Trump Administration Renders U.S. Dept. of Ed.’s Office for Civil Rights Utterly Dysfunctional

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Under orders from President Trump, Education Secretary Linda McMahon has intentionally destroyed the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, an institution that was functioning smoothly at the end of the Biden administration.  There is no clearer example of the Trump administration’s turn away from its responsibility to protect the rights of children in U.S. public schools.

Education Week‘s Alyson Klein recounts the story of the destruction of the Office for Civil Rights: “The U.S. Department of Education spent up to $38 million last year paying staffers from its Office for Civil Rights (OCR) to remain on administrative leave while the Trump administration’s efforts to lay them off were stymied by courts… The OCR layoffs have languished in legal limbo for months, since two court orders last spring required the Trump administration to return laid-off education staff to their jobs. Though the U.S. Supreme Court issued a preliminary ruling last July that allowed the layoffs in other Education Department offices to proceed, OCR staffers were protected by the second court order that addressed only them. The Education Department started bringing back OCR staff in September under that order, until a federal appeals court on Sept. 29, 2025, permitted the OCR staff reductions to go forward. Days into the federal government shutdown in October, the Education Department issued RIF notices to additional OCR staffers who had been spared from the March reduction in force. When a judge ultimately halted those layoffs ordered during the shutdown, the Education Department also abandoned the OCR layoffs stemming from the March reductions. It started reinstating those OCR staffers late last hear, and has since rescinded all their layoffs, according to GAO.  Along with the staff reductions, the department also shuttered seven of OCR’s 12 regional offices, in Atlanta, Boston, Cleveland, Chicago, Dallas, Philadelphia, and San Francisco. OCR reassigned their caseloads to the five remaining offices.”

Beyond the staffing chaos at the Office for Civil Rights, in a recent report for the Brookings-Brown Center on Education Policy, Rachel Perera traces the Trump administration’s radical redefinition of the role of the Office for Civil Rights: “In just one year, the Trump administration has orchestrated a radical overhaul of education civil rights enforcement—unmaking decades of civil rights progress in the process… Trump’s OCR has prioritized a stunningly narrow set of issues. OCR is responsible for enforcing federal civil rights laws that prohibit schools and colleges that receive federal money from discriminating based on race, ethnicity,… shared ancestry… sex… and disability status…. Prior to 2025, OCR’s enforcement work covered a wide range of issues across those areas… In contrast, the current administration has refocused the agency’s limited resources almost exclusively on three issues: sex-based discrimination rooted in the provision of protection of transgender students’ rights;  reverse racial (or ethnic) discrimination, where any efforts to promote DEI are recast as discrimination against white (and/or Asian) students; (and) discrimination against Jewish students, where allegations of antisemitism—some more legitimate than others—are used to initiate sweeping investigations to address longstanding conservative complaints about higher education.”

Trump’s Office for Civil Rights has also begun to respond directly to ideological complaints from within the administration and among its allies instead of complaints from parents who believe their children’s rights have been violated.  Perera explains: “The Trump administration quickly unraveled the work of previous administrations while using the department’s enforcement authority to punish schools and colleges that refused to comply with the administration’s far-right agenda… OCR is obligated to respond to the civil rights complaints it receives, and nearly all investigations initiated by OCR prior to 2025 came in response to complaints filed by families and/or advocates. Over the last year, OCR has prioritized more proactive, administration-directed investigations, as well as investigations into complaints filed by right-wing advocacy groups such as the America First Legal Foundation and Parents Defending Education. This means that OCR is directing resources to remedy alleged civil rights violations for which there is no identified complainant or harmed party… OCR’s recent actions rely on what appear to be faulty or untested legal theories of what constitutes illegal discrimination.”

Finally, while it has been possible for OCR to impose financial penalties on school districts or colleges and universities that were found to have violated civil rights laws, OCR has historically prioritized working with the staff in schools to develop resolution agreements ensuring that children’s rights will be protected going forward. Perera explains how the process has worked and how that changed this year: “To proceed with terminating an institution’s federal funding, OCR is required to follow a lengthy series of steps to ensure due process for the targeted institution.. Until 2025, OCR was not in the business of withholding federal funds. In fact, OCR has not withheld federal funding from schools with any regularity since the late 1960s, when OCR held Title I funds from school districts that refused to make progress towards desegregation.”  Perera reminds readers that this year OCR has withheld funds or paused funding for UCLA, Brown, Harvard, and Columbia and several public school districts.

National Public Radio‘s Cory Turner describes how civil rights enforcement has disintegrated during the past year: “The department is dismissing many cases and issuing fewer resolution agreements. According to GAO, from March to September, OCR resolved more than 7,000 discrimination complaints, but about 90% were resolved by the department dismissing the complaint, meaning staff received information from complainants but did not proceed to investigate.” While the OCR brought back staff in December to process a rapidly growing caseload of complaints, data is not yet available to track the number of complaints that have been investigated or the number that have been dismissed.

The shifting operations at the Office for Civil Rights have left families awaiting investigation of complaints that may have been have filed months or years ago.  The Associated Press‘s Colin Binkley reports that states including Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Massachusetts have begun work to strengthen civil rights enforcement at the state level. Some are considering legislation that would permit them to do so.  Binkley reports that in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, “In their mostly white school district, Black students routinely heard racial slurs. White classmates hurled insults like ‘slave,’ ‘monkey’ or worse… Parents made those claims in a 2024 complaint asking the U.S. Department of Education to investigate racial bullying at the Pennridge School District…. They thought their complaint had the power to make things better. Instead, it became one of thousands sitting in a federal office with little hope of gaining attention….”

Although state-by-state civil rights protection in public schools is, of course, a good thing, the majority of U.S. students will be become vulnerable to violations of their rights because the Trump administration has undermined the agency responsible for enforcing federal civil rights law in their public schools.

MAGA Promotes “Same Old” Dangerous School Vouchers with a New “Culture War” Frame

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While every morning, 90 percent of U.S. children—our children, our grandchildren, and our neighbors’ children—go off to a public school which we expect will welcome them all, our legislators and Congress have been diverting more and more of our tax dollar to vouchers for unregulated private schools, which can exclude the children they don’t want as well as ignoring civil rights laws.  Most of us don’t very often remember to appreciate the strength of universal public education, invented over the past two centuries in the United States to serve our democracy by bringing together all the children in every community to learn together in an institution that protects their rights and serves serve their particular needs.  Of course, it has taken Brown v. Board of Education, the Civil Rights Movement and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act to put us on a path to make our public schools more inclusive, but our society has persisted.

Right now MAGA politicians at the federal level and far right legislatures across the states are voraciously promoting the alternative: retrenchment on civil rights protections for school children and the political promotion of private school vouchers paid for with tax dollars.

Who is responsible for the enormous voucher movement? In his book, The Privateers, Josh Cowen  provides at least a partial list of ideological, so-called, think tanks. They and their affiliated billionaires are underwriting the campaign for school privatization, and they are now framing their campaign with a bigoted attack on civil rights and inclusion of all students: Alliance Defending Freedom, American Federation for Children, American Legislative Exchange Council, The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, The Council for National Policy, EdChoice, The Heritage Foundation, the Institute for Justice, and Moms for Liberty. (The Privateers, pp. vii-viii)  That list leaves out state-by-state organizations like Ohio’s Buckeye Institute and Ohio’s Center for Christian Virtue. The State Policy Network coordinates a number these state-by-state agencies.  When Cowen’s book was published in 2024, Linda McMahon was chairing the board of the America First Policy Institute; today Cowen would have to add that organization to his list, because that agency’s agenda is central to the Trump administration’s policies.

