Marc H. Morial
President and CEO
National Urban League
“Presidents Trump and Musk and their billionaire buddies are so detached from how Americans live that they cannot see how ending public education and canceling these contracts kills the American Dream. This is not about Democrats versus Republicans. This is about billionaires versus the middle class. If kids from working class families do not have access to schools, how can they build a future?” — U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro
The Elon Musk-led slash-and-burn squad euphemistically known as the Department of Government Efficiency has revoked the contracts of researchers who are years into the collection, analysis, and study of educational data.
It has pulled about 100 Department of Education employees, including those with even the slightest connection to diversity, equity, and inclusion policies, from their jobs.
At her Senate confirmation hearing, the nominee for Secretary of Education — an extremist advocate for diverting public funds to private schools — outlined her plan for dismantling her own department.
Meanwhile, extremist allies in the House of Representatives were preparing legislation to divert the resources slashed from educational initiatives to billionaires.
The current administration appears recklessly determined to sabotage our nation’s competitiveness in the new technology-based economy by undermining federal oversight and support for education. Openly mocking its own legal and moral duty to eliminate educational opportunity gaps as “wokeness,” the administration will abandon students in underserved communities, shifting ever-more resources toward the wealthiest Americans.
The Department of Education has been a cabinet-level agency for only 46 years, but opponents of educational equity have been trying to eliminate federal oversight and support for education since shortly after the Civil War. Just a year after President Andrew Johnson signed a bill creating the first Department of Education, resentment over the education of formerly enslaved people led to the demotion of the agency to an office within the Department of the Interior.
Federal support for education remained relatively feeble for nearly a century, until the landmark Elementary and Secondary Act of 1965. Part of President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, the Act represented the first significant federal investment in primary and secondary schools and a commitment to closing the achievement gap.
Both Republican and Democratic presidents have reauthorized the Act over the years, most notably 1994’s Improving America’s Schools Act under President Bill Clinton, 2002’s No Child Left Behind Act under President George W. Bush, and 2015’s Every Student Succeeds Act under President Barack Obama.
The Trump administration is drafting an executive order that calls on Congress to eliminate the Department of Education, but members are unlikely to defy the strong public sentiment in favor of it. Only 29% of voters want to see the Department eliminated, and nearly 70% support increased funding for education.
A clue to the motivation behind the administration’s unpopular and disastrous campaign against education lies in Musk’s own publicly-declared desire to displace American-born engineers with lower-paid immigrants. He falsely claims that Americans aren’t educated enough for the work, but seems determined to make that claim a reality.
