Robertson is a clinical associate professor at the Rory Meyers School of Nursing at New York University and a public voices fellow with The OpEd Project.
Imagine a school where a child grappling with anxiety or depression walks the halls without access to vital mental health support — no counselors, no programs, just in silence. This unsettling scenario could become a reality if Republican proposals to abolish the Department of Education gain traction, jeopardizing not only educational standards but the emotional well-being of millions of students.
As Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), chair of the Appropriations Committee, warns, “Trump’s proposal to abolish the Department of Education may sound outrageous, yet it reflects a serious movement among many Republicans.” Whether or not Donald Trump takes office in 2025, it seems clear that Republicans in Washington will continue to attempt to do away with the Department of Education. If successful, this drastic action could disrupt the daily lives of millions of families, undermining essential support systems for our children.
Many families rely on the federal government to ensure their children receive a quality education, particularly in mental health resources. The Department of Education plays a vital role in promoting both academic excellence and the social-emotional well-being of students. It provides essential funding and guidance for programs that address the mental health needs of children and adolescents. Abolishing the department risks dismantling a crucial safety net that supports our youth during formative years.
Mental health issues among students are alarmingly prevalent. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, nearly one in five children ages 13 to 18 experiences a severe mental disorder at some point in their lives. Schools are often the first line of defense in identifying and addressing these issues, as they provide a structured environment where children spend a significant portion of their day. Without the support from the Department of Education, schools would struggle to navigate these challenges.
Relying solely on state responsibilities for mental health resources is a precarious proposition. States vary dramatically in their funding, priorities and ability to address mental health issues. While Connecticut ranks among the best states for access to mental health services for children, Texas is often cited as one of the worst, highlighting significant disparities in care across the country. This inconsistency means that a child’s access to mental health support would depend largely on their zip code, perpetuating inequality and leaving many students without the help they desperately need.
The lack of bipartisan support for federal initiatives underscores a significant divide in addressing mental health in education. While there is widespread agreement on the importance of mental health services, partisan politics often frame education funding as a contentious issue rather than a shared priority. This division can lead to inconsistent support for vital programs, with some lawmakers advocating for budget cuts instead of necessary investments. As a result, schools — especially those in underserved areas — face financial barriers that hinder their ability to hire counselors and implement effective mental health strategies.
Moreover, the Department of Education facilitates critical initiatives like the School-Based Mental Health Services Grant Program, which aims to improve access to mental health services in schools. These grants help schools hire counselors, provide training for staff and develop comprehensive mental health programs. Without federal support, like the recent announcement of $70 million in awards for school-based mental health services, many schools would struggle to implement effective mental health strategies.
The implications of this situation could be devastating. Imagine a child battling severe anxiety or depression, completely devoid of the support they desperately need during school hours. In such a scenario, teachers — often untrained in mental health crises — may feel overwhelmed and ill-equipped to respond effectively, leading to increased disciplinary issues as frustrated educators resort to punitive measures instead of compassionate interventions. This, in turn, can result in plummeting academic performance and a pervasive sense of alienation, creating a toxic school environment where bullying and social isolation thrive. As mental health deteriorates, some students may face feelings of hopelessness, and tragically, the lack of support could push vulnerable individuals toward self-harm or suicidal ideation. The long-term consequences perpetuate the already existing public health crisis, as untreated mental health issues wreak havoc on the lives of these children, impacting their relationships, families, career prospects and overall quality of life.
Furthermore, the Department of Education’s emphasis on mental health has raised awareness about the importance of social-emotional learning. Programs that educate school personnel on creating safe learning environments and teaching resilience, empathy and stress management skills are vital for developing well-rounded individuals. If these programs were to fade away, we would neglect the mental health of our students and compromise their long-term success as adults.
The proposal to abolish the Department of Education poses a grave threat to mental health resources in our schools. Rather than leaving the responsibility solely to states, we must recognize the essential role the federal government plays in ensuring equitable access to mental health support for all students. As we grapple with the realities of mental health in our youth, we cannot afford to dismantle the structures that support their well-being. The stakes are too high, and our children’s futures depend on the availability of these crucial resources.
