Laura Meckler
Appearances
Fresh Air
The Gutting Of The Department Of Education
She talked about, you know, equity and gender ideology and needing to get rid of those out of schools. She said she would look into what Doge was doing and make sure it didn't go too far. So, you know, she had a fairly as expected confirmation hearing.
Fresh Air
The Gutting Of The Department Of Education
I do think, though, that there's another interesting contrast with Secretary DeVos because, yes, school choice was her and is still, we should say, her passion. She believes very strongly in school choice, which really didn't advance on the federal level under her tenure. But she also had a very, very different outlook about the federal role in education. She thought it needed a light footprint.
Fresh Air
The Gutting Of The Department Of Education
So while she undid a lot of what the Obama administration did, she did not impose her own philosophical agenda. In fact, in a story I wrote last year, we looked into the creation of the 1776 Commission, which was to promote education. patriotic education in schools. And it had begun with Donald Trump calling Betsy DeVos up one summer evening in 2020 and said, we've got to stop the 1619 Project.
Fresh Air
The Gutting Of The Department Of Education
Yes, it was their effort to, you know, to really reframe American history around slavery and the role that slavery has played in this country and its history. And Betsy DeVos's response to President Trump was like, no, we can't ban the 1619 Project. That's not our job. We're not here to run a national curriculum. I don't like it either, but that's up to individual school districts.
Fresh Air
The Gutting Of The Department Of Education
And that's a very different point of view that we're seeing. And that was really how she governed during her whole four years was like, you know, she wasn't telling school districts what to do in either direction. She viewed the federal government as having a light footprint. And now we see such a different
Fresh Air
The Gutting Of The Department Of Education
different orientation where they very much, I don't think they would have any trouble banning the 1619 Project.
Fresh Air
The Gutting Of The Department Of Education
Right. But that's one thing, to ban it on the local level. The local and state governments, that is their job to set curriculum. It isn't the federal role to decide what students learn, what students have to do to graduate, what books people read. Those are not federal roles traditionally.
Fresh Air
The Gutting Of The Department Of Education
But under this new way of looking things under the Trump administration is that they're defining things like this as being essentially akin to racial discrimination, that this is essentially discriminating against white people if they're forced to to see American history through the lens of slavery.
Fresh Air
The Gutting Of The Department Of Education
Those are the sorts of arguments that are being made that essentially if you are pushing so-called critical race theory, if you're trying to say that the country is systemically racist, if you're saying that white people have privilege— that other people don't have.
Fresh Air
The Gutting Of The Department Of Education
All of these things gear you into the territory of a definition of racial discrimination that is very different than what we've seen in the past, essentially using the civil rights laws to try to stop what their proponents would see as efforts to try to eliminate racism. So that is a very different orientation, a much more muscular federal role that we've already seen rolled out
Fresh Air
The Gutting Of The Department Of Education
just in these opening weeks of the Trump administration. So it's a stark contrast to the first Trump administration.
Fresh Air
The Gutting Of The Department Of Education
Well, all of this stems from protests that broke out on campus following the October 7th, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel, which was then, of course, followed by the war between Israel and the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. And Of course, there were, you know, very, very passionate, strong, angry protests at campuses all over the country.
Fresh Air
The Gutting Of The Department Of Education
Yeah, well, DOES showed up and they just really began taking a hacksaw to a lot of different parts of the education department's mission. Specifically, they started with the Institute for Education Sciences, which is the research arm. of the Education Department and began just canceling grants.
Fresh Air
The Gutting Of The Department Of Education
There's a provision in federal grants where you, and maybe others as well, where you can cancel it for, quote, convenience, which means basically any reason we want, and that's what they did. So these are research grants that were meant to try to figure out what is the best way of doing something. For instance, there was one grant that compared two different ways of teaching math.
Fresh Air
The Gutting Of The Department Of Education
It was an experiment, essentially, to see which one was more successful. There also are important grants that deal with collecting data about education statistics around the country, how we know how many schools there are, how many teachers there are, what's the demographic makeup of the student body of the teaching force. All of that information comes through this part of the agency.
Fresh Air
The Gutting Of The Department Of Education
So that's one thing that they did. They also began canceling grants that had anything to do with diversity, equity, and inclusion. If it had any of those words in it, essentially it got canceled as being inconsistent with the administration's priorities. And you also saw them putting a lot of employees on administrative leave.