School privatization at public expense is a growing trend. For Education Week, Matthew Stone and Caitlynn Peetz Stephens estimate that 19 states now “have programs on the books that make virtually all their students eligible for state funding to use on private school tuition or home-school expenses.” And last summer a new, federal tuition tax credit program was created as part of the “One Big Beautiful Bill.”  The Washington Post‘s Laura Meckler reports that governors continue to make decisions about whether their states will participate in the federal program: “Twenty-eight governors have said they will opt in, including all but one Republican (who remains undecided)… Two Democratic governors have said their states will participate, and four have said they won’t, but most have ducked the question, as pressure rises from all sides.”

Meckler explains how the program works: “These tax credits, including the new federal version, incentivize taxpayers to donate money to scholarship granting organizations, or SGOs, which then give money to students. Starting in 2027, donations up to $1,700 to SGOs will qualify for a dollar-for-dollar tax credit. That means that as long as donors owe at least $1,700 in federal taxes, they will see their tax bill reduced by the amount of their donation. In essence, taxpayers are directing money they owe in taxes to these SGOs rather than to the government. The Joint Committee on Taxation estimated that the program will cost the federal government $25.9 billion over 10 years.”

I hope you will take the time to read Kayla Patrick and Loredana Valtierra’s excellent report for the Century Foundation, A Backdoor School Voucher Scheme That Sidesteps Civil Rights and Undermines Public Oversight, which demonstrates the damage already inflicted on our children and their public schools by school privatization schemes across the states as well as the further damage the federal tuition tax credit scheme will likely impose. They begin: “(I)n practice, vouchers operate quite differently than advertised. It’s the private schools not families, who ultimately decide who enrolls, and they do so outside the accountability systems that govern public education and public dollars and ensure every student has equal opportunity to learn.”

Here are three of Patrick and Valtierra’s key observations about what the new federal tuition tax credit vouchers will mean.

In the first place, the federal tax credit scheme is constructed to help wealthy families: “(T)he tax credit is not targeted to families facing affordability pressures. It allows households earning up to 300 percent of area median income to qualify, a threshold that would make roughly 90 percent of U.S. households eligible.” Qualification to receive the benefit of the tax credit is tied to each region’s median income. “In high-income regions, families earning as much as $500,000 per year could receive publicly subsidized support for private education… (T)his program directs public dollars toward a limited use—private education subsidies for households that largely do not need the financial help….”

Second, the federal tax credit program, like almost all state-operated school voucher schemes lacks government oversight: “There are no academic performance standards, no transparency obligations, and no requirement to evaluate outcomes…  Once a state opts in, its role is largely administrative and unfunded. States receive no resources to carry out oversight, cannot impose safeguards, and must submit eligible organizations to the U.S Treasury without authority to shape the program design or accountability.”  The program was created to be administrated by the Department of the Treasury: “As a result, a major national education policy will be implemented through the tax code, with limited attention to accountability, equity, or educational impact.”

Third, the One Big Beautiful Bill does not include civil rights protection for participating students: “Public schools that receive federal funding are required to comply with federal civil rights laws, including Title VI and Title IX of the Civil Rights Act, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act… These laws require schools to take corrective action to prevent and respond to discrimination, provide accommodations and services to students, investigate complaints, and offer families meaningful avenues for recourse… By contrast, the One Big Beautiful Bill does not require scholarship-granting organizations or the private schools and programs they fund to comply with these federal civil rights protections.”

In today’s MAGA era, there is also something new about the way vouchers are being promoted.  In The Privateers, Josh Cowen explains: “Trump’s election… recentered… the notion of ‘parents’ rights’ around its original conception of the right to avoid integrating students from different family backgrounds in one public school community… (H)is presidency refueled culture wars around issues of race and gender.” (The Privateers, p. 100)  “This then, is the education freedom agenda in its entirety: increasing overt conflict on issues of race, gender, and sexuality with the express intent of devaluing public schools as a civic institution and reorienting the notion of education from a public good to a private enterprise.” (The Privateers, p. 131)

While vouchers were once promoted as a marketplace innovation, the Trump administration and groups like Moms for Liberty and the Heritage Foundation now frame the issue based on appealing to parents’ cultural biases. The new frame promotes private school vouchers as the way states and the federal government can help parents protect their children from “the dangerous other.” Parents are told they can move their children to private schools to insulate them from exposure to “woke” public schools and  “diversity, equity, and inclusion.”   The President, the Heritage Foundation, the America First Policy Institute and their allies never mention what has historically been understood as the primary role of public schooling: bringing children from across our society together to learn from each other and prepare for democratic citizenship.

Although MAGA has been radically reframing the promotion of vouchers from the point of view of the bigotry implicit in today’s culture wars, the danger of privatizing schools at public expense has not changed at all.  Here are two traditional critiques of vouchers.  The first analyzes the damage of vouchers academically according to the evidence without any reference to MAGA’s culture war framing.  The second critiques vouchers as they were originally sold by appealing to marketplace framing.  The two critiques use more old-fashioned frames to reach precisely the same conclusions explained of the new report from the Century Foundation.

In 2023, the editors of a Teachers College Press analysis of school privatization, The School Voucher Illusion: Exposing the Pretense of Equty, concluded: “As currently structured, voucher policies in the United States are unlikely to help the students they claim to support. Instead, these policies have often served as a facade for the far less popular reality of funding relatively advantaged (and largely White) families, many of whom already attended—or would attend—private schools without subsidies. Although vouchers are presented as helping parents choose schools, often the arrangements permit the private schools to do the choosing… Advocacy that began with a focus on equity must not become a justification for increasing inequity. Today’s voucher policies have, by design, created growing financial commitments of taxpayer money to serve a constituency of the relatively advantaged that is redefining their subsidies as rights—often in jurisdictions where neighborhood public schools do not have the resources they need.” (The School Voucher Illusion: Exposing the Pretense of Equity, p. 290)

And back in 2007, political philosopher, Benjamin Barber critiqued the same injustices, but from the point of view of a different frame: the danger of elevating the values of marketplace individualism over the common good:

“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)

Heritage Foundation Strategizes and State Legislatures Propose Laws to Deny Free Public Schools to Undocumented Children

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For weeks, as we have been watching the tragedy of ICE invading schoolyards to round up immigrant students and their parents and send them off to warehouse detention centers, there are also structural legal barriers being promoted by anti-immigrant advocates to curtail the right of undocumented immigrant students to public schooling. At least three state legislatures are considering laws to force public schools to collect immigration data on their students and perhaps, as happened decades ago, to ban the right to free public schooling for those children. In addition, the Heritage Foundation continues strategizing about how to undermine federal legal protection by stimulating someone to mount a legal challenge to the 1982, Plyler v. Doe decision by the U.S. Supreme Court.

The Plyler v. Doe decision overturned a 1975, Texas law denying the allocation of state funding to school districts to pay for the children of undocumented immigrants.  After the public schools in Tyler, Texas began charging immigrant families annual tuition of $1,000 per child, a lawsuit challenged the Texas statute, a lawsuit which eventually reached the U.S. Supreme Court.  In the 1982,  decision in Plyler v. Doe, the Supreme Court declared the Texas statute unconstitutional.

Defining the public purpose of our system of public schools, accessible to all children, Justice William Brennan wrote: “A Texas statute which withholds from local school districts any state funds for the education of children who were not ‘legally admitted’ into the United States, and which authorizes local school districts to deny enrollment to such children, violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment… (T)he Texas statute imposes a lifetime hardship on a discrete class of children not accountable for their disabling status. These children can neither affect their parents’ conduct nor their own undocumented status. The deprivation of public education is not like the deprivation of some other governmental benefit. Public education has a pivotal role in maintaining the fabric of our society and in sustaining our political and cultural heritage: the deprivation of education takes an inestimable toll on the social, economic, intellectual, and psychological well-being of the individual, and poses an obstacle to individual achievement.”

Brennan defines principles that have long been the foundation of our nation’s education system: the guarantee of free public schooling to prepare every child to achieve and to prepare all children to contribute socially, economically, intellectually and politically as part of our democracy.

