As 2026 Dawns, Future of Civil Rights Protection in K-12 Public Schools and Higher Ed. Looks Bleak Under Trump Administration

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Nothing, except growing tariffs and the failure to mitigate the damage of the wars in Gaza and the Ukraine, has defined Donald Trump’s second term more than the administration’s attempt to undermine civil rights protection for students and educators in our nation’s 13,000 public school districts and the nation’s colleges and universities.

Happy Holidays! This blog will take a break and return on Tuesday, January 6, 2026.

We watched an attack on Maine’s public schools where trans students compete in women’s sports. We watched the Department of Education withhold funds from the Chicago Public Schools because the district has a Black student student success plan that promotes what the Trump administration considers the dangerous principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion. And just this week, Education Week reported that the Department of Education is cancelling many grants for Full Service Community Schools and the Promise Neighborhoods program where funds are being spent on services the Trump administration believes promote diversity, equity, and inclusion. Many of the Department of Education’s efforts to curtail the protection of the civil rights of historically marginalized groups of students have been temporarily stayed by Federal District Courts, but a lot of these cases linger in temporary, local decisions without any legal resolution.

Some colleges and universities have felt enough pressure that they’ve signed agreements to share with the federal government admissions information including high school grades, test scores and family income of all applicants to prove they are not selecting their students based on proxy data that substitutes for race-based affirmative action. Others have lost federal research grants as a punishment for maintaining programs and policies the Trump administration believes promote diversity, equity, and inclusion and thereby discriminate against the white majority.

Is there any chance the Trump administration’s effort to stamp out civil rights will wind down in 2026?  Here are three events in December that indicate the attacks are likely to continue.

The Trump administration just ended the disparate impact test in civil rights enforcement.  For years the federal government has held schools accountable when data proves, for example, their discipline systems are discriminatory by race or ethnicity or disability status. Evidence of disparate impact has been used for decades to protect students and others from discrimination in institutions that receive government funding including education, law enforcement and fair housing. But that ended abruptly on Wednesday, December 9.

The Washington Post‘s Laura Meckler reported: “(T)he Justice Department moved Tuesday to kill a decades-old provision of civil rights law that allows statistical disparities to be used as proof of racial discrimination. The new regulations reinterpret a key plank of the Civil Rights Act and were issued without an opportunity for public comment, which is unusual for major regulatory action… Conservatives have long argued that proving discrimination should require proof that someone intended to treat people differently. And they say that when people are being judged by data, they feel pressure to make decisions based on racial quotas. In that way, the Trump administration argues, a policy meant to fight discrimination is actually fostering it… Supporters of disparate impact analysis say it is a critical tool because finding ‘smoking gun’ evidence to prove someone intended to discriminate is difficult.” Meckler notes that the way the new guidance was immediately implemented breaks federal precedent: “Federal agencies typically would allow time for public comment before publishing a final rule like this.”

Politico adds that Harmeet Dhillon, the Trump Justice Department’s Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, provided her particular justification for stamping out the disparate impact test: “Harmeet Dhillon, DOJ’s civil rights chief, highlighted that the rule change will lead to fewer civil rights lawsuits…. The prior ‘disparate impact’ regulations encouraged people to file lawsuits challenging racially neutral policies, without evidence of intentional discrimination… Our rejection of this theory will restore true equality under the law by requiring proof of actual discrimination, rather than enforcing race- or sex-based quotas or assumptions.”

By contrast, last spring when President Trump released an executive order trying to end “disparate impact,” the NY Times Erica Green considered disparate impact’s role in the history of enforcement of the Civil Rights Act: “The disparate impact test has been crucial to enforcing key portions of the landmark Civil Rights Act, which prohibits recipients of federal funding from discriminating based on race, color or national origin. For decades, it has been relied upon by the government and attorneys to root out discrimination in areas of employment, housing, policing, education and more. Civil rights prosecutors say the disparate-impact test is one of their most important tools for uncovering discrimination because it shows how a seemingly neutral policy or law has different outcomes for different demographic groups, revealing inequities.”

Trump’s DOJ just sued Minneapolis Public Schools to end the district’s effort to increase the number of teachers of color.  The Minneapolis Star Tribune’s Anthony Lonetree reported last week: “The U.S. Department of Justice has filed suit against Minneapolis Public Schools, accusing the state’s third-largest district of providing discriminatory protections to teachers of color in layoff and reassignment decisions.  The lawsuit… marks the latest salvo against diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives—in this case, the district’s efforts to bolster its minority teaching ranks. At issue is a contract agreement with educators that includes language shielding teachers of color from ‘last-in, first-out’ layoff practices and prioritizing the hiring of Black male educators at a north Minneapolis elementary school.”

Lonetree quotes Attorney General Pam Bondi justifying the lawsuit: “Discrimination is unacceptable in all forms especially when it comes to hiring decisions… Our public education system in Minnesota and across the country must be a bastion of merit and equal opportunity—not DEI.”  Here are words from DOJ’s lawsuit itself: “While defendants claim that these provisions are to stop discrimination, they require defendants to blatantly discriminate against teachers based on their race, color, sex, and national origin.”

Lonetree explains the purpose of the school district’s hiring policy: “Students of color comprise nearly two-thirds of the district’s total student population, and Minneapolis Public Schools, like many districts around the state, has sought to place teachers whom students can relate to and aspire to be like.”

Is the Trump Department of Education making the Office for Civil Rights viable again? Will the December 5th recall of furloughed staff help families who have filed civil rights complaints?  After a year of massive layoffs and the closure of seven of the twelve regional offices of the Office for Civil Rights, for CNN last week, Sunlen Serfaty described what might have seemed like exciting news: “Beleaguered employees in the civil rights office got what they thought was welcome news last week. The Department of Education informed employees who had been terminated earlier this year, then placed on administrative leave in an ongoing court battle, that they are to return to work later this month. The email to about 250 employees noted they are needed to address the existing caseload.”

However, in the details in the Department of Education’s December 5th recall notice, there are some serious questions about what is happening: For the Associated Press, Collin Binkley explains: “The Trump administration is bringing back dozens of Education Department staffers who were slated to be laid off, saying their help is needed to tackle a mounting backlog of discrimination complaints from students and families. The staffers had been on administrative leave while the department faced lawsuits challenging layoffs in the agency’s Office for Civil Rights, which investigates possible discrimination in the nation’s schools and colleges. But in a Friday (December 5) letter, department officials ordered the workers back to duty starting Dec. 15 to help clear civil rights cases.”  (The emphasis is mine.)

And K-12 Dive‘s Anna Merod quotes Julie Hartman, the Office for Civil Rights’ press secretary for legal affairs emphasizing “in a Dec. 8 email that… (the agency) is  temporarily bringing back OCR staff from administrative leave starting Dec. 15.” (The emphasis is mine.)

Let’s be clear. The Office for Civil Rights has never enforced the 1964 Civil Rights Act merely by charging school districts with violations, getting court orders that school district staff be fired, or imposing fines. OCR’s staff have been known for decades to work with school district teachers, counselors and administrators to develop programs and policies ensuring that children’s civil rights are no longer violated.

There is currently a serious problem at the Office for Civil Rights because all year while more than half the agency’s staff have been laid off, a huge backlog of uninvestigated complaints has built up. Reporters confirm that 2,500 complaints await investigation. NPR’s Cory Turner reports: “(P)ublic data show that OCR has reached resolution agreements in 73 cases involving alleged disability discrimination. Compare that to 2024, when OCR resolved 390, or 2017, the year Trump took office during his first term, when OCR reached agreements in more than 1,000 cases.”  CNN‘s Serfaty adds that this year  OCR has been “dismissing cases at an increasing pace, court documents reveal. About 7,000 cases have been dismissed under the Trump administration—hundreds more than in the same period last year under Biden.”

All this makes one question whether the furloughed staff are really being recalled to work with school districts to overcome the issues that have stimulated 2,500 complaints filed by families. Kimberly Richey emphasized that the recall of staff on leave is temporary, that the e-mail to staff emphasized the need to clear the backlog of complaints.  What percentage of the complaints processed by returning staff will be pursued with efforts to mitigate civil rights problems, and what percentage will be merely dismissed without further work?

There are additional questions about how utterly temporary the recall of staff might actually be. It is important to recall that Congress passed a continuing resolution to end the October government shutdown and also to delay the massive staff firings launched during the shutdown  by Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought.  That continuing resolution ends on January 30, 2026.  Are staff at OCR being recalled to work from December 15, 2025 only until January 30, 2026, when they will be permanently terminated?

