BRIEF: Unschooling America

Big thought, small step, deep breath — for March 20, 2025

BIG THOUGHT

The right’s long war on education

So, how’s school going?

Today Donald Trump will very likely sign an executive order directing Secretary of Education Linda McMahon to close the Department of Education and return authority over education to the states, bringing decades of Republican hostility against public education to an unfortunate close. This follows the rounds of firings that have already halved the department’s workforce, leaving it without much ability to function in the first place. Of course, the White House technically can’t just eliminate a department — that would take an act of Congress — but there’s a lot they can do to dismantle it in practice while the court cases play out.

What is it that Republicans have against the department? It’s the smallest of the Cabinet-level departments (with about 4,200 employees before the recent DOGE purges), and one of the most recently created (it began work in 1980, under the Carter administration). Reagan went after the Department of Education on the campaign trail soon after it went into operation and repeatedly promised to end it. Republican platforms called for its abolition up through 1996, but ultimately the party’s war on federal education ended — or at least was put on pause —with the George W. Bush administration’s embrace of the No Child Left Behind set of national standards.

But the conservative war on the Department of Education never did end the threat of so-called “government schools” has been enough to keep the far-right on the attack in the decades since. And lately, there’s been new blood in the water, reviving the cause.