The National Immigration Law Center adds that a federal court has interpreted the Plyler decision as banning school districts from collecting data on students’ immigration status and reporting out that information: “(T)he Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that laws requiring reporting on the immigration status of students can violate Plyler. Similarly, the Department of Education has issued guidance that this kind of data collection is unnecessary and may be illegal if it is done ‘with the purpose or result of denying access to public school on the basis of race, color, or national origin.’ ”

Education Week‘s Ileana Najarro reports that the Plyler v. Doe decision “remains binding federal law, even as the Heritage Foundation… published a policy document on February 17 (2026) calling on states to intentionally enact laws or rules restricting free public education for undocumented students and calling on the highest court to overturn the landmark decision.” At the same time, Education Week updated its map of the states that have passed laws to affirm the Plyler decision by protecting the rights of immigrant students (Illinois and Massachusetts); proposed a law to protect the rights of immigrant students (New York); defeated laws to to undermine the rights of immigrant students (Idaho, Oklahoma, Texas, and Indiana); and are now considering laws to undermine the protection of the rights of undocumented immigrant students (New Jersey, Tennessee, and Ohio).

In testimony presented on November 18, 2025 in the Ohio bill’s 3rd hearing before the Ohio House Government Oversight Committee, the Ohio Education Association’s President, Jeff Wensing  presented powerful testimony explaining Ohio House Bill 42 and vehemently opposing the proposed law: “House Bill (HB) 42 would require multiple state agencies, including the Department of Education and Workforce (DEW), to collect and report data on the citizenship and immigration status of the people they serve. Specifically, for K-12 public schools, the bill requires that local school districts report the following data: the number of students who are U.S. citizens or nationals, the number of students who are not citizens but are ‘lawfully present,’ broken down by immigration category, and the number of students who are ‘not lawfully present’ in the United States. DEW must then report this data to the Governor, who in turn must submit a statewide report to the General Assembly and post it on a public website.”

OEA’s Wensing elaborated on the reasons Ohio HB 42 is obviously unconstitutional under Plyler v. Doe: “Ohio’s Legislative Service Commission (LSC) has already identified serious constitutional concerns with this approach. LSC’s bill analysis notes that the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Plyler prohibits states from denying undocumented children access to K-12 education, and it points to an Eleventh Circuit decision striking down an Alabama law that required public schools to collect and report students’ immigration status for data reporting… ‘Plyler rights’ require that no child should be turned away from school, or made afraid to attend school, because of where they were born or the papers their family does or does not have. Right now, Ohio’s policies respect those rights….”

There is, however, a further twist to the threat posed by the state laws being proposed today to eliminate immigrant students’ rights. The Heritage Foundation is pursuing the goal of using these new laws as tools to get the Plyler v. Doe decision itself overturned. As part of a long legal strategy, the Heritage Foundation has been pressing states to pass laws that would explicitly violate Plyler v. Doe by requiring school districts to collect and publicly expose data about students’ immigration status and to pass state laws that would violate the rights of undocumented immigrant students.

The proposed Ohio House Bill 42 is one of those explicitly unconstitutional laws supported by the Heritage Foundation. If it were to pass, not only would it undermine the rights of some of our state’s most vulnerable public school students, who, as Justice Brennan explained, are not responsible for their parents’ decision to emigrate to the U.S., but also, the bill’s sponsors could help the Heritage Foundation and its allies recruit plaintiffs who would sue to protect the state law by getting today’s U.S. Supreme Court to overturn the 1982 Plyler v. Doe decision that that makes Ohio’s proposed HB 42 unconstitutional.

Contrary to Trump’s Education Strategy, Public Schools Are Supposed to Serve and Protect All Children

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In his State of the Union Address last week, President Trump claimed that a fundamental American principle is that “the first duty of the American government is to protect American citizens, not illegal aliens.” In the same spirit when it comes to children, for more than a year, the Trump administration’s policies impacting public schools have increasingly reflected the President’s idea that inclusion and equity are no longer required.

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William Ayers,  retired professor of education at the University of Illinois Chicago Circle, presents a very different and far more traditional way Americans have thought about children and their education—a way of understanding the role of public schools that the Trump administration is trying to make us forget. After all, ours was the society that first developed universally available public schooling.  Our system has remained a work in progress, but an education system to serve all of our children with equity and justice has remained the goal.  In the final essay in Public Education: Defending a Cornerstone of American Democracy, Ayers defines public schools’ role as protecting the rights and serving the needs of all of our society’s children:

“Let’s move forward guided by an unshakable first principle: Public education is a human right and a basic community responsibility… Every child has the right to a free, high-quality public education. A decent, generously staffed school facility must be in easy reach for every family… What the most privileged parents have for their public school children right now—small class sizes, fully trained and well compensated teachers, physics and chemistry labs, sports teams, physical education… after-school and summer programs, generous arts programs that include music, theater, and the fine arts—is the baseline for what we want for all children.” (William Ayers, Public Education: Defending a Cornerstone of American Democracy, pp.314-315)

Ayers’ definition of public education is not a brand new concept.  Many of us will recognize that he is updating John Dewey’s definition from The School and Society, a book published in 1899: “What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child, that must the community want for all of its children… Only by being true to the full growth of all the individuals who make it up, can society by any chance be true to itself.”

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How do the Trump administration’s policies sabotage the system we have continually worked to build according to Ayres’ traditional definition of public schooling? Here are four specific examples of Trump administration policies that violate Ayers’ definition of what we ought to be providing for children across the U.S.

  • The Trump administration incessantly threatens diversity, equity, and inclusion.

In what has become a relentless campaign, the Trump administration has shut down 7 of the 12 regional offices of the Office for Civil Rights, cut funds from English language-learner programs, ended consent decrees for desegregation in several Southern school districts, and cut funding for the Chicago Public Schools to punish the school district for its Black Student Success Plan.  These programs were all designed  to increase opportunity for groups of children who have been historically left behind.

For the Brookings Brown Center for Education Policy, Rachel M. Perera sums up what has become a relentless series of threats to programming in public schools across the nation and across institutions of higher education: “Federal laws prohibiting racial and sex-based discrimination are being used to withhold federal funding from schools and colleges without even the facade of an investigation. The administration is targeting institutions for a narrow range of supposed offenses. For instance, colleges that didn’t crack down on student protests against the war in Gaza are being punished for ‘antisemitism’; school districts with transgender-inclusive policies are being denounced for sex-based discrimination against girls; and schools and colleges pursuing racial equity (e.g., with /DEI programs) are being accused of racial discrimination against white and Asian students.  All the while, legitimate complaints of discrimination are piling up.”

  • Education Secretary Linda McMahon has been following the President’s order to shutter the U.S. Department of Education.

The Department of Education was created back in 1979 to coordinate and administer a number of programs across the federal government designed to improve opportunity and rectify historical injustice—programs that had been created in response to Brown v. Board of Education, The Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, passed in 1965 as part of President Lyndon Johnson’s war on poverty. Educational equity has never been fully realized across the states, and the goal was to improve opportunity with programs like Title I and later, in 1975, to support disabled students.

In his newest book, Dangerous Learning,constitutional law expert Derek W. Black reflects on the purpose of so many of the programs assembled into the U.S. Department of Education as a response to unequal funding across the states and the failure of some states to protect students’ rights.  “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. The pursuit of racial equality, not just the prohibition of intentional discrimination, is embedded in any number of education policies. ” (Dangerous Learning,  p. 275)   Today, as we see Education Secretary McMahon shutting down the Department of Education and sending the work to other Cabinet Departments through interagency agreements. She is intentionally undermining the Department’s primary role.