The future of civil rights enforcement by the Trump administration continues to look bleak. Will the OCR be shut down? Will its work be shunted to the Department of Justice as Linda McMahon continues to dismantle the Department of Education?  The Trump administration has persisted in abandoning what have been—for 71 years since Brown v. Board of Education—historic efforts to expand educational opportunity for groups of children who were historically marginalized.  As 2025 ends, the attack on academic freedom and civil rights does not seem to be winding down.

For-Profit Immigrant Prison Will Hire For-Profit Virtual Charter School for Children Detained for Months

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This is a story I would never have imagined I’d be covering in this blog whose purpose is to consider the needs of children in the United States today and their education. For me this story calls to mind Charles Dickens’ Little Dorrit, a dark and penetrating novel about a child born and raised in the Marshalsea debtor’s prison where her family is incarcerated due to her father’s debt. The novel is also about the moral corruption permeating an effete, mid-19th century British society that quietly imprisons whole families for debt. Today we imprison and subsequently expel families for being immigrants, even though most of our ancestors were immigrants. Little Dorrit, Dickens’ eleventh novel, captures a society awash in money, speculation, fraud, and pretension, a society that has abandoned the poor, and a government indifferent to its basic responsibilities. It is alarming to recognize how well Dickens’ old novel describes our own U.S. society during Donald Trump’s second term.

Last week, The American Prospect‘s Whitney Curry Wimbish covered the plight of children living at the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas, a prison for immigrant families awaiting extradition by ICE. It is a story set in 2025 in the United States about the mass roundup of immigrant families for deportation; a private, for-profit prison; and an online, for-profit charter school. While the operators of the immigrant detention prison and the operators of the online charter school the prison plans to open are both making gobs of money through the private contracting of services, there is no hint that they worry about about protecting the well-being of children, and there is no mention of the 1982 Supreme Court decision in Plyler v. Doe that protects the rights of all children living in the United States to a free public education. These children have been captured by ICE and are being held with their parents in a prison.

Stride, formerly K12 Inc., an online charter school management company is described by Wimbish as a “a $2 billion online education company that reportedly served 220,000 students in 31 states last year. Formerly McKinsey & Co. consultant Ron J. Packard founded the company in 2000 with $40 million in venture capital backing from Oracle’s Larry Ellison and junk bond king Michael Milken, among others.”  Stride Schools have different names across the states; in Ohio, for example, Stride operates the Ohio Virtual Academy.

CoreCivic is described by Wimbish as, “one of two major for-profit prison operators, whose fortunes have risen drastically under the Trump regime.” CoreCivic operates the South Texas Family Residential Center, an immigrant family prison in Dilley, Texas, which has set out to open some kind of education program. Wimbish explains why: “The establishment of a school is an effort to sanitize the extended detention of hundreds of children at Dilley, which violates a court settlement established 28 years ago. Under that settlement, children may not be held in immigration prison for more than 20 days unless the facility is nonsecure and licensed. But a recent court filing claims that ICE has held hundreds of children for well beyond that limit, in some cases for multiple months, and subjected them to neglect and abuse.”

Wimbish emphasizes that the South Texas Family Residential Center has continued to violate federal law by failing to protect children and by failing to provide adequate services for their education, all in violation of “the Flores Settlement Agreement, the 1997 legal requirement for the government to meet basic standards of care and oversight for children it holds in immigration prisons. Under the agreement, the government must provide education to immigration prisoners 17 years old and younger, along with adequate food, water, clothes, and medical attention. The government also must transfer children to a licensed, nonsecure child care facility after 20 days.” Right now at the South Texas Family Residential Center, “There’s no adequate education or recreation at the prison for children… Children reported that the educational program that currently exists is little more than an hour of drawing in a classroom so crowded that some children are turned away. Opening a new school is meant to resolve this inadequacy. But even if it is instituted, the facility would still not be licensed, and children would not be able to leave the facility, violating both tests set up by the Flores settlement.”

It doesn’t seem as though the CoreCivic for-profit prison looked to the public schools in the area for support or even sought the best possible private provider. If you are interested in mere court compliance and not worried about the kind of instruction you are providing for children and adolescents, you might go for an alliance with a big, for profit provider.  And since there would likely be continuing turnover of students, you might try to get by with an online, computer driven school, where teachers are there mostly to provide some supervision. “There’s no indication how big the school will be or when it will open…  The posting for the school’s principal says whoever holds that job will directly supervise 15 to 30 full-time equivalent regular employees and/or contractors. Postings for instructors, such as one for a high school English teacher, say they will be responsible ‘for a minimum of 20 students’ in two daily four-hour sessions. Immigration advocates said they expect the school to open in January.”

It would seem that one huge, for-profit company went for a handy collaboration with another big company. Did CoreCivic investigate Stride’s questionable reputation?  “Earlier this month, securities law firm Bleichmar Fonti & Auld LLP announced a class action lawsuit against Stride and its senior executives for defrauding investors by lying about enrollment figures and failing to disclose ‘a catastrophic technology failure’…   Two events prompted the claim. The first was in August, when New Mexico’s Gallup-McKinley County Schools announced it had severed all ties with Stride, which it had contracted to provide online education to its students, most of whom are Indigenous, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. According to the school district, during its tenure Stride repeatedly violated state law and failed to provide adequate education to such an extent that graduation rates plummeted, along with academic proficiency in all subjects. During the 2023-2024 school year, the proficiency rate for reading dropped to less than 23 percent and math dropped to less than 6 percent, while fewer than 23 percent of students graduated. District officials said rates would decline again for the 2024-2025 school year because of Stride’s failures.”

Stride’s failure to operate in the public interest goes way back: “In 2011, for example, The New York Times profiled one of K12’s online schools, saying that by ‘almost every educational measure, the Agora Cyber Charter School is failing.’ Six years later, a group of students from Yale published a study titled ‘K12 Inc.: Virtually Failing Our Students.’” They found that, ‘With no exceptions, students enrolled in K12 schools performed worse in math than their district and state counterparts. With only one exception, they performed worse in English and language arts.’ ”

The legal director of RAICES, a Texas immigrant support agency, Javier O. Hidalgo commented on the prison’s plan to open the school: “It makes sense that a private prison company would attract such a private education company… You’re profiting off of putting certain people into these jail settings, which is already disgusting, so it doesn’t surprise me that other companies that are in the business of profiting off people would be aligned with that… The intent absolutely is to be harmful … and try to punish these families for being here.”

Wimbish concludes: “The administration is forcing more longtime U.S. residents into immigration prisons, and plans to increase the number of prisoners even further next year…  It’s part of the Trump regime’s mass deportation campaign, which will significantly expand next year with more than $150 billion in tax dollars, including $45 billion for more facilities, a funding boost delivered in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.”

Billionaires Are Undermining Public Education in America

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In a series of articles dubbed “Billionaire Nation,” the Washington Post confirms what we have all sensed as we watch the operation not only of the Trump administration but also the massive investment by our richest citizens in the candidates and policy of our state legislatures.

In How Billionaires Took Over American Politics, the Post recounts the political story of our new Gilded Age: “In an era defined by major political divisions and massive wealth accumulation for the richest Americans, billionaires are spending unprecedented amounts on U.S. politics… Since 2000, political giving by the wealthiest 100 Americans to federal elections has gone up almost 140 times… In 2000, the country’s wealthiest 100 people donated about a quarter of 1 percent of the total cost of federal elections… By 2024, they covered about 7.5 percent, even as the cost of such elections soared… (R)oughly 1 in every 13 dollars spent in last year’s national elections was donated by a handful of the country’s richest people… America’s 902 billionaires are collectively worth more than $6.7 trillion, the most wealth ever amassed by the nation’s ultra-rich… A little more than a decade ago, there were half as many billionaires in the U.S….”

Our current politics reflect the rise of the billionaire class as well as the erasure of necessary regulation: “Economists say wealth is now more concentrated at the very top than at any time since the Gilded Age. The tech and market revolutions of recent decades have created riches on an unprecedented scale. Changing norms on executive compensation and lower-tax policies under Republican and Democratic administrations have helped insulate those fortunes. And in three landmark decisions, starting with 2010’s Citizens United v. FEC, federal courts gutted post-Watergate campaign finance restrictions, clearing the way for donors to contribute unlimited money to elections.”

