This essay is part of a series by Lawyers Defending American Democracy where we demonstrate the link between the administration’s sweeping executive actions and their roots in the authoritarian blueprint, Project 2025, and show how these actions harm individuals and families throughout the country.
Our public education system is under attack. On March 20, after only seven weeks in office and without input or approval from Congress, President Trump issued an executive order instructing the Secretary of Education to “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education and give the states sole responsibility for educating our nation’s children.”
The U.S. Congress created the Department of Education in 1979, and its leader, the Secretary of Education, is a member of the President's cabinet. By directing changes that compromise the department’s ability to function, Trump's March 20 order attempts to circumvent the requirement that only Congress may approve the department’s closure. This move takes a page from the Project 2025 playbook, which calls for the department’s elimination.
At the same time, and without any apparent recognition of the irony, the administration has directed school districts to radically limit what our children learn, threatening to withhold funds from public schools if they fail to verify that they have eliminated all programs that promote diversity, equity, and inclusion. This transforms Project 2025’s goal of obliterating any mention of diversity, equity, or inclusion from federal policy.
On April 3, a department memo sent to public education officials across the country indicated that failure to comply would result in loss of the funds provided to schools under Title 1 of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, a move that would hit hardest those schools with high percentages of students of color or from low-income families. The administration has also rolled back school discipline guidelines announced by President Obama, which included recommendations to promote nondiscriminatory practices and training— another harmful move given that over two-thirds of students suspended, expelled and arrested in public schools are Black and brown.
Why This Matters
Gutting the Department of Education’s workforce harms families: When resources and support for public education at the local level are wildly uneven and often discriminatory, federal support can help level the playing field. The Education Department can help ensure that students can access classes and programs that might not otherwise be available. Eliminating the department would ensure that, in a land of equality, some students have the resources they need to succeed while others do not.
In a devastating step towards dismantling the agency, the administration fired approximately a third of its workforce. As Jessica Tang, president of the Massachusetts American Federation of Teachers, stated, “Withdrawing funding in schools across the country is . . . a cruel attempt to cause chaos and destruction . . .. These cuts will disproportionately harm those most in need of services—students with disabilities and low-income students," Tang said. "The federal education agenda is nothing short of a dismantling of our ability to provide a fair and equal public education.”
Planned changes limit parents’ access and civil rights enforcement: The administration also plans to relocate the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights (OCR) to the Department of Justice (DOJ) and has closed OCR offices nationwide. This means that parents seeking federal review of school district decisions regarding their children’s individual education and accommodation plans would need DOJ support for their claims, an unlikely result, as DOJ has already made clear that its role is to zealously defend the President's agenda.
Absent that support, families would be left to navigate and litigate their own claims, an option likely unaffordable to most.
Funding cuts make it harder for students to get an equal education: Federally funded student loans also help remove barriers to higher education at a time when tuition is rising. Almost 60 percent of the Education Department's $268 billion budget in 2023 was allocated to federal loans, the federal work-study program, and Pell grants, which help roughly one-third of U.S. undergraduates afford college by providing federal loans.
Dismantling the Department makes it easier for unlawful discrimination to prevent students from fully participating in school. The Department supports programs that supplement state and local funding for low-achieving children, particularly in low-income neighborhoods, as well as funding for students protected under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, which helps cover special education costs. Cutting these programs jeopardizes the rights of 7 million special education students to a fair and appropriate education. Cutting staff also makes it harder for the Department to carry out its mandates to oversee civil rights enforcement in schools and under laws prohibiting discrimination of sex or race.
Administration policies aim to whitewash history: The administration’s actions lead us down a path that threatens the First Amendment free-speech rights of teachers and students, and chills the candid exchange of ideas, which is essential to learning. The administration appears to be focusing on a concern that white students would feel threatened or uncomfortable if questions of race were even discussed - although the administration has struggled to define what conduct or program would violate its interpretation of civil rights laws. For example, Education Secretary Linda McMahon has said that schools should be allowed to celebrate Martin Luther King Jr., but she has been less clear when asked whether classes could talk about Ruby Bridges, who, as a six-year-old girl, stood up to segregationists, or the 1921 massacre of Black citizens in Tulsa, Oklahoma. What about Rosa Parks, Harriet Tubman, or Juneteenth?
Black history is American history. All students should learn about the compromises that were made when the Constitution was drafted to unify the nation—including the decision to preserve the institution of slavery, which profoundly altered U.S. history. The 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, often referred to as Civil War or civil rights amendments, directed states to emancipate slaves, to address "the badges and incidents" of slavery, to guarantee equal protection under the law, and to prohibit laws denying or abridging a citizen’s right to vote based on color. Prior to these amendments, only propertied white male citizens had the right to vote. The primary goal of these amendments was to redress our history of racial discrimination against Black people. Understanding this history is a critical part of a basic education.
Takeaways:
It is disingenuous to say that the goal of dismantling the Department of Education is to return local control of education to states and to promote parental autonomy. Ending federal oversight of education would lead us down a dangerous path, opening the door to a return to the Jim Crow era, when laws, customs, and schools enforced racial inequality. In defending Florida educational policies restricting how the history and impact of racism can be taught, Governor Ron DeSantis gaslit the public by stating that some Blacks actually benefited from slavery as they were able to develop “job skills.” Similar efforts would erase iconic names and important events from the historical record.
The administration is effectively taking a wrecking ball to public education and, in doing so, threatens the future of our most vulnerable resource—our children. This campaign has been described as the “gutting of the system from the inside,” with the ideological goal of not just weakening public education but eliminating it altogether and replacing it with a patchwork of private voucher schools and deregulated magnet and charter chains. This is the opposite of standing up for equal opportunity and would set the nation back at a time when the overwhelming majority of Americans want to see it move forward.
The Hon. Jay Blitzman is a retired Massachusetts Juvenile Court Judge and former Executive Director of Massachusetts Advocates for Children. Jay is a law school lecturer who consults on youth and criminal issues. Blitzman is a volunteer with Lawyers Defending American Democracy.
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.