  • The Trump administration and its followers often use the mythology of white Christian nationalism and parents’ education “freedom”  to justify their strategy of privatizing public schooling.  This strategy runs counter to to our traditional understanding that publicly funded schools should bring our children together at school to learn from each other.

The growth of what’s known as “white, Christian nationalism” has infected public policy through the promotion of education freedom for parents to choose a school or home schooling paid for by tax dollars. The federal government and the states have been rapidly expanding school choice in publicly funded private schools, increasingly allowed to be religious.  School choice and homeschooling enable parents to “protect” their children from students who are Black or Hispanic or gay or trans—children the parents perceive as “the dangerous other”—children who are different or have different values. These publicly funded private schools are permitted to discriminate when they choose which students they will admit, and they not required to protect all students’ civil rights.

Religious sociologists Philip S. Gorski and Samuel L. Perry define white ethnic nationalism in The Flag and The Cross: “Like any story, this one has its heroes: white conservative Christians, usually native-born men. It also has its villains: racial, religious, and cultural outsiders. The plot revolves around conflicts between the noble and worthy ‘us,’ the rightful heirs of wealth and power, and the undeserving ‘them’ who conspire to take what is ours…  But this story is a myth.” (The Flag and The Cross, pp. 4-5)

Gorski and Perry explain further how this narrow mythic framing encourages pushback against public schools that embody welcome for ‘the other’: “The first and most fundamental way in which white Christian nationalism threatens American liberal democracy is that it defines ‘the people’ in a way that excludes many Americans. White Christian nationalism is a form of what is often called ‘ethno-nationalism.’ Liberal democracy rests on what is usually called ‘civic nationalism’ It defines the nation in terms of values, laws, and institutions.” (The Flag and The Cross, p. 114)

  • ICE has been seizing children as they go to and from school and sending them off, with or without their parents, to a warehouse detention center in Dilley, Texas. 

The Trump administration has assumed that immigrant children do not merit the protection of their civil and human rights. The Trump administration has been holding children in vast detention camps without public education services, which are protected for all children in the United States under a long standing Supreme Court decision, Plyler v. Doe. And last year Trump ended a long standing sensitive locations policy that prevented ICE activity on the grounds of sensitive locations like schools and hospitals. The president of First Focus on Children, Bruce Lesley describes the notorious Minnesota ICE raid that swept up a pre-Kindergartner and shipped him off to detention in a private prison: “There are lines a decent society should never cross — and among them is this: we do not harm children to make a political point. Yet across the country, babies, toddlers, and young children are being traumatized by federal immigration enforcement in ways that defy any sense of humanity. From inhumane detention conditions to aggressive raids that leave children alone, afraid, and uprooted, we are witnessing a national crisis in how this country treats its youngest residents. The harm is not hypothetical. It is real, measurable, and unfolding before our eyes. And this past week, it had a name: Liam Ramos.”  

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In contrast with these examples from President Trump’s public school policies, William Ayers depicts the public schools as the essential institution for our democracy:

“In a free society education must focus on the production—not of things, but—of free people capable of developing minds of their own even as they recognize the importance of learning to live with others. It’s based, then, on a common faith in the incalculable value of every human being, constructed on the principle that the fullest development of all is the condition for the full development of each, and conversely, that the fullest development of each is the condition for the full development of all… School serve societies; societies shape schools. Schools, then, are both mirror and window—they tell us who we are and who we want to become, and they show us what we value and what we ignore.” (William Ayers, Public Education: Defending a Cornerstone of American Democracy, p.315)

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As we watch Linda McMahon continue driving the Trump administration’s educational “reforms,” please do call to mind Ayers’ definition of public schooling—the kind of public schools many of us have ourselves experienced, but which the Trump administration is trying to obliterate.  It is urgently important that our nation’s public public schools serve and protect everyone.

McMahon Continues Dismantling Dept. of Education. Will She Succeed?

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As someone who has advocated for responsible and equitable federal public education policy since the No Child Left Behind era, through the Race to the Top years, and through the growing rush to privatization, I am finding the Trump era frightening, baffling, and hard to track. Outrageous plans are announced that would undermine the U. S. Department of Education’s role of protecting the rights of the nation’s most vulnerable students; threats are made; policies are hinted at; then there is no news for weeks and sometimes months as we all wait and nothing happens.

Although I was relieved that in early February, six months late, Congress passed an education budget for the last half of Fiscal Year 2026 (until September 30), a budget that prevents the draconian cuts in President Donald Trump’s proposed budget, Education Secretary Linda McMahon had already begun a process to dismantle the Department of Education by handing off the work of particular offices to other agencies.  A number of the “temporary interagency agreements” to move programs to different Cabinet Departments were signed off in November. Has the work itself already been transferred? Have staff, who are being assigned to travel with and oversee their programs, already moved? I haven’t been able to find out.

Why does all this matter so much?  Because it is part of a strategy to eliminate the Department of Education altogether.  On March 20, 2025 President Trump signed an executive order to shut down the Department.  It is well known, however, that without Congressional approval, the President and a Cabinet Secretary cannot eliminate a federal department established by Congress. Nor can the executive branch eliminate offices or full programs established by Congress.  When Trump appointed Linda McMahon as Education Secretary, he defined her job description as shutting down the department.

In the past couple of weeks, a bit more clarity has emerged about how McMahon is trying to accomplish that goal.

Many supporters of public schools hoped that when Congress signed the education budget  at the beginning of February, its members would protect the Department by inserting a provision to preclude the handoff its work to other federal departments. Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn) the ranking member of the House Appropriations Committee did her best to prevent the dismantling of the Department’s work. In a committee and chamber dominated by the GOP, however, DeLauro could not find enough votes for a clause in the budget bill itself that would prevent the handing off of education programs.  The best she could accomplish was a strong explanatory statement attached to the budget. K-12 Dive‘s Kara Arundel explains:

“When Congress passed the fiscal year 2026 budget for the U.S. Department pf Education earlier this month, many critics of the Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle the agency had hoped the appropriation would ban the outsourcing of certain education programs to other federal agencies. It did not. But while the appropriations statute does not prohibit the Education Department from carrying out or entering into interagency agreements with other federal agencies, the legislation’s accompanying explanatory statement—which is nonbinding—strongly condemns and discourages the transfer of key programs out of the department. The bicameral and bipartisan statement (which DeLauro’s committee passed) said that no authorities exist for the Education Department ‘to transfer its fundamental responsibilities under numerous authorizing and appropriations laws’ to other federal agencies. The statement also raised concerns that ‘fragmenting responsibilities for education programs across multiple agencies will create inefficiencies, result in additional costs… cause delays and administrative challenges… (and) weaken Federal support to protect the rights of students, children, youth, and families under Federal education laws.’ ”

A court challenge has been mounted to block McMahon’s steps to spread education programs across other Cabinet Departments, but sadly, the courts seem to take a long, long time as cases go through the appeals process. Arundel adds: “An ongoing lawsuit opposing the Education Department’s downsizing was amended in November to include opposition to the agency’s interagency agreements. The lawsuit called the agreements unlawful and harmful to K-12 and higher education systems. The updated complaint in Somerville v Trump was brought forward by a broad coalition of school districts, employee unions and a disability rights organizations. That case has been consolidated with New York v McMahon, which was brought… by groups of states, school districts and teachers unions. The case is ongoing.”  Arundel reports that a group of Democratic Senators has also asked the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to investigate the legality of the “interagency agreements.”

The Federal News Network‘s Jory Heckman recently reported on another step Linda McMahon has taken to protect her right to dismantle the department: making all of the interagency agreements to hand off the work of the department temporary and less vulnerable to legal challenge: “Education Secretary Linda McMahon told employees last November that the department’s interagency agreements would reassign staff to other agencies ‘on a temporary basis.’ ”  The Education Department’s press secretary Savannah Newhouse explains that the temporary agreements are key to McMahon’s long term strategy: “We will continue to deliver successes through these partnerships, further solidifying the proof of concept that interagency agreements provide the same protections, higher quality outcomes, and even more benefits for students, grantees, and other education stakeholders… We look forward to working with Congress on the next steps to codify these partnerships.”  The goal here is to create a trial run, prove the dismantling of the Department is harmless, and then convince Congress to take the necessary action to approve the restructure.