Fresh Air
The Gutting Of The Department Of Education
Initially, they said they were going to put people on leave who did work related to DEI because they don't want that work done anymore. But they actually went further than that and put a lot of people on leave, it appears, simply because they had at some point participated in some sort of a diversity program.
Fresh Air
The Gutting Of The Department Of Education
And this includes programs that were touted under the first Trump administration that then Education Secretary Betsy DeVos herself founded. was a supporter of.
Fresh Air
The Gutting Of The Department Of Education
So essentially, if you just participated in something like the Diversity Change Agent program, which was a program to essentially help try to change the culture at the department, if you were just an everyday participant and you went to like a one-day training or a two-day training, you know, a few years ago, you might have been put on administrative leave. So Doge has been quite active.
Fresh Air
The Gutting Of The Department Of Education
Well, it's interesting because when you listen to President Trump talk about education, he really talks about two different things. And they're somewhat in tension. The first thing he talks about is, quote, returning education to the states. which is somewhat of a puzzling thing to say because education is already run by the states and local governments to a very large effect.
Fresh Air
The Gutting Of The Department Of Education
Now, there was a time not that long ago, you probably remember the No Child Left Behind Act that was passed under President George W. Bush, where the federal government did have a much bigger role. But that was actually rolled back near the end of the Obama administration. So really, the federal footprint today is somewhat light. education to the states.
Fresh Air
The Gutting Of The Department Of Education
And the second thing we hear about from him is getting essentially wokeness and gender ideology and equity and race conversations essentially out of the schools. So he wants to use the power of the federal government to influence the way that schools talk about those subjects and the policies that they use. You can see how these are somewhat in tension with one another.
Fresh Air
The Gutting Of The Department Of Education
You have the federal government on one hand saying, well, this should be run by the states, on another hand saying, yes, except for this, that, and the other.
Fresh Air
The Gutting Of The Department Of Education
So there's been this tension that colleges have been facing, especially last academic year, to be honest, but to some extent this year, too, about how to balance the free speech rights of the protesters against racism. the rights of other students to be on campus and to be on campus in an atmosphere that's free of harassment, for Jewish students to feel safe. In some cases, they did not feel safe.
Fresh Air
The Gutting Of The Department Of Education
Yeah. So the term critical race theory, which became sort of a basket term for everything that conservatives did not like about the conversation around race in schools. But what it really is about is taking as a given that there is systemic racism in the country. And, you know, for some people, that's an obvious. Of course, there's systemic racism. And for other people, that's quite offensive.
Fresh Air
The Gutting Of The Department Of Education
So that was essentially the dividing line that we saw. We really saw a lot of this being turned up following George Floyd's death in May of 2020. And a lot of schools felt a moral imperative to really address questions of race and equity and to talk about what was happening in our country.
Fresh Air
The Gutting Of The Department Of Education
And then what you had was essentially a backlash to that, where you essentially had mostly white people who were saying, you know, this is offensive to me. How can you say, are you saying I'm racist? They didn't like any insinuation that they were part of the problem. And I think that that's essentially where you saw a lot of pushback.
Fresh Air
The Gutting Of The Department Of Education
Most of this really began on the local level at school board meetings. Then you started seeing parent groups form. I should actually say that those parent groups were initially formed in response to COVID policies. And people who were angry that schools were closed too long, they were angry that their children were being required to wear masks, and they were fighting against that.
Fresh Air
The Gutting Of The Department Of Education
And then those groups essentially morphed into So and then that escalated to the state level where you, you know, sort of led by Florida and Governor DeSantis there. You saw a lot of legislation essentially controlling what could be taught. You couldn't. have certain conversations about race or gender in classrooms. There were new restrictions on what books were allowed to be read.
Fresh Air
The Gutting Of The Department Of Education
There were efforts to take books out of the library. Sort of all these culture wars were percolating all through the Biden years, essentially, and sort of teed up for Trump when he started running for reelection.
Fresh Air
The Gutting Of The Department Of Education
Sure. I do think there is a direct relationship between the pandemic and school choice, as well as what we are now seeing from President Trump. The frustration around public schools, some of which really were closed for a very long time, as long as a year and a half in some cases, where, well, the schools were open, but they were operating remotely. There was huge frustration around that.