Clearly all this has shaped the second Trump administration. “Last year, many tech barons threw their support behind the GOP, which they saw as more aligned with their often-libertarian ideals and their companies’ economic interests… Musk is the starkest example of the shift. He accounted for a sizable portion of the uptick in political spending in 2024, doling out $294 million to help elect Trump and other Republicans… The president installed about a dozen billionaires in his current administration… Trump’s Cabinet is the wealthiest in U.S. history, with a combined net worth of $7.5 billion… At the same time, Trump has championed a deregulation and tax cut agenda that is bringing huge benefits to wealthy Americans.”

Economist Joseph Stiglitz published a warning in the summer of 2024 in his book, The Road to Freedom: “There are two distinct aspects to the situation in the U.S.  The power dynamics are exacerbated by a political system in which money matters more than in most democracies. American elections are very expensive, and donors who make more campaign contributions (more rightly thought of as ‘political investments’) inevitably have more influence. Lobbying has also become a major business.” (p. 232) “To put it bluntly, ordinary citizens around the world have been sold a bill of goods. When there’s a problem, they’ve been told to ‘leave it to the market.’  They’ve even been told that the market can solve problems of externalities, coordination, and public goods. That’s wishful thinking. A well-functioning society needs rules, regulations, public institutions, and public expenditures financed by taxes.” (pp. 278-279)

While we have all been watching the operation of big money driving the power dynamics in Washington, D.C., just last week in its “Billionaire Nation” series, the Washington Post explored the role of big money in the legislative chambers across the states.  . In “Meet the Billionaire Pushing Taxpayer-Funded School Vouchers,” Laura Meckler, Beth Reinhard, and Clara Ence Morse profile the role of Pennsylvania billionaire Jeff Yass investing in the promotion of his favorite ideology as he helps purchase state legislation for universal school vouchers. It is not as though Jeff Yass has had much recent experience with public schools; he educated his sons at “the Haverford School, a private school for boys on Philadelpia’s Main Line, where yearly high school tuition today costs nearly $48,000.” And he and some friends opened their own classical charter school.  But sixty-seven-year-old Yass formulated a commitment to his favorite ideology even before he made enough money to become “the 27th-richest  person in the world” through the “Susquehanna International Group, the behemoth trading firm.” “Yass’s political instincts began to form in his 20s, when he read economist Milton Friedman’s seminal work, ‘Capitalism and Freedom.’ He came away convinced of the value of free markets and idolizing Friedman himself.” Yass once personally asked Friedman for advice: “If you had a lot of philanthropic money, how would you spend it? His answer: ‘school choice.’ ”

According to Meckler, Reinhard and Morse, Yass regularly distorts the results of recent studies showing that private schools accepting vouchers are definitely not more academically effective than their public school counterparts: “But he also says he doesn’t really care what the studies say….  He takes the libertarian point of view that all parents should be empowered to choose the school—public or private—that they want for their children., no matter what.” “He argues that public schools are failing millions of children, and says those students deserve the chance to attend the school of their choice—private, religious, charter or traditional public—with taxpayer dollars.”

Yass has definitely been investing in school choice via universal vouchers, which he calls “his philanthropy,” even though he has not yet successfully been able to buy enough legislative power to produce universal voucher plans in Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Colorado, and Nebraska, where voucher legislation he supported ultimately proved unsuccessful. However, he hasn’t give up.  He has already supported Vivek Ramaswamy, a supporter of Ohio school voucher expansion, in Ramaswamy’s 2026 gubernatorial run in Ohio with a check for $10 million, for example.

Yass’s money did enable Texas Governor Greg Abbott to pass a universal voucher plan last April, 2025.  Abbott’s original 2023 drive for school vouchers failed in a state where vouchers would not be relevant in many rural districts lacking private schools where vouchers could be used. After 21 rural Republicans in the Texas House voted with Democrats to block the vouchers, Abbott tried a new strategy: backing pro-voucher Republicans to challenge the incumbents. “Yass gave $6 million to a political fund controlled by the governor, which Abbott’s campaign called the largest contribution in Texas history. He later gave $6 million more… Yass also donated $5.7 million that year to the Texas AFC Victory Fund, the political arm of the American Federation for Children… that spent $8 million working to defeat the anti-voucher Republicans… Most of the anti-voucher Republicans were defeated, and in April, the newly voucher-friendly Texas legislature approved a $1 billion program.”

In The Road to Freedom, economist Stiglitz discusses a term students learn about in Economics 101:  “Key questions of economic policy entail managing externalities—discouraging activities where there are harmful (negative) externalities and encouraging activities where there are positive externalities.” (p. 46)  Yass’s huge donations helped replace one set of state politicians with others who share his libertarian ideology without public conversation about the negative externalities of universal school voucher policies—their diversion of tax dollars away from the public schools that serve the majority of children—their failure to protect students’ civil rights—their exclusionary admissions policies—their failure to ensure teachers are qualified—their failure to protect the separation of religion and public life.

Jeff Yass epitomizes the power of the world’s 27th richest person to use his money to help politicians undermine the kind of public oversight that protects the majority of U.S. families who depend the provision of well funded public schools in rural, urban and suburban areas and the kind of public oversight that protects all students’ civil rights.  Here is the late political theorist Benjamin Barber speaking to the consequences for all of us of the growing power of money in our unequal society as billionaires increasingly dominate our politics:

“Privatization is a kind of reverse social contract: it dissolves the bonds that tie us together into free communities and democratic republics. It puts us back in the state of nature where we possess a natural right to get whatever we can on our own, but at the same time lose any real ability to secure that to which we have a right. Private choices rest on individual power… personal skills… and personal luck.  Public choices rest on civic rights and common responsibilities, and presume equal rights for all. Public liberty is what the power of common endeavor establishes, and hence presupposes that we have constituted ourselves as public citizens by opting into the social contract. With privatization, we are seduced back into the state of nature by the lure of private liberty and particular interest; but what we experience in the end is an environment in which the strong dominate the weak… the very dilemma which the original social contract was intended to address.” (Consumed, pp. 143-144)

Disillusionment: The Charter School Dream Has Utterly Collapsed

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Launched in the mid-1990s, charter schools—publicly funded but privately operated—have been authorized to operate in 44 states with a mixed academic record and an appalling absence of public oversight by the state governments that made these public–private partnerships possible.

In July, the Network for Public Education (NPE) released Decline, the first installment of a new report, Charter School Reckoning: Decline, Disillusionment and Cost, which concluded: “Once heralded as a bold experiment in innovation and opportunity… (the charter school sector) is now characterized by stagnation, retrenchment, and rising school closures. Between 2022 and 2025, growth has nearly halted, and closures—often sudden and disruptive—are accelerating. Federal investment, rather than adapting to the sector’s shifting realities, has ballooned to half a billion dollars annually, funding schools that never open, quickly fail, or operate with minimal oversight and accountability.”

In Disillusionment, the second installment of the Charter School Reckoning report, released last week, NPE addresses the question of why support for charter schools has declined over the educational experiment’s 30 year lifespan. Back in the mid-1990s, charter school advocates imagined they would be: “nimble, innovative, community-driven alternatives to traditional public schools—laboratories of experimentation led by teachers and grounded in equity.”  Why didn’t the dream work out?

With examples from across the states, NPE tells a four part story of the collapse of the charter school dream—a combined policy failure that has created an education sector dominated by fraud, corruption, and the theft of public tax dollars. Each section names the dream and exposes its collapse:

First:   “Aspiration: Charter schools will be teacher-led schools, rooted in community needs, where parents have a real voice.  Reality: About half of all charter schools are run by charter management organizations—some are for-profit corporations; others are nonprofit. All are disconnected from families and communities.”  We learn that, “In 1995, two years after Michigan passed its charter law, multi-millionaire businessman J.C. Huizenga, son of the founder of the for-profit garbage collection corporation, Waste Management, opened his National Heritage Academies… Today, more than 60% of Michigan’s charter schools are run by for-profit companies.”  And, “In New York City, Eva Moskowitz, who heads the Success Academy chain, took home $1,018,977 in compensation in 2023—more than twice the salary of the Chancellor of the city”s nearly one-million-student public school system.”

Second:   “Aspiration: Less regulation of charter schools will unleash innovation.  Reality: Less regulation has resulted in mismanagement, profiteering, and scams.”  “Even if it can be argued that freedom from labor laws provides helpful flexibility, it is hard to see how exemptions from bidding laws, public oversight, and authorizer accountability—or the allowance of related-party transactions and for-profit management without financial transparency—are necessary ingredients for educational innovation.” “Ohio… has some of the most problematic charter laws in the nation. Roughly half of its charter schools… are operated by for-profit corporations, which flock to states with weak oversight and generous funding for charter schools. Across the country, for-profit entities manage charter schools in thirty-six states.”