Last November, Department of Education work was transferred to other departments through interagency agreements with Primary and Secondary Education programs including Title I sent to the Department of Labor and smaller programs sent to the Departments of Interior, Health and Human Services, and State.  The issuing if temporary interagency agreements continued early this week.

Education Week‘s Mark Lieberman reports: “The U.S. Department of Education… announced it will begin offloading the management of key federal programs for school safety, community schools, educational TV programming and family engagement (in) an ‘interagency agreement’ with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services… Separately, the U.S. Department of State will take over management of a grant portal that displays foreign gifts to higher education institutions….  Under Secretary of Education Linda McMahon, the department has now forged nine separate interagency agreements to transfer program responsibilities to other agencies, including administration for most K-12 programs and funds.  But shifts the administration has touted for special education (to HHS), civil rights enforcement (to the Department of Justice,) students-loan management (to the Treasury Department), and data collection (to a federal statistics agency) haven’t yet materialized.”

Lieberman notices that this week’s, “Grant programs shifting to HHS are already beleaguered. The six grant programs included in this week’s announcement include several the Trump administration over the past year has proposed to defund and moved to disrupt.  Congress recently supplied level year-over-year funding for all of them—$514 million in total.  The Department of Education is currently facing three separate lawsuits from recipients of Full-Service Community Schools grant recipients in Illinois, Maryland, North Carolina, and the District of Columbia, who saw their ongoing grant awards abruptly discontinued in December.  All told, the agency discontinued roughly $168 million that Community Schools grant recipients in 11 states had been expecting in the coming years.” The Department claims the grantees were promoting “diversity, equity, and inclusion”in their Community Schools.

Rep. Bobby Scott (D-VA), the ranking member of the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Education and the Workforce, does not buy Linda McMahon’s theory that all the temporary interagency agreements will “provide proof of concept” and win over Congress. The Federal News Network‘s Heckman describes Scott disdain for the “legally dubious interagency agreements… Over and over again, the administration has circumvented the law to hamstring the future of public education without the consent of Congress or the American people.”

Trump Slashes Funding for Full-Service Community Schools. Children, Parents, and Communities Suffer.

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Full-Service Community Schools have been a prized strategy for turning public schools into community hubs that collaboratively pull enriching after-school programs right into the public school building along with additional social and medical services.  These schools have proven essential for children who face opportunity gaps and families who need help securing vaccinations and eye glasses for their children and connecting with community agencies that provide social support.

In a 2024 newsletter, the National Education Policy Center examined why the federal government has invested in Full-Service Community Schools: “The federal government has engaged in community schools historically as part of its  broader commitment to addressing educational inequality and supporting holistic child development. Federal involvement in community schools increased significantly during the 1960s with President Lyndon B. Johnson’s “War on Poverty.” Programs like Head Start, created under the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, embodied early principles of community schools by acknowledging that schools alone cannot address the underlying problems associated with poverty.”

New York City’s Children’s Aid Society defines the Community School: “The community school strategy delivers holistic services for children and families, connecting them to resources in their communities and fostering academic success… No two community schools look alike.  When we partner with a school… we assess the needs of that student population and community.  At all of our community schools, we are placing an emphasis on chronic absenteeism… Services at a community school can include  comprehensive health services, after-school academic enrichment, mentoring, parent engagement, and more.”

Such schools need to add staff to coordinate right in the school building the services of community agencies with the academic program of the public school and to staff enrichment programming like after-school services.  Federal grants have traditionally made Community School services possible.  At the beginning of December, 2025 the federal government was contributing funding nationwide to 70 Full-Service Community Schools, but as Education Week‘s Mark Lieberman reported, “On December 12, the Department (of Education) notified recipients of 19 of these grants, across 11 states and the District of Columbia, that they would not be receiving their remaining two or three years of expected funding—$168 million in total. Much of that money covers salaries for community schools coordinator positions in school buildings, many in rural areas.”

K-12 Dive‘s Kara Arundel reports that in Illinois, the American Federation of Teachers and the Brighton Park Neighborhood Council in Chicago filed a lawsuit to block the funding cancellation as a violation of the Administrative Procedure Act.  Other lawsuits were filed by state attorneys general in Maryland, North Carolina and the District of Columbia.  However, as we have watched in other cases of cancelled federal funding by the Trump administration, the legal cases take a long time to be heard and appealed in federal courts. In the meantime, staff are let go and students and their families, lose essential services. Arundel explains that, “The two states and D.C. said they were in the middle of five-year grant cycles totaling between $1.9 million and $50 million when they got notice that their grants would be terminated….”

For the Washington Post, Lauren Lumpkin recently described the cancellation of a large after-school program at the Family Academy of Multilingual Exploration (FAME), a public school serving 440 students in New Haven, Connecticut. The federal grant had supported a school collaboration with the Community Care Center, whose executive director, Ilaria Filippi, explained why the staff at the U.S. Department of Education told them the grant was being cancelled: “The group’s grant application included language ‘about advancing racial equity and trauma-informed practice.’ … After President Donald Trump took office last year, the Education Department said DEI policies were harmful and discriminatory. And the community schools money was clawed back…This program did not end because it failed. It did not end because outcomes were poor. It did not end because it was ineffective.”

Lumpkin profiles the work of FAME’s Community School care coordinator: “Among the biggest losses for FAME was Keishla Sanchez, who was laid off from her job as a care coordinator responsible for helping students and families navigate challenges at school or at home. One of her first cases was a mother who had immigration documents but whose child did not. Sanchez helped the family find a lawyer and eventually obtain a green card… Since leaving in December, Sanchez said she’s been getting calls and texts from families, many of whom still need help.  ‘I was their main person to go to,’ she said.”

FAME was able to find enough money from a local nonprofit to keep its after-school arts program alive for the rest of this year. Several other Community Schools in Hartford, New Haven, and Waterbury were able to benefit from funding to finish out this school year when Connecticut Governor Ned Lamont got legislative approval to provide emergency funding.  FAME’s staff hope to be able to secure some of that state funding.

Before the December funding cut for the future of the Community School partnership, here is what FAME’s school principal, Marisol Rodriguez had envisioned: “Rodriguez had hoped to double the number of children participating in after-school programs from about 60 to 120 students. Between FAME and Fair Haven School—which was in the second year of its grant—students would have access to fencing, theater, arts and crafts, dance, and a math and a soccer program. They’d also get more staff.”

Education journalist, Jeff Bryant tracks the impact of the sudden loss of a Community School grant at Curie High School in Chicago’s Bryant Park Neighborhood: “As a result of the funding cut-off to Curie High school, according to (teacher) Claudia Morales, Curie will lose money it needs to pay for tutors, after-school programs, parent education courses, and academic support for students who struggle with learning. These are programs and services parents specifically asked the school to provide.” Programs providing support for parents had been seen as essential before the grant’s cancellation: ” ‘Although the students are the ones most affected by these grant terminations, adults are too,’ said Cynthia Ramirez, a parent coordinator at Curie… For the past five and a half years, Ramirez has been in charge of parent classes at the school, and she organizes parent workshops to give support and point parents to services and resources in the heavily Hispanic, working-class community. She also coordinates with school nurses and other health providers to help parents navigate things like vaccinations, physicals for sports programs, dental and eye services, and mental health problems. Now, she fears she is likely going to lose her job.”