Children watch a July Fourth Parade along the Walkway of Heroes and Independence Avenue on July 04, 2026 in Tappan, New York.
The Great American Grumpfest
Our nation’s 250th birthday party didn’t feel especially patriotic and wasn’t as much fun as the 200th anniversary was.
President Trump, who did his best to co-opt our holiday for his personal aggrandizement, was a major reason. The party he threw in Washington, D.C., was crankier than uplifting, and less about celebrating our shared past and a promising future than about reminding us how far we have strayed from our founders’ plan to create a republic that future Americans would keep in good working order.
Credit Trump this much. He has a singular gift for picking at scabs that other politicians would rather ignore and pushing us into reckonings we don’t need.
The thing is, Americans have seen all this before. Sometimes the makeover we were encouraged to undertake was more conservative, sometimes more liberal. Whatever direction we were pushing, however, the reckoning we had in mind this time had to be more forthright and the conclusion more definitive than it was the last time.
Our current discontents, the ones behind the reckoning President Trump has been trying to inspire, are not trivial. Included among them are immigration, birthright citizenship, exploding healthcare costs, election rigging, a gag-inducing national debt, how we educate our children, too many genders, racial differences we can’t move past, a lopsided economy that favors more well-off Americans, and historic levels of political corruption and graft. Add to these the several foreign adventures he has pushed us into or is anxious to undertake, and you have the makings of a national headache the likes of which we haven’t had in half a century.
All the elbow-throwing and overheated rhetoric we’re using today have begun to look almost normal in all the ways that bickering neighbors and feuding family members appear normal. But they have also made us look mean-spirited and have portrayed our differences as irreconcilable. To ourselves, of course, but also to many people outside the United States who might be forgiven for turning their heads and not looking at the national car wreck we Americans show no interest in avoiding.
The good news, as I suggested above, is that Americans have had a great deal of practice dealing with challenges and national car wrecks like these.
This essay begins to lay out the reasons why.
By way of illustration, we have our seemingly insatiable demand for more bad news about race in America.
Sixty years after being released from the legal constrictions that bedeviled both white and black Americans, many white people have come to believe the color that used to make them unassailable is now a sign of a moral inferiority born of a racial animus they can never wash off. Many black people, on the other hand, are insisting that America is as hopelessly stacked against them as the formerly unassailable white people’s ancestors used to tell their black ones.
The result is that many people today are buying into racist nightmares and mumbo jumbo that their black and white ancestors worked hard and effectively to put in each other’s heads.
This might be dismissed as crazy behavior if it weren’t so important to rituals Americans have long used to express their deepest fears about each other while figuring out what move they can make that won’t end with their world crashing down on everybody’s head.
Unfortunately, the kind of cultural sleight of hand we have used to ramp up our racial differences has been appropriated by people who have many other cultural fears and unresolved differences with each other. Their clumsy but culturally prescribed missteps are making all these other issues look as irremediable as our racial problems.
A good place to start an answer to how we back away from ledges is Alexis de Tocqueville’s writing on early-19th-century American democracy. He had an optimistic take on Americans’ unscripted displays of public bravado, recrimination, and payback.
For him, these were occasions when people tried to mitigate the effects of the unfair hand they were dealing someone else or had themselves been dealt by behaving in ways quite at odds with how they would otherwise be expected to act. These inversions of what Tocqueville called “the natural order of conscience” presented themselves as a loud but culturally muted challenge to the hypocrisies that people had built into the world they’d made together.
One of his favorite illustrations of early-American hypocrisy involved slave masters sleeping with their less-than-worthy slaves. To the best of my knowledge, he didn’t pick up on all the ways that slaves messed with their owners. Their well-chronicled and quiet resistance showed that even severely ill-treated people can exercise more control over their lives than outsiders appreciate.
Be that as it may, such inversions of a people’s “natural order of conscience” make a good public show of them wrestling with demons they can’t or may not want to shake off, but in any case, are nowhere close to figuring out how to cast out.
Implicit in these disruptions was the discomforting idea that people might flip the entire script and turn the world on its head in more permanent ways. That kind of flipping worked out better for us in our revolution against England than in our Civil War. These events taught us the value of stepping back from historically unprecedented ledges.