Third:   “Aspiration: Renewable charter contracts with supervision provided by outside authorizers will create schools accountable to families and the public.  Reality:  Authorizer laws, which vary by state, have resulted in a steady stream of income for authorizers, weak oversight and, in some states, authorizer shopping that allows failed schools to continue… Only two states—Virginia and Kansas—grant local school districts exclusive authority to issue charters… Elsewhere, states have opened the authorizing business to a wide array of players—from small nonprofits to cash-strapped colleges—that can authorize charter schools, sometimes with little expertise in school oversight. When this broad access is paired with generous authorizing fees, a lucrative market emerges.”

Fourth:   “Aspiration: Charter schools will be run by teachers and parents, thus escaping bureaucracy.  Reality: Charter boards are nearly always composed of unelected individuals who may not even live in the state in which the charter is located. Often, they are connected to the school’s founders or management organization.” This section features a shocking story from Oklahoma: “Oklahoma’s largest virtual charter, EPIC Charter Schools, was technically governed by a nonprofit board—Community Strategies Inc.— but the real power rested with EPIC Youth Services… a private, for-profit management firm owned by the schools’ founders, David Chaney and Ben Harris. EYS took 10 percent of all taxpayer funding received by the charter school as a ‘management fee.’ According to Community Strategies Inc.’s 2020 Form 990, the taxpayer income to the school was $393,403,534, meaning the for-profit took in more than $39 million that year.”

I urge you to read the mass of stories reported from across the states in Disillusionment, published last week as the second installment of the Network for Public Education’s excellent comprehensive report. Reading the same story about state after state clarifies the danger of public policy based only on a lofty dream.

For me, as an Ohioan, it is fascinating to consider that nothing has changed since, 26 years ago, in a 1999 Akron Beacon Journal bombshell report, Whose Choice?,  Dennis Willard and Doug Oplinger exposed David Brennan’s White Hat Management Company: “White Hat runs 11 schools with 3,267 students and is projected to take in $16 million—or almost one of every three taxpayer-funded charter dollars… By next fall, Brennan and White Hat could have more than 30 charter schools in Ohio. By law, only nonprofit organizations, and not private for-profit companies, can start a charter school. But the nonprofits and Education Management Organizations work hand-in-hand, often so close it is difficult to determine which came first or if they truly are distinct entities.  For example, identical contracts for several White Hat Management-managed schools were submitted together to the state board, although the schools are supposed to be run by independent governing authorities—the private equivalent of school boards. These governing authority members, unlike public school board members, can have a financial interest in the schools, give contracts to friends and relatives without competitive bids, and are not required to undergo criminal background checks.”

The Network for Public Education’s new report concludes with recommendations for reform. As a cynical Ohioan, I wish I could imagine state legislators, susceptible to the power of lobbying and contributions to their political campaigns, who would be likely to adopt the reforms listed at the end of the report.  The recommended reforms are a guide, however, to what the public ought to demand when an appealing dream for public policy is proposed without the provision of necessary regulation and public oversight embedded as part of the plan.

In the case of charter schools, we ought to have known that when tax dollars are dangled in front of entrepreneurs, the kind of well-staffed, innovative, nurturing programs we dream about for children would likely evaporate into profits.

First Focus on Children’s Bruce Lesley Decries Trump’s Abandonment of Our Society’s Vulnerable Children

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In a profound and important Thanksgiving reflection, the President of First Focus on Children, Bruce Lesley considers our society’s abandonment, in this Trump era, of the institutions that protect the well-being of families and children:

“It’s a moment to ask: what kind of nation are we building for the next generation? Are we creating one in which children are cherished, families are supported, no child goes to bed hungry, and public institutions reflect the values we profess around the dinner table? Or are we drifting toward a model of isolation—where families are left to find for themselves, and childhood becomes a competition depending on how much parents can pay or how well they can game the system? … Unfortunately, federal policy increasingly reflects what Ruth Wilson Gilmore refers to as an agenda of ‘organized abandonment.’ Public systems and partnerships once built to support families are being deliberately dismantled—from education to health to environmental safety.  Investments in children are declining dramatically, while parents are being told they must do it all alone.”

Lesley describes the “anti-state state” as a central goal of the Trump administration’s “proposals to eliminate the U.S. Department of Education, the only federal agency solely dedicated to children’s domestic policy;  moves to undermine childhood vaccination programs and gut public health protections;  deep cuts to Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP);  denial of the full Child Tax Credit to low-income children and families who need it the most;  (and) efforts to weaken environmental and consumer product safety protections… The truth is that most parents don’t want to be left in isolation. Most parents don’t want to navigate every health, education, and safety concern on their own. They want teachers, doctors, and public officials to be their partners.”

Lesley cites Derek Black’s new book, Dangerous Learning, comparing our era to the post-Reconstruction period in the Southern states: “After the Civil War, as law professor Derek Black explains… the Freedmen’s Bureau helped build schools for formerly enslaved children and poor whites—a radical step toward equal opportunity for children. But when Reconstruction faltered and federal troops withdrew from the South, white supremacist violence surged, state constitutions were rewritten, and the Freedmen’s Bureau was dismantled. What followed was the imposition of Jim Crow laws, segregation, widespread underfunding of Black schools, and a reassertion of ‘local control’—a phrase that, then as now, often meant local control over who deserved an education and who didn’t.”

Today, explains Lesley, “we are watching history repeat itself yet again—not in the form of outright segregation, but in the dismantling of the federal infrastructure built to protect children’s rights. The rhetoric may have shifted from ‘states rights’ to ‘parental rights’ and from ‘neighborhood schools’ to ‘local control,’ but the underlying goal is chillingly similar. With both words and deeds, the proponents of destroying the Department of Education have made it crystal clear they wish to remove the federal government as a guarantor of  ‘equity and inclusion’… When we erase national commitments to fairness, children lose—especially children with the fewest resources, children of color and children with disabilities. Today’s proposals to eliminate the Department of Education follow the same pattern: retreat from progress, re-empower inequality, and reframe abandonment as freedom.”

Most parents want a partnership with their children’s teachers, with a good pediatrician, and with a librarian who shares wonderful books for children, writes Lesley.  By contrast, “The real goal of organized abandonment isn’t to strengthen families: it’s to strip public institutions of their supportive role, remove expert voices from the table, and cast families into a realm of individualized risk. It’s no coincidence that the same movement pushing ‘parental rights’ is also attacking school curriculum, banning books, attacking vaccines, and slashing school funding. By framing every institution—school, government, science—as suspect, families are left to fend for themselves in a confusing, politicized, and deeply unequal landscape.”

Once wealthier families disengage, “disinvestment becomes the default” in a cycle “that both reflects and reinforces the ideology of organized abandonment.  As supports disappear, families are scrambling to find private fixes, such as private tutors, private schools, and concierge medicine… those without means are left behind…. (A)s more families turn to private solutions, public investment becomes harder to sustain. Why fight for universal preschool if you’ve already paid for yours? Why push for safer schools if your child goes to private school?” “Nothing captures the logic of abandonment better than the race to secure preschool spots in elite programs… It’s a window into a society where families no longer trust the public system to offer their children a fair shot. Where early childhood education… is treated not as a public right but as a private luxury. And where isolation, not partnership, has become the default.”

Lesley concludes: “The dismantling of the Department of Education is not just about education… It’s the tip of a spear aimed at the very idea that children’s well-being is a public responsibility.  And it’s part of a broader campaign to shrink the village—slowly, deliberately, and with devastating consequences.”

Please do read Bruce Lesley’s important reflection on the danger of policy that abandons and undermines the public systems families have counted on for generations.

New Plan to Decimate U.S. Dept. of Ed. Exposes Trump Administration’s Deficient Educational Vision

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In his newest book, Dangerous Learning, constitutional law professor Derek Black summarizes what has happened to public education in the United States during the lifetimes of most of us who are reading this post today:

“Brown v. Board of Education and its progeny fundamentally altered the way society thinks about education, not just of Black children but of all children. Laws prohibiting discrimination against students based on sex, language status, ethnicity, alienage, disability, poverty, and homelessness all grew out of the foundation Brown laid. For the past half century, the federal legal apparatus as well as several state regimes have aimed to deliver equal educational opportunity.” (Dangerous Learning, p. 275)

Happy Thanksgiving! This blog will take a short break. Look for a new post on Thursday, Dec. 4th. 