Bryant quotes research from RAND Corporation on the effectiveness of the Community School model: “According to a 2020 analysis conducted by the… nonpartisan research organization RAND, schools in New York City using the community school strategy experienced… positive results. Compared to similarly matched non-community schools, community schools saw higher graduation rates; decreased chronic absenteeism, especially among Black students and high school students in temporary housing; fewer disciplinary incidents among elementary and middle school students; and significantly improved measures of student achievement—such as math scores, credit accumulation, and on-time grade progression.”

What Would It Mean if Ohioans Voted to Eliminate Property Taxes?

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When I read  Cleveland Plain Dealer columnist Thomas Suddes’ column on February 1st, I gritted my teeth before I followed the advice in the headline: “Abolishing Property Taxes Would Leave Ohio in Shambles. Don’t Ignore Study.” Suddes is asking readers to study a new report from Zach Schiller, the research director at Policy Matters Ohio.

Thirty-three years ago—with another mother who has become a lifelong friend due to our experience volunteering together 60-hours-a-week for several months in 1993—I co-chaired the political campaign to pass an 8.9 mill property tax levy to fund our community’s public schools. There isn’t much waste in public school budgets, and I knew that if our school district ran out of money, my kids’ classes would grow larger, school music and the school library might disappear, and the caseloads of our exhausted school counselors would only grow larger.  I got involved personally because as a parent, I realized that property tax revenue was responsible for my children’s experiences.

But that same year, if I remember correctly, I heard school finance expert John Augenblick tell the following joke when he spoke in Ohio: “School finance is like a Russian novel.  It’s long, and it’s boring, and in the end everybody gets killed.”  My fear when I read Suddes’ column in the Sunday newspaper was that if I opened the link he provided, I would discover a long, technical slog that would take hours and hours to read.  I thought I’d probably have to read it twice or three times just to be sure I understood it.

But Suddes made me realize I was obligated to finish the reading he had assigned: “Anti-property-tax activists are asking registered voters to sign petitions that, assuming enough valid signatures are gathered—minimum: 413,487 statewide—would place on Ohio’s ballot a measure to abolish property taxes.”  “(I)f Ohioans voted to abolish the property tax, that could blow a colossal hole in local government finances… Policy Matters’ (Zach) Schiller reports that the property tax is Ohio’s largest tax, at $21.4 billion annually, providing almost 64% of schools’ funding; 16% of counties’ funding; 7% each for municipalities and townships; and 6% for libraries, parks, fire districts ‘and other special districts.’ ”

So… I opened the link to Schiller’s study, and I discovered a short column, only a bit longer than one page , a report written in plain English without technical jargon and lacking pages of tables and spreadsheets. Zach Schiller is an expert on property taxes and a former newspaper reporter who knows how to write.  His “study” is a short, clear alarm, cautioning Ohio about the bizarre idea of killing the tax that pays for the public services we all count on.

Because this is a blog about public education and public policy as it shapes public education, I am merely going to share a little bit of basic background and the parts of Schiller’s alarming report that relate directly to funding public schools. Schiller begins: “The property tax on land and buildings is Ohio’s oldest and largest tax. Every state has a tax on such property, called ‘real’ property. The tax is based on the assessed value of property, determined by county auditors with oversight from the Ohio Department of Taxation. The large majority of these taxes are approved by voters. Schools, libraries, local governments, and all manner of public services depend on the property tax.”

Schiller continues: “More than three-fifths of real property-tax revenue goes to public schools—or an estimated  $13.6 billion for Tax Year 2024 (payable in 2025). This is their biggest source of funds, greater than state aid, and thus the main funding source for the education of Ohio’s 1.5 million public school students.”

What will happen if Ohioans pass a property tax repeal in this year’s November election? “If property-tax repeal were to pass this November, it would wipe out 2027 taxes due in 2028, leaving little over one year to come up with replacement for the $20.57 billion in revenue the real property tax likely will generate in 2027… No provision is made in the proposal for replacing that revenue.”

How could public services be paid for if a property tax repeal were to pass?  Schiller explains: “That would require gigantic increases in other taxes. Doubling the state sales tax, from 5.75% to 11.5% would be insufficient;  to fully recover the losses, Ohio’s sales tax would have to increase by nearly 7 cents on the dollar pushing our average combined sales tax rate above 14%—far and away the highest in the nation… (Y)ou could double the state income tax and would still need to boost the state sales tax by more than half to come up with the necessary revenue.”

Schiller explains that a property tax circuit breaker for vulnerable homeowners is a more palatable reform: “Legislators have good options to provide property-tax relief to Ohioans who need it—while preserving local revenues. A property tax circuit breaker is one such option.”

Schiller’s new report concludes: “(E)liminating the real personal property tax would force devastating cuts to schools, libraries, and other critical public services, or extraordinary increases in other taxes and utility costs… Eliminating property taxes should be off the table.”

Please read Schiller’s pithy warning.

Children Are Warehoused in Dilley, Texas as their Classmates at Home Fear ICE Near Their Schools

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The enormous impact of the ICE surge in Minneapolis and other U.S. communities has been twofold—for the children held at the Dilley Detention Center for weeks and months without any arrangement for their education, and for the students and educators affected by raids near their schools, including the extreme anxiety that has interfered with learning and the stress for educators trying to protect students.

For the NY Times last Friday, Miriam Jordan, Sarah Mervosh, and Allison McCann reported in depth on the facility in Dilley, Texas where most of the children seized by ICE have been sent: “Under the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign, hundreds of children have been detained…. Nearly all pass through one place: a sprawling detention center… that is a jumble of trailers and soft-sided tents in a desolate expanse about 70 miles south of San Antonio… All told, about 3,500 adults and children have passed through Dilley since it reopened… As of mid-January, there were about 1,400 people at Dilley, including about 500 children and 450 parents.”

The reporters continue: “A promotional video by CoreCivic, a private prison company that runs Dilley, depicts a dormlike setting, with bunk beds, an outdoor playground, a volleyball court, a no-frills library and a pantry…. Families describe a different reality: inadequate medical care, lights kept on all night, scant drinking water and little education.”

In mid-December, it was reported that CoreCivic was attempting to hire a for-profit charter school management organization to provide educational services at Dilley. The NY Times reporters indicate that the deal did not materialize: “At Dilley, children of different ages and grades are grouped together for one-hour classes, which often consist of basic work sheets or coloring… ‘In high school, I was taking chemistry, geometry, history, and English,’ said Christian, (a) 16-year-old who had been living in San Antonio… Christian said that students (at Dilley) were handed a sheet to color in the American flag and another to search for the 50 states. He has quit attending class… The government had seemed to be making plans to set up an in-person school at Dilley by hiring STRIDE Inc., a for-profit company that primarily offers virtual (computer-based) education… But that did not happen.  In a statement, STRIDE said, ‘We are not providing education services at this facility.’ ”

There is also the second side of this story about the impact of the ICE raids that send children and adolescents to Dilley.  Although we have been reading about the acute crisis created by ICE activity in recent weeks in the Twin Cities, last week, for WBEZ and the Chicago Sun-Times, Sarah Karp and Emmanuel Camarillo looked back to the ICE surge in Chicago last fall to trace the story of the Chicago Public Schools’ developing a district-wide protocol for school personnel to follow when ICE activity suddenly occurred.  Not only had staff at many schools been suddenly put on the spot to protect their students when they received warnings about ICE in the neighborhood, but educators discovered that children and adolescents had been so distracted by fear of ICE that it had interfered with their ability to concentrate on learning:

“Though the exact number of times federal activity disrupted schools isn’t known, it’s clear the effect was widespread… CPS received nearly 200 calls for support from 109 schools between Oct. 20, when it opened a command center to centralize calls for assistance, through mid-December… That’s likely an underestimate of how often agents came near schools…  At least 10 schools thought the situation this fall posed enough of a safety risk to staff and students that they went on lockdown…. The unpredictability of immigration enforcement actions made it difficult for CPS to figure out how and when to tell families about activity near schools.”