Fresh Air
The Gutting Of The Department Of Education
And that all teed up longtime efforts. These go back decades to try to essentially allow public money to pay for private schools and today also for homeschooling through various types of voucher programs.
Fresh Air
The Gutting Of The Department Of Education
And we've seen an explosion of these in conservative, mostly conservative states around the country of really big, expansive voucher programs that in many cases are available to all families, whereas they used to be limited by, say, income or maybe they were targeted to students in certain parts of the state or maybe to students with disabilities. Now they're essentially open to anybody
Fresh Air
The Gutting Of The Department Of Education
where you can get thousands of dollars in state funding to apply to something other than public school. So that's been happening over the last few years, a very robust school choice movement around the country. And now President Trump also campaigned on bringing that to the federal level.
Fresh Air
The Gutting Of The Department Of Education
And there is an effort right now to add a federal school choice program into a big budget bill that is being negotiated now. that can pass through Congress with a simple majority in the Senate as opposed to the normal threshold of 60 votes for new programs like this. The leading idea that proponents are pushing hard is a tax credit.
Fresh Air
The Gutting Of The Department Of Education
And all of that was sort of stirring and quite active as President Trump was running for his second term. And then once he took office, he's taken a very strong step to try to essentially clamp down on colleges and force them, they would say, to take anti-Semitism seriously.
Fresh Air
The Gutting Of The Department Of Education
It's in fact a 100% tax credit for donations to what are called scholarship-granting organizations. And then you would essentially get that money back through the tax code when you pay your taxes.
Fresh Air
The Gutting Of The Department Of Education
Well, there are certainly public school advocates who are very worried about that. They're worried on two levels. They're worried about sort of the opportunity cost of it. Like if we have billions of additional dollars to spend on education, they believe it should be spent on the public schools and not on private schools.
Fresh Air
The Gutting Of The Department Of Education
They also worry about, and certainly on the state level, which is where a lot of the money for public schools comes from, that if you are spending all this money on voucher programs, will there be enough for the public schools? Will you have to cut public school spending at some point? And then lastly, the concern is, does this essentially lure kids away from public schools to private schools?
Fresh Air
The Gutting Of The Department Of Education
Now, of course, advocates on the other side would say that that's their choice. They're making a choice about what's best for their kid. But from the public school point of view, every child who leaves, they take their money with them. They no longer get that per-pupil funding. So this is a big deal for public schools.
Fresh Air
The Gutting Of The Department Of Education
Yeah, well, they're much less likely to be able to take advantage of it because, as you say, there are fewer private schools. So kids just have fewer choices about what to do. And also in rural areas, we should say that often the schools are the biggest employer areas. and really the center of the community. So they play a very important role.
Fresh Air
The Gutting Of The Department Of Education
In fact, for many years, we really saw reluctance of Republicans representing rural areas in many states to support school voucher programs for that reason. However, that has somewhat shifted, and there has been more support from Republicans from those Republicans over time for these programs.
Fresh Air
The Gutting Of The Department Of Education
But yeah, I mean, school choice does not have the same kind of impact in a rural area that it does in a suburb or in a city where there are a lot more options.
Fresh Air
The Gutting Of The Department Of Education
Well, the federal government requires that schools, public schools, offer students with disabilities a free and appropriate education. And as part of that, they have agreed to pay for part of the cost. Now, they've never paid the amount that they said they would.
Fresh Air
The Gutting Of The Department Of Education
But they do pay some of the costs and help school districts fund these services, which can be quite expensive depending on what a particular student's situation is. But the idea is that we want students with disabilities to not just be ignored. For many years before this, schools would just refuse to educate them, and they're no longer allowed to do that.
Fresh Air
The Gutting Of The Department Of Education
They do have to provide education to students regardless of their disability.
Fresh Air
The Gutting Of The Department Of Education
Well, we haven't seen that be threatened, at least not yet. So I don't necessarily think that's specifically on the chopping block. But, you know, I would never rule it out. It could be. I mean, I think you have to ask the question if they're saying essentially that, for instance, affinity groups, say like a group that –
Fresh Air
The Gutting Of The Department Of Education
people together with a certain identity for support and socializing and, you know, maybe frank conversations that they essentially are arguing that these are contrary to federal law because they're exclusionary based on race. So does that same argument get made for an HBCU? I don't think so. HBCUs admit people of all races, even if they are focused on one.