In 1979, during Jimmy Carter’s administration, Congress created the U.S. Department of Education to fulfill that mission by pulling together the federal agencies administering programs to increase educational opportunity for groups of children who had historically been marginalized.

It should, therefore, not be surprising that President Donald Trump, who has spent the year trying to stamp out every program or policy that protects equity and supports inclusion and diversity in public schools and across U.S. colleges and universities, has now implemented a plan to end the U.S. Department of Education.

Because federal law prescribes that only Congress can close a federal department or close one of the offices that Congress established within a federal department to manage particular programs, Trump began by keeping all the departments and offices but eliminating the people who do the work through the massive staff layoffs we have been watching all year long. Those layoffs, of course, constitute illegal impoundment of federal funds, and some of them have been temporary blocked by Federal District Courts. Then last Tuesday, Education Secretary Linda McMahon announced a further effort to phase out the Department under a new plan which complies with the law because it involves mere “interagency transfers” that will house Department of Education (DOE) programs in other departments, with some DOE staff moving with the programs to run them in their new setting. Although the transfers were announced last week, the interagency agreements were signed, according to Education Week, on September 30.

Chalkbeat‘s Erica Meltzer explains: “These changes were done administratively.  Senior officials said the Economy Act gives the Education Department the authority to contract with other federal agencies.”  The Washington Post‘s Laura Meckler and Danielle Douglas-Gabriel add: The interagency agreements amount to a work-around under which policy decisions will remain with the Education Department but the programs will be administered elsewhere. Staffers who work on the programs are expected to move to the new agency.”

Meckler and Douglas-Gabriel summarize the restructure announced last Tuesday: “Under the new agreements, the Labor Department will inherit the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education, including 27 K-12 programs, and the Office of Postsecondary Education, which administers 14 programs to help students enroll in and complete college. The Education Department will move the Indian education program to the Interior Department, child care access and foreign medical education to the Department of Health and Human Services, and foreign-language education to the State Department.” “There was considerable speculation that the $15 billion program to support students with disabilities would be included in the announcement, but it was not. Other major functions of the Education Department, including its Office for Civil Rights and the federal student aid program, also were not affected by Tuesday’s changes, but a senior department official told reporters that officials are still exploring options for moving those programs elsewhere in the government.”  The Office for Civil Rights has already been decimated by the elimination of seven of its twelve regional offices and the layoff of most of its staff.

The NY Times‘ Michael Bender describes a senior official at the Education Department justifying the restructure as an attempt to “streamline bureaucracy so that ‘at the end of the day,’ it means more dollars to the classroom.” Bender quotes Secretary McMahon’s rationale: “Cutting through layers of red tape in Washington is one essential piece of our final mission.” The attempt by Secretary McMahon and her staff to justify the interagency agreements as a step toward reducing the federal bureaucracy is laughable.

The Associated Press’s Colin Binkley highlights another of McMahon’s bizarre rationalizations for the restructure. McMahon resurrects the old “falling test scores” argument as though moving around federal offices will have some kind of miraculous effect on the nation’s economic inequality, which, according to research (here or here), is the primary factor causing overall disparities in students’ aggregate test scores. Binkley describes McMahon as predicting that, without federal oversight, the states are likely to use federal dollars to help the students most in need: “McMahon has increasingly pointed to what she sees as failures of the department as she argues for its demise. In its 45 years, she says, it has become a bloated bureaucracy while student outcomes continue to lag behind. She points to math and reading scores… which plummeted in the wake of pandemic restrictions. Her vision would abolish the Education Department and give states wider flexibility in how they spend money that’s now earmarked for specific purposes, including literacy and education for homeless students. That, however, would require approval from Congress.”

An extremely serious concern is what the proposed restructure says about the Trump administration’s narrow and inadequate understanding of the purpose of public education as mere workforce preparation.  Why is the Office of Primary and Secondary Education, which administers the enormous Title I grants that help promote equity in school districts serving concentrations of our nation’s poorest children, being moved to the Department of Labor?  The Washington Post‘s Meckler and Douglas-Gabriel quote a Department of Education official “who argued that education’s purpose is to prepare students for the workforce. ‘Nowhere is that better housed than the department of labor,’ she said.”  The reporters name the broader purpose of some of the programs being moved to the Department of Labor: “The K-12 grant programs that Labor stands to take on address a plethora of subjects not directly related to the workforce, such as support for children in poverty, after-school programs and aid for rural education.”  Historically, public schooling has been understood as the primary institution that forms students as the citizens of our democratic society—with workforce preparation merely one component of that mission.

The U.S. Department of Education was created to pull together the administration of federal programs that help public schools across the states serve and welcome every student and protect each student’s civil rights.  In a formal statement last week, Republican Congressman Brian Fitzpatrick strongly opposed the new interagency agreements designed to phase out the U.S. Department of Education:

“The United States Congress created the U.S. Department of Education for very good reason. And for millions of families, particularly those raising children with disabilities or living in low-income communities, the Department’s core offices are not discretionary functions. They are foundational. They safeguard civil rights, expand opportunity, and ensure that every child, in every community, has the chance to learn, grow, and succeed on equal footing. Working alongside our early childhood educators, local school partners, and disability advocates as Co-Chair of the Bipartisan Disability Caucus, I’ve seen exactly how essential these programs are. Altering them without transparency or congressional oversight would pose real risks to the very students they were created to protect.  I will not allow it — and I urge all of my colleagues to stand with me.”

How the Trump Administration Manipulates Power and Undermines Core Principles that Protect Public Schools and Students’ Rights—Part 2

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On Tuesday, Part 1 of this post explored the Trump Administration’s seizure of the Congressional “power of the purse” as part of a strategy to accomplish the President’s goal of shutting down the U.S. Department of Education by firing hundreds of the Department’s staff who administer and oversee enormous grant programs like Title I and special education programs funded by the 1975 Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, along with many other essential programs that protect students’ rights and fulfill the Department’s mission of ensuring that children across all the states can equitably have a quality public school education. Part 1 also examined how the U.S. Supreme Court has shunted many of the legal challenges filed against Trump administration onto a “shadow docket” of temporary decisions with a long wait for a hearing on their merits and a final ruling by the Supreme Court on their legality.

Today, Part 2 will examine three primary examples of what appear to be the Trump administration’s shameless violation of the core Constitutional principles we have long valued for protecting the rights of children and their teachers in our nation’s system of K-12 public schools.

The First Amendment Protection of Freedom of Speech — Beginning in February and continuing through the year, the Trump administration has been pressuring colleges and universities and K-12 public schools to adopt its own interpretation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the administration’s idiosyncratic interpretation of a 2023 Supreme Court decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard. While most experts believe that Students for Fair Admissions was a narrowly tailored decision to eliminate affirmative in college admissions, the Trump administration has alleged it also bans all “diversity, equity, and inclusion” programming and policy in K-12 public schools and in higher education.

In August, the NY Times’ Dana Goldstein analyzed the ideology the Trump administration has been trying to impose on educational institutions and teachers: “While there is no single definition of D.E.I., the Trump administration has indicated that it considers many common K-12 racial equity efforts to fall under the category and to be illegal. Those include directing tutoring toward struggling students of specific races, such as Black boys; teaching lessons on concepts such as white privilege; and trying to recruit a more racially diverse set of teachers. The administration has also warned colleges that they may not establish scholarship programs or prizes that are intended for students of specific races, or require students to participate in ‘racially charged’ orientation programs… The administration has also argued that because the Supreme Court overturned affirmative action in college admissions in 2023, all racially conscious education programs are illegal.”

Can the Trump administration impose its ideology on educational institutions and get teachers punished or fired if they cover unpleasant parts of our nation’s history? Many experts call this a violation of the First Amendment’s protection of free speech. To define how the First Amendment protects the freedom of speech in educational institutions, Yale Law School professor Justin Driver quotes the words of Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson in the 1943 Supreme Court decision in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette: “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or any other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.” (Justin Driver, The Schoolhouse Gate, pp. 65-66)

The Vagueness Doctrine — In addition to the violation of the right to freedom of speech, there is another serious legal problem in the Trump administration’s efforts to scrub “diversity, equity, and inclusion” from K-12 public schools and from the policies of the nation’s universities.  Writing for the NY Times, Matthew Purdy explored how the Trump administration’s vague rules, mandates and executive orders are designed to frighten people into complying:

“Federal District Court judges across the country and across the political spectrum…  (have faulted) the administration for using broadly cast executive orders and policies to justify ‘arbitrary and capricious’ actions. Many of these judges have explicitly invoked something called the vagueness doctrine, a concept that for centuries has been foundational to American law. The notion is simple: Unless laws are clearly stated, citizens cannot know precisely what is and is not permitted, handing authorities the power to arbitrarily decide who is in violation of a law or rule. Vagueness has long been seen as a clear divide between democracies run by laws and autocracies run by strongmen….”