Here is the plan Chicago Public Schools developed: “The district eventually gave school leaders clearer guidance about how to handle immigration enforcement activity near their buildings. Introduced in October, it instructs school leaders to bring students and staff inside and secure doors if federal activity is happening on the same block. If it’s further away, they should monitor the activity. That’s something community members and rapid response teams can help with… School board members and principals say communication improved once schools had a single hotline to call and the district gave school leaders the go-ahead to use their own judgment to act quickly.”

How did this help students? “Steps like this have helped students like eighth grader Dennise Marioni at Gunsaulus Scholastic Academy. Parents said the Brighton Park (neighborhood) school kept students indoors multiple times last fall, but Marioni said clear communication from the school kept her calm. In addition, staff often set up a perimeter around the school during dismissal or arrival to monitor for federal agents. ‘They’re keeping us safe,’ Marioni said.'”

The trauma from the ICE enforcement surge has not been limited to metropolitan areas like Chicago and Minneapolis-St. Paul.  A December, 2025 survey of high school principals released by UCLA’s Institute for Democracy, Education and Access reports: “More than 2/3 of U.S. public high schools were impacted due to heightened concerns of students from immigrant families…. An Idaho principal reported that migrant workers who are parents of his students have been ‘afraid to come in.’ … Almost 2/3 of principals across the nation… reported that ‘students from immigrant families missed school due to policies or political rhetoric related to immigrants.’ These declines in attendance occurred as schools have been making herculean efforts to rebuild attendance rates shaken by the COVID pandemic… The high school principals in our study feel a professional and moral obligation to meet the needs of the moment… And yet, many principals expressed concern that their ability to advance the essential work of public education is being undercut by political forces beyond their control.”

Two policy changes in recent years have left school grounds more vulnerable at this time when the Trump administration has also accelerated ICE activity.  From UCLA’s Institute for Democracy, Education and Access we learn that it was President Trump himself who ended federal rules prohibiting ICE activity in sensitive locations: “One of the first official acts of the second Trump administration was an executive order that rescinded long-standing guidance restricting immigration enforcement in and around ‘sensitive locations’ such as schools, churches, hospitals, and courthouses.”

In last week’s report on the Dilley Detention Center, the NY Times reporters also remind us of the history of the 1997 Flores Settlement Agreement, which it appears is being flagrantly violated today at Dilley: “(A) 1997 settlement agreement… requires the government to provide basic care and education to undocumented children in their custody. It requires age-appropriate instruction in subjects like science, math and reading in a classroom setting. The agreement has its origins in a class-action lawsuit filed in 1985 against the government over its treatment of detained migrant children. The Clinton administration agreed to settle the lawsuit, establishing standards for the detention of minors. Under the settlement, children are supposed to be transferred out of immigrant detention within about 20 days. The Trump administration is fighting in court to end the settlement, arguing that it incentivizes unlawful border crossings and undermines immigration enforcement.”

All the Ways the Trump Admin. Keeps Redefining Civil Rights by Banning Equity and Inclusion in Education

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At the Brookings Institution’s Brown Center on Education Policy, Rachel Perera disdains the Trump administration’s, “unprecedented effort to repurpose federal anti-discrimination law to reverse longstanding efforts to promote equality in public life… Federal laws prohibiting racial and sex-based discrimination are being used to withhold federal funding from schools  and colleges without even the facade of an investigation… (C)olleges that didn’t crack down on student protests against the war in Gaza are being punished for ‘antisemitism’; school districts with transgender-inclusive policies are being denounced for sex-based discrimination against girls; and schools and colleges pursuing racial equity… are being accused of racial discrimination against white and Asian students. All the while, legitimate complaints of discrimination are piling up (at the Office for Civil Rights).”

Vague federal threats to scrub hiring practices and programming said to promote “diversity, equity, and inclusion” have produced a McCarthy-era level of fear that has undone academic freedom, undermined hiring practices, threatened the jobs of school teachers, college professors, and even university presidents, and resulted in significant cuts to federal dollars that we all count on to pay for essential programs in the nation’s public schools and colleges and universities.

Last week Laura Meckler and a team of Washington Post reporters surveyed the impact of Trump administration policies on university hiring practices: “When President Donald Trump took office last year, America’s research universities were in the midst of an aggressive quest to hire more Black and Latino professors. All but three of the 187 most prominent schools had made public commitments…. Now most of these efforts are on ice or abandoned…. Of the 184 universities that made faculty pledges at least 108 have fully or partially rolled them back…. In 2020, the University of Virginia vowed to double the number of underrepresented faculty… ‘We must be a community that is diverse, inclusive, and equitable,’ Jim Ryan, then-president of U-Va., wrote at the time. ‘Diverse because talent exists all around the globe and within every demographic, and because the very best ideas emerge from the consideration of diverse viewpoints and perspectives.’  Under pressure from the Trump administration and the state, U-VA. ended its DEI programs last year…. Ryan resigned.”

Meckler and her colleagues describe how slowly racial and ethnic diversity has increased among the faculty at American universities: “Before the concentrated push began, the share of Black and Hispanic professors at top research universities barely moved—inching up 1.7 percentage points between 2005 and 2015.  There was slightly more growth after the wave of university commitments. Between 2015 and 2024, the most recent year for which data is available, the share of Black and Hispanic professors increased by 3.1 percentage points. Absent focused diversity effort, faculties will remain overwhelmingly white, said Freeman Hrabowski, president emeritus of the University of Maryland at Baltimore County and a national leader on faculty recruitment. ‘People tend to choose people who look just like themselves,’ he said. ‘That’s just nature.’ ”

While most job openings at the nation’s colleges and universities continue to be filled by white candidates, in a lawsuit that would have been unheard of a year ago, a white biologist, with legal representation from the America First Policy Institute (where Education Secretary Linda McMahon was formerly president of the board), recently sued Cornell University for violating the Civil Rights Act by favoring candidates of color and discriminating against him for being white. Meckler reports: “Colin Wright, the plaintiff, was a postdoctoral researcher… at the time. He said he was seeking an academic job and was well qualified for the tenure-track position that Cornell allegedly filled without ever posting the job publicly, as was required by university policy. Attorneys for the America First Policy Institute… contend that internal documents classified a list of candidates by race, ethnicity, disability status, and sexual orientation.”

The impact of the Trump administration’s rollback of civil rights protections is not limited to faculty hiring. In late January, the NY Times‘ Sarah Mervosh tracked a lawsuit filed by “the 1776 Foundation, a group that opposes racial preferences in education,” against the Los Angeles City School District: “A decades-old policy meant to combat the harms of school segregation in Los Angeles was challenged in federal court by a conservative group that says the policy discriminates against white students. The policy dates back to the 1970s, when the Los Angeles school district… was under a court order to desegregate and improve conditions for students of color… The plaintiffs argue that students at schools with more white students receive ‘inferior treatment and calculated disadvantages’… A 2023 Supreme Court decision outlawing race-based affirmative action in college admissions has galvanized conservative groups and the Trump administration, which has pushed to apply the ruling beyond college admissions.”

Finally, there is the Trump administration’s fight with the nation’s universities and especially with Harvard, which has refused to capitulate to the President’s demands.  For refusing to cave in, Harvard University has reaped the Trump whirlwind. The conflict began as the Trump administration attempted to punish the university for failing to contain demonstrations during the war between Israel and Palestine. The Department of Education subsequently launched an attempt to force a number of universities to comply with the Trump administration’s redefinition of the meaning of the 2023 Supreme Court decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard by insisting that it ban not just affirmative action in student admissions but also now eliminate all programs that promote ‘diversity, equity and inclusion.’ Several universities and a mass of public school districts have submitted to the President’s demands, but Harvard, so far, has stood firm.

