Last week, the Trump administration threatened to withhold funding specifically from schools and school districts with high shares of low-income students if they did not verify in 10 days the elimination of certain diversity, equity and inclusion practices. Craig Trainor, the acting assistant secretary for civil rights at the department, declared in a release announcing the memo, “Federal financial assistance is a privilege, not a right.”
This is not the first time that the Department of Education has outlined the Trump administration’s interpretation of civil rights law. States are already required to certify that they will comply with federal antidiscrimination laws — as New York officials noted when they refused to comply with the administration’s demands.
What makes the latest guidance from the department so pernicious is that it specifically targets Title I funding, which goes to schools that tend to have higher percentages of students of color.
The willingness of the administration to target schools serving low-income students for noncompliance with its interpretation of federal civil rights law illustrates its commitment to returning American education to a time before the Civil Rights Act, when the nation’s most vulnerable students were largely unprotected.
Since the inauguration, the Trump administration has laid off more than 1,300 employees at the Department of Education (hundreds more have taken buyouts) with the ultimate goal of eliminating the department altogether. Through its programs and enforcement actions over the last four and a half decades, the Department of Education has been the chief entity ensuring that in every state students who are racial minorities, those with disabilities, English language-learners and members of other marginalized communities, are not discriminated against and have access to the same quality education that has historically been provided to wealthy, white students.
The Department of Education was signed into law by President Jimmy Carter who, while governor of Georgia (as well as a county school board member), made it a priority to improve the state’s education system. Education guaranteed full citizenship, and when he declared in his inaugural address that “no poor, rural, weak or Black person” should be deprived of one — several conservative state senators walked out. In four years, Georgia made significant strides in early childhood education and integration.
Mr. Carter’s successes were perhaps more impressive given that his predecessor was a staunch segregationist. There were still education issues to be resolved in Georgia as elsewhere in the nation, and Mr. Carter wanted to do more, but he was term-limited. Leaving office, he knew that as quickly as rights were won and gains were made, they could all go away.
Mr. Carter took that knowledge on the national campaign trail. “It is time for the law to be enforced. We cannot educate children, we cannot create harmony among our people, we cannot preserve basic human freedom unless we have an orderly society,” he said when accepting the Democratic nomination for president in 1976.
When he arrived in Washington, there were more than 260 education-related programs spread across various federal agencies; creating a separate department — one that wrapped program administration and rights enforcement together — would streamline bureaucracy. The department would support states in addressing the deep educational inequities they faced, and it would be a backstop if states failed in that mission.
During her confirmation hearing, Education Secretary Linda McMahon argued that her administration’s policies to return education to the states would prevent the nation’s schools from being “corrupted by political ideologies, special interests and unjust discrimination.” But rather than removing corrupting political ideology by selectively limiting the federal influence in education, the Trump administration has inserted it — paving the way to re-establish a system rife with unjust discrimination.
When President Trump first entered office, in 2017, conservatives argued that — from K-12 to higher education — schools taught students what to think rather than how to think. As Ms. McMahon put it recently, parents and grandparents “worry that their children and grandchildren are no longer taught American values and true history.” The culture had veered too far left, critics of education argued; the path to making America great again ran through the schools, specifically by ridding them of a leftist ideological agenda they claimed was part and parcel of the curriculum. On the right, focus on the performance of America’s schools and students has come to be largely supplanted by near-hysterical concern about the nature of what students are being taught.
By 2020, this complaint had grown into a movement. Ideologues like Chris Rufo began invoking and contorting academic phrases like critical race theory and business strategies like diversity, equity and inclusion into a catchall scapegoat for complaints about the ways America had changed. Diversity had superseded merit as American society’s chief goal, they argued. Across the country, activists began criticizing books they did not like and curriculums in elementary and secondary school. And conservatives distorted the language of civil rights to suggest that efforts to make higher education institutions more inclusive or to provide opportunities for those who have been historically barred from them were themselves discriminatory.
Diversity efforts in education — from college diversity programming to nonsanitized versions of American history — grew out of the civil rights movement and attempts to ensure that founders’ promises were available to all Americans. Our education system has never been perfect, but the view espoused by many in the modern conservative movement is that programs that have led to significant progress — progress the Department of Education has helped guarantee through its Office for Civil Rights and the programs it administers such as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act or Title I — have been in error. Max Eden, a former fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, has argued that the “the antidiscrimination provisions of the Civil Rights Act do not apply to white students or teachers.” But in reality, for much of American history, white students were the only ones who had their rights considered at all.
Education is not explicitly protected in the Constitution, outside of the implicit promise of the 14th Amendment that no state can “deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” But public education rights have always been central to how America’s leaders have thought about the nation’s growth. Even the founders considered for whom and what formal schooling should be designed.
George Washington argued that education should be lawmakers’ chief concern in his first annual address before Congress in 1790, saying, “Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness.” Alongside his contemporaries such as James Madison and Benjamin Rush, Washington believed that education was the best way to build good citizens.
But the founders also knew how important an education was to citizenship because by the time the first signature stained the Declaration of Independence, slave codes in many parts of the colonies had barred enslaved Black people from learning to read. After Gabriel’s Rebellion, a planned slave revolt in 1800, slaveholders across the South barred Black people from reading the Bible as they were wary that it would give the enslaved ideas of liberation. Educating women was an afterthought for almost everyone except Rush. Denying people education meant denying them citizenship. Washington’s idea of civic education was exclusionary by default; it accounted for the experiences of only wealthy, white men.