Fresh Air
The Gutting Of The Department Of Education
So they're certainly not violating federal law. But it's kind of in a similar neighborhood, you know, to what we're hearing.
Fresh Air
The Gutting Of The Department Of Education
Well, 100%. And that, I think, is sort of the idea here. They want everybody to be questioning everything they do. One thing that struck me during Linda McMahon's confirmation hearing is she was asked, would a Black History Month celebration be okay? And she said, yes, it would be. And she said, an event on Martin Luther King Day, that would be all right as well.
Fresh Air
The Gutting Of The Department Of Education
But then she was asked, well, what about a Black History course? And she said, well, I don't know. I'd have to see the details. And now there are black history courses at schools all over the country. So I thought that was a somewhat of a red flag. My eyes, you know, perked up when I heard that, if eyes can perk up.
Fresh Air
The Gutting Of The Department Of Education
And when I heard that, when she said that, because I was like, well, a black history class might be contrary to federal law. You know, that's a new idea.
Fresh Air
The Gutting Of The Department Of Education
The thinking of the administration is that, you know, we shouldn't be separating people out by race. So are these departments doing that? Is this contrary to their interpretation of federal law? We had the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights issue a letter, what's called a dear colleague letter, which was.
Fresh Air
The Gutting Of The Department Of Education
Well, we don't have the full scope of what it impacts. But yes, $400 million is a lot of money for a university, for any university, and for Columbia University. This unfolded very quickly at Columbia. About a week and a half ago or so, the
Fresh Air
The Gutting Of The Department Of Education
Their interpretation of the Students for Fair Admissions case against Harvard, you know, a couple of years ago, which had to do with affirmative action in admissions. And they wrote this letter, though, very broadly, suggesting that essentially any consideration of race in any way, in any program, at a university or a K-12 school works. could be contrary to federal law.
Fresh Air
The Gutting Of The Department Of Education
And this letter had people scrambling, like, what does this mean? And then they issued a follow-up, which somewhat narrowed it. But all of this confusion that we're talking about throughout this whole conversation, we're talking about confusion, we're talking about general ideas that then get seemed to applied in –
Fresh Air
The Gutting Of The Department Of Education
you know, somewhat shocking ways such as all of a sudden Columbia University losing $400 million in funding or a grant program that had a lot of bipartisan support just sort of disappearing, you know, or people losing their jobs. Like all of this stuff is extremely destabilizing.
Fresh Air
The Gutting Of The Department Of Education
And I actually think is sort of part of the plan in some ways because they want people and universities and school districts to think twice before they do any of this stuff.
Fresh Air
The Gutting Of The Department Of Education
For sure. I mean, I don't think anybody really disagrees that we want kids to have the best possible start in life and have the most opportunities. I think that that's very true. And there has been in recent years a some more conversation about the actual substance, about how do we achieve that.
Fresh Air
The Gutting Of The Department Of Education
For instance, there's been a deep conversation about how reading is taught and promotion of something called the science of reading, which is something that incorporates phonics much more directly than we've had in recent years. And that's like a conversation about the real heart of education. Like, how do we actually improve outcomes for kids? How do we get them on a firmer footing?
Fresh Air
The Gutting Of The Department Of Education
There also is more – there actually is bipartisan support for things like apprenticeships and, you know, more robust and more effective career and technical education in high schools for kids who are not going to maybe end up going to college.
Fresh Air
The Gutting Of The Department Of Education
Trump administration told Columbia that it was under investigation for how it was treating Jewish students and whether it was safeguarding them against anti-Semitism. And then just four days later, they concluded that they weren't and pulled this $400 million by their calculations in grants and contracts. This is not normally how things are done.
Fresh Air
The Gutting Of The Department Of Education
So there are things out there to talk about the actual education of it all, as opposed to the rest of this, which is very much about politics and culture and the like.
Fresh Air
The Gutting Of The Department Of Education
Normally, there's a long investigation and there's a process by which universities can sort of come into compliance, which is what almost always happens. In this case, they just said, you haven't upheld your duty under federal civil rights law, and therefore, we're pulling this federal funding. So it was quite dramatic.
