WASHINGTON—With U.S. schools now starting classes, the cruelty of President Donald Trump’s dismantling of the Education Department is now obvious to millions of children and their families as they suffer the consequences. Feeling the pain, students, parents, teachers, lawmakers and unions descended on Capitol Hill this week to decry the cuts resulting from the dismantling of the Department of Education.
Union leaders and congressional Democrats discussed how students of color—who are more than half of the nation’s 50 million-plus public school students—students with special needs and students whose first language is not English, among others, benefit from and need the department’s programs.
Trump and his Education Secretary, GOP donor Linda McMahon, don’t think so. “They want to shut the door on these kids,” said Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md.
The Sept.15 sun-splashed outdoor press conference featured Government Employees (AFGE) President Everett Kelley, AFGE Local 252 President Rachel Gittleman—whose local represents the department’s present and former workers—Teachers/AFT Secretary-Treasurer Fed Ingram of Florida, National Education Association Vice President Noel Candelaria, a special ed teacher from El Paso, Texas, and congressional Democrats.
Several speakers offered a solution for voters at the polls this fall: Elect a new Congress whose members would successfully resist Trump, McMahon, their corporate backers, and their destruction of the department, which began just over a year ago.
Sen. Angela Alsobrooks, D-Md., told the crowd then-nominee McMahon both publicly and privately said her assigned mission was to put the department, the nation’s smallest Cabinet agency, out of business and herself out of a job. Gittleman said her local had 4,000 active workers before cuts.
“Since Day 1, McMahon has done everything possible to cause this department to fail,” Alsobrooks elaborated. “She told me” in a private visit at the senator’s office “her job would be done if there was no more Department of Education.”
Added NEA’s Ingram of the Trump administration, “Their plan is to monopolize education for the haves and not have it for the have-nots.”
One way to do that, other speakers said: Cut money for public school kids while pushing more federal taxpayer vouchers for parents of private school kids. Both teachers’ unions oppose voucher schemes, which strip needed state and federal funds from public schools.
Private schools can be selective in who they educate. Many deny education to kids of different faiths from the sponsoring schools.
Congress, however, refused to dismantle the department, so Trump and McMahon, aided by Trump’s Office of Personnel Management, are dismembering it by executive fiat.
McMahon fired half of the department’s headquarters staff and is shuffling off its programs to other agencies. Student aid, for example, went to the Small Business Administration. And $35 billion in grants for special programs, such as vocational education, including $600 million to local schools for advanced teacher training, were cut or killed, AFGE President Kelley said.
And when federal judges ordered McMahon to fill some vacancies she created, the secretary deliberately refused to consider reapplications from qualified people who held those positions before, said Gittleman, president of AFGE Local 252, which speaks for the department’s headquarters staff.
As former head of the Office of Student Financial Aid, Gittleman’s one of those who were fired. “I couldn’t sit back,” and is now leading AFGE’s campaign to restore the department, said Gittleman.
McMahon also dumped the department’s Office of Civil Rights—a particular victory for Trump, his MAGA million, and radical right lawmakers—into the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, whose prime objective under Trump is investigating supposed “discrimination” against white men.
“When we had no Office of Civil Rights” which, like the rest of the department, was established in 1979, “and we had no federal oversight, we had rampant discrimination,” said Rep. Bobby Scott, D-Va., top Democrat on the highly partisan, GOP-run House Education and the Workforce Committee.
McMahon “refused to let the Office of Civil Rights do its job.” Federal law assigns the office to probe cases of discrimination against woman students, students of color, and those with different abilities. McMahon, again defying Congress while obeying Trump, abolished the civil rights office.
But when Democrats retake the House this fall, Scott predicted confidently, “We will conduct vigorous oversight over the department and pass vigorous legislation to restore” it. “We’ll stop this war on public education,” promised Scott, who would reclaim the committee’s chair.
Educators unions—the Teachers/AFT, the National Education Association and the School Administrators—along with the Government Employees (AFGE) are leading the fight in both Congress and the federal courts against dismantling the department. Gittleman added Local 252 joined former Education Secretaries John King, Miguel Cardona and Arne Duncan to demand the department’s Acting Inspector General, Mark Priebe, formally investigate the legality of the firings.
One speaker, Rep. Jahana Hayes, D-Conn., touched on one uncomfortable fact. Even before Trump took a chainsaw to the department, the promises lawmakers annually make in Education Department authorization bills—which set priorities for the agency but don’t actually fund them—often fell short of need, regardless of which party controlled the White House and Congress.
“We’re talking as if it’s too late now” to save funding for the nation’s kids, said Hayes, a National Education Association member and former National Teacher of the Year, who taught social studies in Waterbury, Conn. “For the kids I taught 10 years ago, it was too late.”
But Trump’s regime is not the only problem backers of restoring the Education Department face, NEA VP Candelaria told People’s World in a brief post-press conference interview. Parent apathy is another, and that will take a lot of education by the unions and their members to overcome. “We need to make that direct connection,” he said.
And his own home state, Texas, is a big problem, too. The Texas Education Agency—the state’s department—is under the tight control of right-wing MAGA Gov. Greg Abbott and his agency administrator, Mike Morath. It can and has seized control of local school districts at will, targeting majority-minority districts, especially the largest, Houston.
“We have to connect with the parents and show how our ability to teach has been affected and how” Morath’s moves “will set them up to fail,” he said of kids “when they go to college.” And because the Texas Education Agency rules on the content of all required school texts in the entire state, the nation’s second-most-populous, its market is so huge that its texts, and the right-wing dogma they include, are used nationwide.
“We need to come together with the parents” to tackle that problem, too, Candelaria added.
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