The Cornell Law School Legal Information Institute explains how the vagueness doctrine protects due process of law: “Vagueness doctrine rests on the due process clauses of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution. The Supreme Court stated in Winters v New York, that U.S. citizens should not have to speculate the meaning of a law due to its vagueness, the law should be clear on its face.”

Purdy adds that many of Trump’s educational executive orders and the rules being imposed by Linda McMahon’s Department of Education ought to be declared void for vagueness. Without being sure  precisely what steps are required, universities have settled with the administration by making financial deals to protect their research funding; public school administrators have changed bathroom policies for trans students; and teachers have felt afraid to teach honestly about our nation’s history.  Purdy describes “Valerie Wolfson, the 2024 New Hampshire history teacher of the year… whose post-Civil War curriculum includes Reconstruction, the rise of the K.K.K. and the Jim Crow era. ‘I do not know how I could discuss them without creating a risk of being accused of presenting a narrative of the United States as racist,’ she says… None of Donald Trump’s edicts have deployed vagueness as effectively as his attack on D.E.I. …   The line between what is and isn’t allowed may be vague, but the penalty for crossing it is certain. The version cooked up by the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights is a textbook case…  The message—and the threat—from the Department of Education was received loud and clear across the country.” (This blog covered Purdy’s article in more detail.)

Birthright Citizenship — One of President Trump’s executive orders stands out in its utter contradiction of the language of the Fourteenth Amendment. In an executive order last January, the President ended birthright citizenship. Birthright citizenship does not, thank goodness, deny any child’s right to public education because a 1982 Supreme Court decision in Plyler v. Doe does protect the right for every child residing in the United States to a free public education.  However without the protection of birthright citizenship, children in this country are denied the protection of virtually all other rights.

In February a Federal District Court judge temporarily stayed Trump’s executive order banning birthright citizenship; the case was appealed; and later on June 27, the U.S. Supreme Court released a final decision. However the Supreme Court Justices twisted the meaning of the case without addressing the core issue of birthright citizenship itself. Instead the justices turned the decision into a ruling on procedure—declaring that local Federal District Courts cannot block the imposition of federal policy nationwide.

For Scotus Blog, Amy Howe explains how today’s Supreme Court abrogated its responsibility by ignoring the core issue in the birthright citizenship case: “(O)n July 23, a divided panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit (had) ruled that the executive order ‘is invalid because it contradicts the plain language of the Fourteenth Amendment’s grant of citizenship to ‘all persons born in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof ‘.”

Responding to the decision of the appeals court, U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer failed to ask the justices to fast-track its petition, urging the Supreme Court to review the ruling. Howe adds: “Although Sauer had the option to ask the court to fast-track its petition, he chose not to.  Accordingly, if the justices decide to take the case… it will likely schedule oral arguments for sometime in 2026 and reach a decision at the end of the… term—most likely in late June or early July.”

All three of these serious Constitutional principles remain at issue today in Trump’s attempt to deny the rights of educators and undermine the protection of students’ rights.

Disciplining ourselves to name and and understand what appear to be troubling legal violations by the Trump  administration is an important step toward building the political will for reform.

How the Trump Administration Manipulates Power and Undermines Core Principles that Protect Public Schools and Students’ Rights—Part 1

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Despite that the federal government shutdown has ended, SNAP funds are being distributed, and airplanes are returning to their expected schedules, many of us are feeling disoriented and troubled by the way the federal government seems to be operating under Donald Trump’s leadership. We have been observing the Trump administration violating core principles we learned in civics class are at the heart of our democratic society. And we thought the Constitution was supposed to protect every one of us. In today’s post, I’ll try to name and explore some of the principles that President Trump seems to be violating as he attempts to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education. On Thursday, in Part 2, I’ll explore three serious constitutional violations. All of this is undermining the well-being of our nation’s massive institution of K-12 public schools, the leaders of 13,000 public school districts, over three million public school teachers, and more than 50 million students enrolled.

NY Times economic reporter Tony Romm reflects on the deeper meaning of the recent federal government shutdown: “(T)he president has frequently bent the rules of (the) budget, primarily to reap political benefits or exact retribution. He has found new and untested ways to spare certain Americans, like the military, from the pain of the government closure, while claiming he has no power to help others, including low-income individuals who rely on benefits like SNAP. The result is a shutdown unlike any other, one that has posed disparate and debilitating risks for those unlucky enough to depend on the many functions of government that Mr. Trump has long aspired to cut… At the heart of Mr. Trump’s actions is a belief that the president possesses vast power over the nation’s spending, even though the Constitution vests that authority with Congress. Mr. Trump and his budget director, Russell T. Vought have dismantled entire agencies, fired thousands of workers and canceled or halted billions of dollars in federal spending—all without the express permission of lawmakers.” Romm is not writing about public education, but you will recognize that his concerns apply to public schools and all the rest of our society’s primary institutions.

Trump Seizes the Power of the Purse

The NY Times Editorial Board enumerates three ways the President has grabbed power from Congress  by violating “the power of the purse” granted to Congress in the Constitution: “First, he has refused to spend money that Congress allocated… Second, Mr. Trump has spent money that Congress has not allocated… Third, the president has taken steps that effectively overturn Congress’s spending decisions. In these cases, he has not added or subtracted federal funds, but he has taken other steps that make it so an agency cannot carry out the mission that Congress envisioned for it.”

All year, and at a new and radical level during the recent federal shutdown, President Trump has ordered Education Secretary Linda McMahon and his other appointees in the Department of Education to usurp the power of the purse primarily by slashing the expenditure of Congressionally appropriated funds to staff the department, along with announcing the goal of eliminating the department and its federal role altogether.  The administration’s imposition of permanent layoffs during the federal shutdown focused on firing the professionals responsible for carrying out the very reason a U.S. Department of Education was established back in the fall of 1979, during President Jimmy Carter’s administration: to gather together and administer programs that equalize opportunity for students across the states, where there had historically been unequal protection of students’ rights depending on children’s family income, race, primary language, immigrant status, sexuality or disability.  Huge grant programs like Title I and IDEA and myriad smaller programs ensure that public schools, no matter where a student lives, meet the specific learning needs of all students including those whose primary language is not English and students with disabilities.

During the shutdown, the Trump administration appeared intent on violating the power of the purse at the U.S. Department of Education by radically reducing the staff who do the work—impounding funds congressionally appropriated for paying the staff who enable the Department of Education to fulfill its primary mission.  For example, Education Week‘s Brooke Schultz examines the implication of the shutdown staff cuts for the Office for Civil Rights, on top of massive staff cuts last spring: “Though the latest layoffs are on hold, an enforcement staff that had 560 members spread across 12 offices… will shrink by more than 70% if they go through… Experts worry that without federal enforcement, a fractured interpretation of civil rights laws and protections could take shape across the country—leading to conflicting and politicized handling of cases depending on where students live and what laws are on the books. They worry students in one state might not have the same protections at school as students in another… (S)ome state lawmakers are worried about civil rights complaints not being handled at all.”

During the shutdown, the Trump’s administration also eliminated most of the remaining staff in the Office for Elementary and Secondary Education who administer the huge and essential Title I grants for school districts serving concentrations of students living in poverty. Trump and McMahon also reduced staff in the Office of Special Education Programs, which oversees IDEA grants, from around 200 to five.  Everyone has understood those proposed shutdown layoffs as the Trump administration’s threat to move special education programming from the Department of Education to the Department of Health and Human Services, despite that the mission of that department emphasizes treatment instead of education. During the shutdown, Federal District Court Judge for the Northern District of California, Susan Illston temporarily blocked the proposed permanent staff layoffs and their implications for undermining the mission of the U.S. Department of Education, though, of course her pause on the staff firings had no effect while the shutdown continued.