Fresh Air
The Gutting Of The Department Of Education
And a lot of people read it as a real shot across the bow, not just to Columbia, but to other universities around the country, too.
Fresh Air
The Gutting Of The Department Of Education
You know, absolutely. I mean, everybody is fearful. And I think we should put this into some really broader context here, which is that universities have been on their heels really since the start of this administration.
Fresh Air
The Gutting Of The Department Of Education
There have been a series of actions that have been taken and that have been threatened in terms of funding and sort of general control over what they do from the Trump administration. And so universities are already feeling very frightened, unsure, and And, you know, frankly, scrambling about what they will do if they lose all this federal funding.
Fresh Air
The Gutting Of The Department Of Education
Some of these schools are very dependent on federal funding through NIH research grants and other means. And the Trump administration is going about this, you know, quite aggressively, as we saw with Columbia on Friday. And now this threat to, as you said, 60 other universities to say, yes, you know, you are also on our radar and we could do the same to you.
Fresh Air
The Gutting Of The Department Of Education
I have seen it. Of course, President Trump campaigned on a promise to close the Department of Education. And when he showed up on his first day, there was a draft executive order waiting for him, actually, that would have called on Congress to do such. We should note that the administration does not have the power to simply close the Department of Education.
Fresh Air
The Gutting Of The Department Of Education
Only Congress would have the ability to do that. Congress created the agency and only they can dismantle the agency. But what this executive order, the initial version of this executive order would have said was, ask Congress, come up with a plan to get Congress to eliminate the department. And in the meantime, do what you can to dismantle it, to diminish it.
Fresh Air
The Gutting Of The Department Of Education
And then we saw another version of the executive order floating around that did not have the part about calling on Congress to act, but did say that you should do what you can to to diminish the agency on your own. So it's not entirely clear what the administration's thinking is right now. But we do know two things. Ultimately, they would like to eliminate the department.
Fresh Air
The Gutting Of The Department Of Education
Congress is not likely to do that. And absent that, they would like to do what they can to reduce its footprint, potentially take parts of the agency and send them elsewhere, although that too is legally problematic.
Fresh Air
The Gutting Of The Department Of Education
Sure. So the biggest thing that it does is run the student federal aid program, the loans and the Pell Grants that come from the federal government. That's a huge responsibility. On the K-12 side, they administer a couple of very large grants. Now, 90% of education spending comes from the state and local governments, but 10% comes from the federal government.
Fresh Air
The Gutting Of The Department Of Education
Some of it's from a program called Title I. which aids high poverty schools. Some of it's from a program called IDEA, which helps cover the costs of educating students with disabilities. And then the department also has, as you mentioned, the Office for Civil Rights.
Fresh Air
The Gutting Of The Department Of Education
And the goal of the Office for Civil Rights is to enforce, it's more than the goal, its task, its mandate is to force federal civil rights laws, which say you cannot get federal funding if you discriminate on students or others on campus on the basis of sex, race, national origin, and other factors as well. So that's their job. So those are the major functions of the Department of Education.
Fresh Air
The Gutting Of The Department Of Education
Well, there has been an aspiration for them to do that.
Fresh Air
The Gutting Of The Department Of Education
For instance, there's been talk, and Linda McMahon, the education secretary, during her confirmation hearing kind of floated these ideas of moving, for instance, the Office for Civil Rights to the Justice Department or moving, say, the Title I program to the Department of Health and Human Services or moving the federal student loan program to the Treasury Department.
Fresh Air
The Gutting Of The Department Of Education
However, all of these programs in statute are said to be housed at the Department of Education. So it isn't really clear at all to me or the experts I've talked to that they can just, on their own, try to move it. Now, maybe they will try, in which case, as you said, I think we'll likely see court action.
Fresh Air
The Gutting Of The Department Of Education
But I also think there's another path that's possible, which is rather than try to move these pieces around the government—
Fresh Air
The Gutting Of The Department Of Education
is change how they're used, either try to diminish them through unilateral canceling of grants and contracts, through reducing the staff, which we've already seen, the significant reduction in the staff at the Department of Education, and through changing how they use the powers of the Department of Education itself, including the Office for Civil Rights.