The NY Times‘ Alan Blinder summarizes the Trump administration’s year-long attack on Harvard: “The Trump administration’s biggest target has been Harvard…. The dispute erupted after Harvard rejected Trump administration proposals, including one for the use of an outsider to audit ‘programs and departments that most fuel antisemitic harassment or reflect ideological capture.’ The government also wanted Harvard to curb the power of its faculty and report international students who commit misconduct. The Trump administration almost immediately began cutting off billions in funds… Harvard sued the administration over the cuts. In September, a federal judge in Boston broadly ruled in Harvard’s favor, and research money is largely flowing again. The administration filed a notice of appeal in December. But the administration’s onslaught goes beyond research funding… Mr. Trump has also threatened Harvard’s tax-exempt status. His administration has also tried repeatedly to bar the university from enrolling international students. A federal judge in Boston has blocked those efforts. In June, Harvard and the White House began discussing the possibility of a settlement… Harvard told the government that it is willing to spend $500 million… to go toward work force programs. But the Trump administration shifted its demands… demanding that $200 million be paid directly to the government.”

Last week in a pair of reports, here and here, a team of NY Times reporters covered the latest developments in the President’s attack on Harvard.  The Times reporters described what appeared perhaps to be Trump’s willingness to backtrack “on a major point in negotiations with Harvard, dropping his administration’s demand for a $200 million payment to the government in hopes of finally resolving the administration’s conflicts with the university.” The reporters added: “The White House’s concession comes amid sagging approval ratings for Mr. Trump, and as he faces outrage over immigration enforcement tactics and the shooting deaths of two Americans by federal agents in Minnesota.”  The president responded with outrage on Truth Social: “Strongly Antisemitic Harvard University has been feeding a lot of ‘nonsense’ to The Failing New York Times… We are now seeking One Billion Dollars in damages, and want nothing further to do, into the future, with Harvard University.”

No one believes the Trump administration is permanently backing off its attack on Harvard University and the Trump administration’s attack more broadly on equity, diversity, and academic freedom.  However, Harvard’s dogged refusal to capitulate to the Trump administration has proven a model for other university leaders who are realizing that conceding to the Trump administration’s demands erodes academic freedom, undermines their autonomy, undermines the rights of their faculty, and threatens programs that protect equity and inclusion among their students.

In late January the American Council on Education (ACE) joined 22 other national higher education associations to file “an amicus brief with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit supporting  Harvard University in its lawsuit challenging a Trump administration effort to bar international students from attending.”  The American Council on Education explains why it is urgently important to support Harvard University in this case:

“ACE and the other higher education associations focus on the extraordinary implications of the case for colleges and universities nationwide, not just Harvard. The brief argues that the First Amendment protects the autonomy of educational institutions to govern themselves free from unwarranted federal intrusion, and that this autonomy is essential to the nation’s academic, scientific, and civic interests… The (presidential) proclamation reflects an effort to punish a single institution for perceived viewpoints by leveraging immigration policy in a manner that would chill speech and academic decision-making across higher education… International students would remain eligible to enter the United states to study at any institution other than Harvard—underscoring, the associations argue, that the measure is punitive rather than regulatory in character… ACE and its co-signatories warn that allowing the proclamation to stand would have consequences far beyond this single case, creating a chilling effect on institutional governance, campus expression, and the free exchange of ideas. Colleges and universities, they argue, could face pressure to alter academic programs, research priorities, or campus policies to avoid becoming targets of similar executive action.”

Ohio Legislator Proposes Law to Punish School Districts for Pursuing Anti-Voucher Lawsuit

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Last week, an Ohio legislator introduced House Bill 671 to deprive roughly half of Ohio’s 609 public school districts of any state funding for their public schools unless the school districts drop out of a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality the state’s EdChoice private school tuition vouchers. In January of 2022, the school districts, the Ohio Coalition of Equity and Adequacy of School Funding, and several parent plaintiffs filed the lawsuit because the state’s growing voucher program continues to divert more and more of Ohio’s school foundation funds to private schools instead of the public schools that serve the mass of the state’s children.

The proposed law is a blatant example of extortion.

The Plain Dealer‘s Laura Hancock reports that, last Tuesday, Rep. Jamie Callender (R-Lake County) introduced House Bill 671 to withhold state public school funding from the over 300 plaintiff school districts participating in the Vouchers Hurt Ohio lawsuit. Hancock explains: “Under HB 671, the money that would normally go to the school district would be held in an escrow fund: ‘The department of education and workforce shall release withheld funds to the school district only upon the termination of the legal action or the district’s withdrawal from the action.’ ”

Here is the current status of the Vouchers Hurt Ohio lawsuit.  At the District Court level, on July 24, 2025, Franklin County District Court Judge Jaiza Page found Ohio’s EdChoice statewide school voucher program unconstitutional on three counts. The lawsuit being pursued by more than half of the state’s school districts has been appealed to the 10th District Court of Appeals and is likely to be heard in 2026.

Article VI, Section 2 of the 1851 Ohio Constitution defines the legislature’s responsibility to fund the state’s public schools: “The General Assembly shall make such provisions, 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; but no religious or other sect, or sects, shall ever have any exclusive right to, or control of, any part of the school funds of this state.”

Judge Page found that Ohio’s EdChoice voucher program violates the Ohio Constitution on three of five counts named in the lawsuit:

  • Creation of one or more systems of uncommon schools in violation of the Ohio Constitution, Article VI, Section 2;
  • Failure to secure a thorough and efficient system of common schools in violation of the Ohio Constitution, Article VI, Section 2; and
  • Diversion of funding in violation of the “No Religious or Other Sect Shall Ever Have Any Exclusive Right To or Control Of, Any Part of the School Funds of the State” clause of Article VI.

Two of the plaintiffs, the Vouchers Hurt Ohio Coalition and the Ohio Coalition for Equity and Adequacy of School Funding released a statement responding to Rep. Callender’s attempt to intimidate school district plaintiffs and force them to quit pursuing the legal challenge. Eric Brown, former Ohio Supreme Court Chief Justice, and the Vouchers Hurt Ohio Coalition’s chair, describes HB 671 as an obviously unconstitutional attempt to violate school districts’ obligation to serve their students: “This appears to be another attempt to intimidate and bully… The school districts have a long-standing constitutional right to pursue legal action on behalf of their students… The Coalition stands behind its members and is prepared to immediately challenge any legislation that withholds funding from districts that protect Ohioans’ constitutional rights.”

From the Richmond Heights School District near Cleveland, School Board President Nneka Slade Jackson defines the impact of vouchers on school district finances: “We have more than 330 school districts in our coalition, and it is growing as more and more superintendents, treasurers, and board members in public districts feel the harmful impact of the legislation siphoning away $1.7 billion for private school vouchers that benefit primarily wealthy families and religious schools.”

Jocelyn Rhynard, a member of  Dayton’s school board, explains: “Mr. Callender’s proposal is dangerous because it is not just about vouchers. It would remove the ability for school districts to challenge unconstitutional legislation. It would open the door to block other public entities like cities and townships and counties that receive state funding from their constitutional right to appeal to the court system.”

By introducing HB 671, Rep. Callender is  blatantly attempting to distract the public from the very reason 330 of Ohio’s school districts are suing the state to have EdChoice vouchers declared unconstitutional: As the legislature has diverted billions of dollars to the universal EdChoice voucher program, it has simultaneously reduced its investment in the public schools that serve 1.6 million children and adolescents.

The Plain Dealer‘s Anna Staver traces a persistent decline in the state’s contribution to Ohio public school funding: “In fiscal year 1999, the state covered about 47% of the base cost of education, according to the Ohio Education Policy Institute. This fiscal year, the state will cover 38%. By FY 2027, that share is projected to drop to 32%. As the state steps back, more of the responsibility for funding schools shifts onto local homeowners—through their property tax bills.”