Americans of late have been giving loud expression to a long list of things they don’t like about each other and the last makeover they started but didn’t finish a half-century ago. The outcome of our fights today will be as revealing as they are embarrassing to everyone who imagined they could recast our country in a way that privileged their favorite kind of Americans.
Their disappointment with the accommodations they strike will be palpable, but the middling results they achieve with all their pushing and shoving won’t be anything they can’t live with.
Anthropologists who have written about such moments in other cultures less “advanced” than our own show that people find ways to work around their seemingly irreconcilable differences without ever fully resolving them. Indeed, the patches and repairs people make have the unheralded effect of reinforcing rather than undermining the legitimacy of the practices and values they thought were fundamentally flawed.
For example…
White guilt and black pessimism do more good than putting cash into the pockets of professional shamers and handwringers. They give the rest of us who don’t feel guilty or powerless more time to make the world less racially unequal. Good news.
Regarding illegal immigration, the entrance requirements for future immigrants will remain stringent. Americans will applaud the continued detention and deportation of the few illegal immigrants who commit serious crimes. Good news.
All the people who came to the United States without being legally vetted and were locked up for a time will be released in numbers small enough to avoid serious media attention. Along with the several million other good people who snuck in but avoided capture, the former detainees will go to school, find gainful employment, pay their taxes, and stay out of trouble. Many will eventually become citizens. Good news.
Investigations into election tampering and Donald Trump’s 2020 presidential loss will come to an unceremonious conclusion the day after his second term ends. Many Americans will grumble about this, but there will also be some quiet partying, too. Good and bad news.
Congressional hearings into all the grifting accomplished by people tied to the Trump administration will end without anyone having to pay a dime back to the American taxpayers. Bad news, we’ll learn to live with.
New laws and regulations will be created in the hope that the kind of corruption practiced by President Trump will not be repeated for another 250 years. Good news, I hope we’ll live long enough to enjoy.
Show trials for people who allegedly vandalized the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, if they happen, will get big television viewer ratings. Good news.
Trials for pardoned Capitol insurrectionists who committed serious crimes after their release should get more attention, but won’t. Bad news.
We will continue to hear nothing from most of the people who were pardoned for crimes they committed in the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. They will keep their mouths shut and their heads down for the rest of their life. Good news.
The gold-gilded ornaments that Donald Trump had plastered all over the White House will be shipped to Mar-a-Lago, where the former president will sell them on eBay. Fun news.
American taxpayers end up paying for most of the new East Wing, the removal of the miniature gladiatorial arena that was built behind the White House, and the restoration of the White House rose garden. Bad news.
The Triumphal Arch was never built. Good news.
Trad wives and gay couples raise perfectly lovely children. Good but unsurprising news.
Trans men and women learn that most Americans can’t figure out who they used to be. No one gives a second thought to their use of “family bathrooms” or “unisex bathrooms” in public settings, businesses, and schools. Communities will sponsor athletic teams that have trans boys and girls just to show they can. Good news.
Budget deficits will be kicked down the road for someone else’s children to pay down. Bad news.
Federal agencies that had their budgets and employee ranks slashed during President Trump’s second term are getting some of the money and lost positions back. Good news.
Elite universities will buy their way out of DEI purgatory by competing for conservative scholars whose inflated salaries dwarf those of their liberal colleagues, who will think about suing their institutions for reverse discrimination but won’t be able to figure out who would pay for it or care. More fun news.
Okay. I’ve probably missed some ways that Americans will step back from the ledges they have been making noises about leaping off. But to the extent that my predictions pan out, the best and most important moral of the stories about us stepping away is this: everything we lost and took back, or had returned to us, will have happened without our government collapsing, civic traditions crumbling, or our people beating each other up.
The reason why is that the differences Americans have with each other really weren’t as irreconcilable as we made them out to be. The empty-sounding bromide that Americans have more that unites us than divides us turns out to be true, not just metaphorically but in fact.
Now that is really something to celebrate.
Daniel J. Monti (danieljmonti.com) is Professor of Sociology at Saint Louis University and the author of American Democracy and Disconsent: Liberalism and Illiberalism in Ferguson, Charlottesville, Black Lives Matter, and the Capitol Insurrection.