The end of the shutdown did temporarily end all the shutdown layoffs. We shall have to wait a couple of months to see what happens. K-12 Dive‘s Kara Arundel explains: “The continuing resolution signed into law Wednesday funds federal education programs at fiscal year 2025 levels. This temporary spending plan expires Jan. 30, unless Congress agrees to a more permanent budget before that deadline.  The deal nullifies the reduction-in-force notices sent to 465 agency employees on Oct. 10. The Education Department is also prohibited from issuing additional RIFs through the end of January and must provide back pay to all employees who did not receive compensation during the shutdown.” Clearly Trump and Vought’s power grab to eliminate much of the staff in a department established and funded by Congress has been blocked only temporarily.

Education Week‘s Mark Lieberman adds that prior to the shutdown, “The Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan federal watchdog funded by Congress, had been investigating more than 40 instances of the Trump administration potentially violating the Nixon-era federal law that prohibits the executive branch from impounding… funds appropriated by Congress… The GAO had already published decisions before Oct. 1 finding that the administration broke the law by withholding funding from programs supporting school infrastructure upgrades, library and museum services, Head Start, and disaster preparation.”

Supreme Court Gives Trump Power through the Shadow Docket

We have also watched all year as Federal District Court judges have temporarily blocked Trump’s executive orders, but lacked the power to declare them permanently unconstitutional or in violation of federal law. Only the U.S. Supreme Court can do that. These cases then become part of “the shadow docket”— cases decided temporarily on an emergency basis but awaiting a full hearing and final decision. The number of these cases derailed to “the shadow docket” has grown rapidly in this first year of Trump’s second term.

In March, the Department of Education fired nearly 2,200 of its 4,133 staff.  After a Federal District Court judge blocked the layoffs temporarily, the case was subsequently appealed. On July 15, Diane Ravitch reported in her blog: “Yesterday, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that the President could continue to lay off the employees of the Department of Education while leaving aside the legal question of his power to destroy a Department created by Congress 45 years ago… If the Supreme Court ever gets around to deciding whether Trump has the legal authority to abolish the Department of Education, it will already be gone.”

After a Federal District Court case is appealed, the Supreme Court releases a temporary, emergency decision, putting off a formal hearing, oral arguments, and what the NY Times‘ Adam Liptak calls, “an explanation of the court’s rationale” until some future time when the case could be scheduled for hearings on what Liptak calls the Supreme Court’s “merits docket.” Liptak explains: “The question of whether the nation’s highest court owes the public an explanation for its actions has grown along with the rise of the ’emergency docket,’ which uses truncated procedures to produce terse, provisional orders meant to remain in effect only while the courts consider the lawfulness of the challenged actions. In practice, the orders often effectively resolve the case.” His implication here is what Diane Ravitch worries about. By the time the Supreme Court fully considers and decides the case, perhaps years from now, it may be too late.

The shutdown has ended, but it is not clear what will happen to the U.S. Department of Education and the many federal programs that support public school equity across our nation.  Part 2 of this post on Thursday will explore what appear to be serious constitutional violations as they impact children and public schools.

Nov. 6th Local Election Returns Show Ohio Voters Out of Sync with Legislature’s Attack on Public Schools

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The local election returns across Ohio on November 6th didn’t exactly square with the Ohio General Assembly’s public education policy priorities.

The Culture Wars

Ohio legislators continue perpetually to swell the wave of far-right culture war legislation. Current examples include Senate Bill 156, “a success sequence” law that would require public schools to teach students they need to graduate from high school, get a job, and get married before they have children in order to avoid poverty. Another current example is House Bill 486, the Charlie Kirk Bill, to encourage Ohio’s public schools to teach about the influence of Christianity on our history and culture. Passed past spring, Senate Bill 1 stamps out “liberal indoctrination” at Ohio’s public universities by eliminating all programs and policies promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion, as well as punishing or firing professors who are turned in by their students for violating the policy.

But in last week’s election, many Ohio voters did not support local school board candidates who support the culture wars. For Signal Ohio, Jake Zuckerman reports on widespread losses by extreme right-wing ideological candidates: “In Akron, the incumbent school board president criticized for sharing ‘transgender to transformed’ and other incendiary LGBTQ+ commentary on Facebook lost re-election last week. So did the incumbent board president of a rural district in Allen County, a conservative stronghold in central-northwest Ohio, after first winning office two years ago on a promise to crack down on bathroom assignments of transgender students. Voters levied the same result in Delaware County, in a wealthy suburb of Columbus, where several school board members behind a district-wide banning of LGBTQ+ flags lost their re-election bids…  Ohio Value Voters, a Christian conservative advocacy group, endorsed nearly 50 candidates in school board races around the state. Only about 44% of them won…. That includes at least nine candidates who ran unopposed…  Will Wright, a candidate in Buckeye Valley Local School district, which spans rural counties like Morrow and Union, lost on Tuesday. In a Facebook post… he listed as his top priority to ‘keep all indoctrination out of Buckeye Valley which includes LGBTQ material and the subsequent pornography, anti-Christian Values, Critical Race Theory or any other propaganda.’ ”

Public School Funding

Underneath all the debates about what can be taught and what can be banned in the school curriculum is the foundational issue of the way Ohio funds public education itself.  Over time, the Ohio legislature has cut taxes, diverted money to private school tuition vouchers, and reduced the state’s contribution to public school funding. In the current legislative session, which began last January, a huge legislative focus has been on protecting homeowners, farmers and businesses from high local property taxes.  Myriad bills, some contradicting each other, threaten local school districts’ capacity to raise local property taxes.  Unlike other states where school boards can vote to raise local taxes, in Ohio, parents have to mount expensive political campaigns to pass local taxes at the polls. These bills would make that much harder.

But in last week’s election, a majority of voters across the state chose to increase their local property taxes to protect their children’s public schools from massive program cuts. The Cleveland Plain Dealer‘s Anna Staver reports: “(S)chool levies passed at a higher rate than last year. Trumbull County didn’t reject a single property-tax question. Cuyahoga County approved 17 of 19… Schools make up the biggest part of most property tax bills, and voters gave them a boost on Tuesday. Ohioans approved 66% of the school tax issues… Most of those levies were renewals keeping existing tax rates in place, and they passed easily. Fifty-five of 60 renewal requests got the green light, a 92% success rate that’s up from 71% last year. New money requests were tougher, but still stronger than in 2024. Voters approved 33% of these requests, compared to 24% last year.”

The Public School Issue the Ohio Legislature Fails to Address

While it is important and encouraging to see a reaction emerging among Ohio voters against culture war extremism, the big systemic problem for public schools in Ohio right now is a financial crisis that is the culmination of years of the legislature’s withdrawal from its responsibility under Article VI, Section 2 of the Ohio Constitution: “The General Assembly shall make such provision, by taxation, or otherwise, as, with the income arising from the school trust fund, will secure a thorough and efficient system of common schools throughout the state….”

Plain Dealer columnist Thomas Suddes explored this problem a couple of weeks ago: “Left unaddressed were the real reasons school levy costs are busting homeowners’ budgets. Reason One: The state is paying a smaller and smaller percentage of public school costs, requiring homeowners to pay a larger percentage. Reason Two: The state is sluicing more and more taxpayer money to nonpublic, often religious schools, which flagrantly violates the Ohio Constitution, as Franklin County Common Pleas Judge Jaiza Page ruled in June.  The state constitution forbids a ‘religious or other sect, or sects [to] ever have any exclusive right to, or control of, any part of the school funds of this state’… If the central problem is, as it’s always been, constitutionally fair state funding for local public schools without bankrupting homeowners, there are two readily available General Assembly solutions. One is to stop (unconstitutionally) handing taxpayers’ money to religious and other nonpublic schools. The other is for the legislators to undo their brazenly broken promise to fully fund the Cupp-Patterson Fair School Funding Plan, devised by then-Senate President Robert Cupp, a Lima Republican and then-Rep. John Patterson, a Democrat from Ashtabula County’s Jefferson.”

Not only has the legislature failed fully to fund the Fair School Funding Plan, but the new budget, passed in June, replaced Ohio’s graduated income tax with a flat tax, resulting in tax cuts for the wealthy and at the same time the elimination of over a billion dollars of state revenue..  Signal Ohio‘s Andrew Tobias reports: “That new top tax rate of 2.75% is lower than any surrounding state and lower than any time in the past five decades… About 96% of the $1.1 billion in annual lost revenue… will stay in the pockets of those earning $138,000 or more….” The new state tax cut follows two decades of previous Ohio tax cuts.