Fresh Air
The Gutting Of The Department Of Education
The first thing to talk about is exactly what you were just sort of pointing to, which is that there is a contradiction between the rhetoric that we hear from the White House, which is about returning education to the states and letting local people make these decisions and
Fresh Air
The Gutting Of The Department Of Education
having empowering parents and all of this, and then at the same time, essentially trying to control education from Washington. So we have a real contradiction there. Having said that, how would you go about doing that? Well, the way you do it is the argument is that when you, say, talk about race in certain ways in schools or when you talk about gender and particularly transgender in
Fresh Air
The Gutting Of The Department Of Education
identity in schools, you are essentially violating civil rights laws. They would say, yes, education should be controlled by school districts, but they don't have the right to violate federal law, which of course they don't. But there is a lot of debate about what federal law actually has to say about these issues.
Fresh Air
The Gutting Of The Department Of Education
Well, it wouldn't necessarily change anything. So the Justice Department could use the power in the exact same way that the Education Department uses the power. It would just be sitting in a different building in Washington. When you talk about dismantling the Department of Education, there's really two things to think about. One is to think about, are we diminishing what the department does?
Fresh Air
The Gutting Of The Department Of Education
Are you cutting the funding? Are you doing less? Are you essentially pulling back on the federal influence over schools? Or are you just getting rid of the department and moving stuff around? And those are two very different things.
Fresh Air
The Gutting Of The Department Of Education
I think that theoretically it could. I mean, it could, if they could find a way to get Congress to go along, or maybe they ignore Congress and just try to do it on their own and try to spread the functions around, they would declare victory on that. I don't know how much that necessarily impacts people on the ground, whether there is a Department of Education or not. However, I do think that
Fresh Air
The Gutting Of The Department Of Education
There's a symbolic importance to having this agency. I think the reason why it was created was to try to say that, hey, education is important and it deserves a seat at the table when we talk about the most urgent federal priorities.
Fresh Air
The Gutting Of The Department Of Education
And that, you know, we're going to have a secretary who has stature and who is in the cabinet room and with the other cabinet secretaries and who has a voice to be a leader on education and all of these elements that come from having a department itself. So theoretically, the Treasury Department could run the student aid program. Theoretically, any agency could give out grants.
Fresh Air
The Gutting Of The Department Of Education
Theoretically, the Department of Justice could enforce civil rights laws in the context of education just like it does in other contexts. Those things could happen. But the question also here around having a department is about what do we say that we value and what ideas and what issues do we want to have a seat at the table?
Fresh Air
The Gutting Of The Department Of Education
Well, it's interesting. She's not somebody who has a strong background in education. She has a little bit of education experience. She's served on a state board for about a year, and she's been a trustee of a college in Connecticut. She's obviously best known as being the CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment with her husband, Vince McMahon.
Fresh Air
The Gutting Of The Department Of Education
But the other thing you need to know about Linda McMahon is she's very close to Donald Trump. And she served as the administrator of the Small Business Administration in his first term. And she worked on his reelection. and she co-chaired his transition, and now she has this job. So, you know, she is not somebody who has to really – she's a billionaire.
Fresh Air
The Gutting Of The Department Of Education
She doesn't have to worry about a paycheck if, theoretically, the Department of Education went away. I think that, again, it's going to be very difficult, if not impossible, to close the Department of Education. So that's really much more of a talking point. I think that one thing we should be looking for is –
Fresh Air
The Gutting Of The Department Of Education
At what point do they start pivoting away from really talking about closing the education department? Because the more they talk about it, if it doesn't happen, does that look like a failure on the part of President Trump? I don't think he would like that much. So I think we're much more likely to see her come in there. She's really... She's kind of a grown-up.
Fresh Air
The Gutting Of The Department Of Education
Before she got there, it felt like the 20-something dozers were running the place. Now she's coming in, and the people who opposed her didn't so much oppose her for who she was, but more because of what the agenda was.
Fresh Air
The Gutting Of The Department Of Education
You know, she basically parroted the Trump lines about education. She spoke about being in favor of school choice, which, as you said, was a Betsy DeVos priority. She talked about wanting to decrease the footprint of the Department of Education. She did acknowledge that only Congress could close it.