make Teacher Appreciation Week mean something more. Let’s use the week as a time to call on Congress to pass meaningful legislation that shows just how much we support and appreciate teachers.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular