COMMENTARY: The Dismantling of the Department of Education Continued

I ain’t done.  Let me say some more things about the dismantling of the Department of Education….

Trump and his MAGA ilk aren’t afraid of “liberal indoctrination.”  Don’t believe that LIE. They’re afraid of Black and brown children learning the truth about this country.  They don’t want white kids to learn either because they saw what happened in 2020 when young angry white people were in the streets tearing shit up after George Floyd was publicly lynched in the street.

They don’t want students reading about slavery, colonization, gender identity, police violence, and whitewashed history.  Trump and his cult want to ban books, get rid of teachers, and make sure the next generation is too uninformed to challenge the racist power structures they cling to.  So, if you can control the narrative then you can control the future!

Not to mention, they understand that demography is destiny.  They see the numbers.  The majority of K-12 students in public schools are non-white.  Only about 45% of students are white, according to data from the National Center for Education Statistics.  Oh, and the same trend is happening in higher ed, with more than 50% of college students being nonwhite.  I wanted to write about this decline in white college students years ago when I was a reporter for the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Look at these numbers, Y’all.  That’s the real crisis they’re trying to “solve.”  When they say they want to “Make America Great 

Again,” what they really mean is: “We want the schools to serve white children again and f*ck them other people’s kids!”  

And so, they MUST kill the DOE!  

They MUST kill the DOE because it represents the last line of federal defense against their campaign to whitewash history.  They MUST kill the DOE because it funds schools that serve the very Black, brown, immigrant, queer, and disabled children they see as expendable. They MUST kill the DOE because it enforces civil rights laws that keep their fantasy of segregated, obedient classrooms from becoming reality.  They MUST kill the DOE because it threatens their ability to turn education into a profit machine for white Christian nationalists and private charter grifters. They MUST kill the DOE because a diverse generation that can think, question, vote, and resist is their worst nightmare!

And ohhh, don’t get it twisted… They say this is about “school choice.”  It ain’t.  This is privatization of education is wrapped in the flag and soaked in evangelical Kool-Aid.  They want to destroy public education so they can justify giving tax dollars to private, religious, and white schools.  They want to do this so they can preach white nationalism, obedience, and patriarchal garbage without government interference. 

And when I say they want people stupid, I’m ain’t being hyperbolic, Y’all.  This is a calculated strategy.  

Fascists thrive when people can’t think critically, can’t decode propaganda, and can’t organize.  An uneducated population doesn’t vote in high numbers.  It doesn’t resist.  It doesn’t dream because it has not been taught how to imagine and think critically.  The goal is to raise a generation of passive workers and paranoid consumers who will beg the state for permission, and for protection from imaginary threats while real ones are sitting right there in the halls of power.

So, they’re gonna hand education policy over to the states.  Uh-huh, they’re still on this “states’ rights” bs.  Well, we know this is just Jim Crow with new branding for the 21st century.  

So, what does this look like?  

Returning education to the states means gutting federal civil rights protections.  It means letting states like Florida and Texas erase Black history, punish queer students, and roll back more than 50 years of progress.  Yeah, the DOE has long had problems, but it has been one of the only levers of accountability for educational equity for decades.  Destroying it is an open invitation to racist and all kinds of other discrimination.

Be clear, these fascists want CHAOS!  They want to starve the schools.  Ban books.  Destroy libraries.  Bully teachers.  Starve Black and Brown children, and even their own because white supremacy doesn’t genuinely care about children.  It never has.  It only cares about preserving whiteness.   

And after they destroy public education, they will use the failure THEY ENGINEERED as an excuse to funnel tax dollars to white-washed private academies and Christian indoctrination camps to guarantee that whiteness stays centered as the nation’s moral, cultural, and intellectual standard.

Contributed by Stacey Patton

Check out “Parents Defending Education,” an organization working against improving education for Black children