Ohio’s top school funding expert, Howard Fleeter reports¹ some hard facts about Ohio’s diminished capacity to fund public education, facts that local property tax reform cannot possibly address:

  • While in Fiscal Year 2002, Ohio ranked 35th among the states in the state’s share of revenue allocated for public education, by FY 2023 Ohio’s ranking by the state share of revenue for public education had fallen to 45th among the states.
  • While in Fiscal Year 2002, Ohio ranked 24th among the states in the amount of per-pupil state revenue spent on K-12 public education, by FY 2023, Ohio was ranked 41st, and its state revenue per pupil was now $2,672 below the national average.
  • In FY 2002, Ohio was covering 44.8% of the money needed for the public schools, but by FY 2023, the state was providing only 33.5% of the revenue.
  • In Ohio, between FY 2002 and FY 2023, Ohio’s public school dependence on local tax revenue grew from 49.5% to 53.1%.

However, in the midst of all these challenges—and a gerrymandered legislature they cannot easily impact— Ohio voters should get credit for voting at the local level last week for school board candidates who have disdained the battles over sexuality and white ethno-nationalism, and for passing local school levies to protect small class sizes and an enriched curriculum in their school districts.

¹Howard Fleeter, “On The Money,” Hannah News Service, September 26, 2025, (“On the Money” is not available online; it is available free in many public library research collections).

As an Institution, Public Education Is the Very Definition of Our Society’s Civic Vision

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Colin Woodard is the director of the Nationhood Lab at Salve Regina University and author of a new book, Nations Apart: How Clashing Regional Cultures Shattered America. 

In a recent NY Times column, Woodard explores two conflicting mythic stories we Americans tell ourselves to define who we are today: “There is a battle raging across America (and soon in the halls of the Supreme Court) over what it means to be an American and what our nation should aspire to be… Nations are, as the Anglo-Irish historian Benedict Anderson put it, ‘imagined communities’; they only exist because we collectively believe they do. Every nation is defined and shaped by the stories its members have come to accept about where it came from, what its purpose is, who belongs to it and who does not.”

Woodard describes today’s battle about our society’s identity: “One vision is civic. It says that we Americans may lack a common history, religion or ethnicity, but what we share are the ideals in the Declaration of Independence: Each human has a natural and equal right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. To be American, in this tradition, is to create a society dedicated to making these ideals a reality.”

“The other vision—an animating force inside the Trump administration—is exclusive and ethno-nationalist. Vice President J.D. Vance laid it out explicitly in a speech this summer: a national identity based not on ideals, but on privileged heritage and bloodlines. ‘America is not just an idea … We’re a particular place, with a particular people, and a particular set of beliefs and way of life’… Mr Vance identified ‘our ancestors’ as the people who came to ‘tame a wild continent.’ Americans in this construction, are those people whose ancestors participated in the conquest of Indigenous America. If your ancestors include people who were Indigenous or enslaved or who immigrated to this country after 1890—ancestors who, in all likelihood, are not British, German or French Protestants—you might not be equally American.”

In The Flag and the Cross, their excellent book defining White Christian Nationalism, Philip Gorski and Samuel Perry, two sociologists of religion, define ethno-nationalism—what it is and what it is not: “White Christian nationalism is a ‘deep story’ about America’s past and a vision of its future. It includes cherished assumptions about what America was and is, but also what it should be… America was founded as a Christian nation by (white) men who were ‘traditional’ Christians, who based the nation’s founding documents on ‘Christian principles.’ The United States is blessed by God, which is why it has been so successful… But these blessings are threatened by cultural degradation from ‘un-American’ influences both inside and outside our borders.” (The Flag and The Cross, pp. 3-4)  However… “White Christian nationalism is not ‘Christian patriotism’; white Christian nationalism…. is rooted in white supremacist assumptions and empowered by anger and fear. This is nationalism, not patriotism… ((W)hite Christian nationalism is not just a problem among white American Christians. There are secular versions of white Christian nationalism that claim to defend ‘Western Culture’ or ‘Judeo-Christian civilization.’ And there are secular white Americans who know how to leverage white Christian nationalist language. For such Americans, the ‘Christian’ label simply signals shared tribal identity or veiled political values that would otherwise be socially unacceptable.”The Flag and the Cross, pp. 8-10)

Colin Woodard explains that today’s civic narrative of our nation’s identity was established during the 1960s: “Americans like to think of our country as one of the oldest democracies in the world. But we only truly became a liberal democracy in the 1960s, in the living memory of many Americans. It was only then that the civic national vision triumphed, a result of the mass mobilizations in the World Wars, the civil rights movements that returning Black and Native American and Latino vets helped spearhead, and the interventions of the federal government at key moments.”

In Dangerous Learning: The South’s Long War on Black Literacy, his history of American attempts to limit and undermine Black Americans’ right to literacy, constitutional law professor Derek W. Black traces the development of the our nation’s civic vision back much farther, as an “action-reaction” driven process beginning with slave-led rebellions in the antebellum South and the impact of northern abolitionism. After that, “The Civil War ended formal slavery but did not remedy the conditions slavery had perpetuated for centuries. Reconstruction began as a remedy but was abandoned while far from complete. The same is true of the second reconstruction—the Civil Rights Movement. School desegregation, for instance, lasted only a decade in most places before it ended.”  However, Brown v. Board of Education and its progeny fundamentally altered the way society thinks about education, not just of Black children but of all children. Laws prohibiting discrimination against students based on sex, language status, ethnicity, alienage, disability, poverty, and homelessness all grew out of the foundation Brown laid. For the past half century, the federal legal apparatus as well as several state regimes have aimed to deliver equal educational opportunity.” (Dangerous Learning, p. 275)

Derek Black understands today’s attack on civil rights in public schools and today’s huge school privatization movement—to establish “education freedom” via publicly funded private school tuition vouchers—as central to the reaction against the civic vision that our society has struggled to maintain since Brown: “As rhetoric, educational freedom sounds good.  As a practical matter it falls well short of freedom for all. It does not even attempt to ensure that private education works for children. At best it is agnostic toward the school environments students enter. At worst it uses public funds to facilitate patterns and values that America has spent the last half century trying to tame. Of course, some private schools offer an excellent education. But those schools aren’t particularly interested in expanding to serve large numbers of new students, much less disadvantaged students who would arrive with additional needs. And while some private schools attract students for good reasons, the education freedom movement speaks most directly to families who want to leave public schools for the wrong reasons—such as rage over values like anti-discrimination, inclusiveness, free thinking and equal playing fields.” (Dangerous Learning, p. 282)

Black concludes: “(G)overnment has played… an enormous role. It has been a guarantor of educational opportunity, not a market player. Before the Civil War, the free market of education had failed to deliver opportunity to huge groups of children. Black and white, rural and urban, Northern and Southern. Private actors lacked the capacity or desire to do more. When government decided to act in the aftermath of the War, it was to lift a race of people out of slavery, not deliver fungible commodities. Government proved that only public education could expand schooling from individual institutions into a system that would eventually reach everyone, or nearly so. Only government could mandate and fund education for every student. And in that unique role, it was government that insisted that schools overcome society’s basest instincts.” (Dangerous Learning, p. 287)

When I personally think about our society’s civic vision that has sustained our universal system of public education, one memory stands out. A couple of years after Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans in 2005, I was listening to a keynoter at a national conference as he extolled the transformation of that city’s schools—a transformation that included the “shock doctrine” state takeover of the New Orleans public schools, the mass imposition of privately operated charter schools, and the mass firing of all the teachers who had served the district pre-hurricane. While the keynoter was speaking, a woman in the audience leapt to her feet and loudly protested: “They stole our public schools and they stole our democracy all while we were out of town!”

That New Orleans mother understood in a very personal way what the late political philosopher Benjamin Barber explained theoretically in his definition of our society’s civic vision: “Privatization is a kind of reverse social contract: it dissolves the bonds that tie us together into free communities and democratic republics. It puts us back in the state of nature where we possess a natural right to get whatever we can on our own, but at the same time lose any real ability to secure that to which we have a right. Private choices rest on individual power… personal skills… and personal luck.  Public choices rest on civic rights and common responsibilities, and presume equal rights for all. Public liberty is what the power of common endeavor establishes, and hence presupposes that we have constituted ourselves as public citizens by opting into the social contract. With privatization, we are seduced back into the state of nature by the lure of private liberty and particular interest; but what we experience in the end is an environment in which the strong dominate the weak… the very dilemma which the original social contract was intended to address.” (Consumed, pp. 143-144)