At nearly every moment when America could have expanded educational opportunity, the nation chose inequality. The 1862 Morrill Act doled out millions of acres of land that states could sell to fund colleges that Black students were almost exclusively barred from attending; discrimination prevented Black veterans from enjoying the spoils of the G.I. Bill which Congress passed to provide World War II veterans money for college, housing and unemployment insurance. At the same time, in America’s public schools, students were being taught an incomplete, revisionist history.
As the long civil rights movement began to bear fruit — through court wins like that in Brown v. Board of Education, and in higher education cases that preceded it, like Sipuel v. Board of Regents — the nation began including everyone’s accomplishments in its story. In 1961, California passed a law forbidding the adoption of textbooks with materials that did “not correctly portray the role and contribution of the American Negro and members of other ethnic groups in the total development of the United States.” That necessarily meant explaining the trials those people had been through. Several states — Oklahoma, New Jersey, Illinois, Nebraska — followed suit. At the same time, colleges and universities — in efforts to recruit students whose entry had historically been barred — began race-conscious admissions programs.
The national reconsideration of how the American story was told in history and popular culture, whose achievements were included in that telling, and strategies to account for all of the years of inequality, were attacked immediately. Some white Americans viewed policies intended to help address a legacy of discrimination against others as a discrimination against themselves, which led to lawsuits. Cases like Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, which fought the affirmative action strategy at the university’s Davis School of Medicine, sought to dismantle the apparatus that would enforce the Civil Rights Act. As soon as rights were won, they were disputed.
By the end of President Trump’s first term in office, he assumed that fight — beginning an assault on a bastardized version of critical race theory not long after Mr. Rufo blasted it on Fox News — and sought to blunt the momentum around books, articles and reports that examined the full breadth of American history, such as the 1619 Project.
America’s story is one of progress, which has rarely been obtained simply through good will. It has to be enforced. Fights for equality have been messy, and quite bloody at times. Understanding that history is important so as not to repeat it. Still, shortly before leaving office in 2020, Mr. Trump established the President’s Advisory 1776 Commission, in part a rebuttal to the 1619 Project, as a way for the administration to write its own version of American history.
On Jan. 18, 2021, when Mr. Trump’s panel released its report, it put forth a view of American history that has relentlessly bent toward progress through slavery and Jim Crow. That trend began to reverse, the panel argued, at the culmination of the civil rights movement. “The civil rights movement was almost immediately turned to programs that ran counter to the lofty ideals of the founders,” the authors of the report wrote. They argued that the idea that “past discrimination requires present effort” — the logic of affirmative action — amounted to reverse discrimination. “Those forms of preferential treatment built up in our system over time, first in administrative rulings, then executive orders, later in congressionally passed law, and finally were sanctified by the Supreme Court.”
That is now a view held by officials in the current Trump administration. For example, a 2021 review of Christopher Caldwell’s book “The Age of Entitlement,” by Craig Trainor, endorses the idea that the government which grew up to enforce the Civil Rights Act went too far.
“Contrary to the contemporary platitude, it is not diversity that is our strength, but the American Creed animated by the Declaration’s equality principle and the Constitution’s guarantee thereof,” Mr. Trainor wrote. But America did not embrace the colorblind principle until its inequalities were already baked in.
In some ways, Mr. Trump’s 1776 commissioners and conservatives who align with that view are right: Civil rights programs that seek to include people the founders never would have considered Americans — much less citizens deserving of rights — might run counter to their ideals. But to suggest that programs created immediately after the end of Jim Crow to ameliorate its impacts amount to reverse discrimination in the present day is wrongheaded.
After Mr. Trump’s loss to Joe Biden in the 2020 election, Florida, Texas and North Carolina took on the battle to reclaim the sanitized version of American history that existed before the 1960s. Republican state lawmakers have prohibited discussion of L.G.B.T.Q. identities in the classroom, banned diversity initiatives and scholarship programs, eroded tenure protections for faculty and appointed ideologically driven members to board positions at colleges. And they have tied their efforts to redesign general education curriculums to the funding they provide colleges.
The state legislative changes to curriculums and policy were made worse by the Supreme Court’s decision in June 2023 to eliminate the use of race in college admissions. Since then, in cases where there have not been sufficient declines in Black enrollment, affirmative action’s opponents have argued that institutions must be flouting the law.
The Trump administration has taken the fight back to the federal level. They have fired hundreds of members of the Education Department’s office for civil rights, effectively turning the office’s investigations into a pretense for punishing dissent under the guise of combating antisemitism; they have sought to erase tens of millions of dollars in university funding before investigations are completed; and they have tried to bludgeon universities into submission — all while eliminating vital roles at the Education Department that actually sought to help students and protect their rights.
The president’s vision to take a sledgehammer to the Department of Education’s ability to function will cause student suffering. The founders believed that education was critical to the full experience of citizenship; it was where students learned arts, sciences, humanities and how to engage with one another. But putting that vision into place left the nation with a system where inequities — in content and classroom composition — were left in place.
America began to undo those inequities, and the department protected that progress. Now, less than three months into Mr. Trump’s second presidency, the administration has done everything in its power, and some things beyond its authority, to ensure we are equal no more.
Adam Harris is a senior fellow at the New America Foundation.
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