Your school is next

The Musk-Trump administration is trying to dismantle the Department of Education. We talked to scholar Eve L. Ewing about the long battle over schooling as a tool for control — or for liberation

Elon Musk’s coup came for the Department of Education last week.

With an executive order in the works calling for the agency’s elimination (a conservative goal since the department’s founding in 1979), employees were sent home on leave and Musk’s aides were granted access to its networks. Democratic members of Congress responded by attempting to enter the agency’s headquarters, only to be turned away.

But why is the Department of Education — an agency that’s mostly concerned with handling student loans and providing financial assistance and educational support for low-income students and those with disabilities — a target of far-right ire anyway?

It’s about who calls the shots, of course. Conservatives have long claimed they feared federal power over education, seeing national standards and enforcement of anti-discrimination efforts as threats to state sovereignty and local control.

But Donald Trump is just fine with strong federal control and oversight of education — so long as it enforces his vision of what America is and should be.

And that’s what’s behind his executive order aimed at ending “radical indoctrination” in schooling. It centers on rooting out “DEI” (recast as “Discriminatory equity ideology”), imposing penalties from the denial of funding to possible investigation and prosecution for such offenses as suggesting “the United States is fundamentally racist, sexist, or otherwise discriminatory.”

But it also calls for the establishment of a panel — a reanimated “1776 Commission” — to design and enforce a program of “patriotic education” instilling America’s young learners with the notion that “commitment to America’s aspirations is beneficial and justified” and the “celebration of America’s greatness and history is proper” — so long as that doesn’t include any of that equity stuff.

Which in itself sounds a lot like radical indoctrination. Every accusation is a confession!

But Trump’s call for patriotic education isn’t without precedent. It’s part of a long tradition in American schooling, which has all too often had more to do with indoctrination than education. The equity efforts that Trump is doing his best to dismantle are the product of an alternative tradition — a lengthy struggle for basic rights and liberation on the part of educators, students, and families. And a new book by writer, organizer, and scholar of education Eve L. Ewing traces those histories and their implications for the present.

Original Sins: The (Mis)education of Black and Native Children and the Construction of American Racism focuses on how Black and Native students have experienced education in America, and on how schools were designed not to unlock opportunity but to control Black and Native children, enforce inequality, and to build the basic infrastructure of America’s racial and economic hierarchy.

We talked with Ewing about the challenges educators and students face under the second Trump administration; the way modern meritocratic models for education are rooted in the most punitive ideologies of the past; and how students, parents, and communities can build solidarity and draw upon liberatory traditions from feminism to abolition and the Land Back movement to redefine what schools can be and who they can serve, outside structures of power.

Read on for our interview with Eve L. Ewing, and an exclusive excerpt from the book.

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The argument you make is that schools have been involved in a very anti-liberatory project for a lot of American history. You tell the story of how Black and Native kids have been taught in America — and people who have been under this impression the idea that it’s just sometimes people say the quiet part out loud will find out there really was no quiet part. Education policy was, expressly, “Kill the Indian, save the man.” Schools were meant to change people so much that they forgot their culture, forgot their identity, to remake them into docile subjects.

I'm a schools person. I love schools, which is a really complicated thing to say after having written this book. I love being in schools. I love being around kids. I love being around learners of all ages. I love teachers. I love all of it.

As a Black person, the understanding that schools are not entirely for us, that parents and families have to do a certain amount of counter-teaching or complementary teaching — that's something that was very normal for me, that I grew up with. You might come home and say, "My teacher said this," and your parents are going to be like, "That's half the story” or, “That's wrong."

But on the Native history side of things, the first time I read the primary source documents that I'm quoting in this book, from people like Carl Schurz, people who were saying so explicitly that they wanted to use schools as this tool of colonialism and of violent oppression, I think that a lot of times when we learn that certain histories are problematic or complicated, you kind of assume, naively, that you have to read between the lines. And it was so stunning to see how candidly and transparently a lot of these folks were making these claims. And I felt like once I learned that for myself, I could never unsee it.

You’re a professor, teaching educators. Do your students have any awareness of this history?

No, they didn't. And not only that, many of my students would say that this was actually the first Native history that they learned at all in higher education and post-secondary education.

Over the years, I've given talks to teachers where I share that famous Richard Henry Pratt speech with them, and I say, "Raise your hand if you've ever read the speech before. ” No hands. Then I ask, “The things that you hear this person saying, does this resonate with things that you see happening in your building, with things that you hear other teachers say, things you yourself have thought or wrestled with?” And always, they raise their hands. They say, "Yes."

And as a teacher, I saw the connections in the way that so many students, especially students of color, were treated in terms of the assumptions that are made about their home lives, the idea that school needs to basically civilize them or make them suitable for entry into polite society. I saw these connections everywhere, and I came to the conclusion that this is not just my own kind of niche interest. I don't think any of us can really claim to understand the institution of schooling without understanding this history.

It seemed essential to me. And so I started teaching the classes that I teach in education policy and the history of race and began teaching my classes always with these stories at the beginning. And to try to ask my students to wrap their heads around what seems like this contradiction that for Black people, school and the tradition of freedom schooling, schooling as a tool for liberation is also so much part of the originary story of education in this country. And at the exact same time, schools are a tool for cultural decimation and tools for genocide.

Because of the new administration, we're going to have at best less federal support for education policy across the country now. Is there an opening for more of the kind of change that you're talking about now because it's just going to be a free field of confusion at the federal level for a while?

Most people at ground level would probably have a hard time articulating what success at the federal level of education policy meant for their own flourishing or feeling loved or feeling cared for, because there has never been a moment, certainly in my lifetime or in what I understand of the last 100 years or so, when people were feeling awesome on this front.

I want to be clear, there is a lot to be scared of. Having been a rank-and-file public school teacher, I understand what it's like to be scared to lose your job. I understand what it's like to be scared as a school board member that you're going to be doxxed, that you're going to be attacked.

At the same time, whatever your dream is for the young people in your lives — and if you are not a parent or a caregiver, I encourage people to have a sense of ownership and accountability and stewardship over their community, and the learners in their community — whatever your wildest, most liberatory dream is for those folks, what does it look like to try to make that happen?

And my guess is that, again, under the best of circumstances, your dream was probably never going to be like, "I'm going to go apply for federal funding” or even “I'm going to apply for state funding." Your dream might have been something like, "I want to make sure that young people in this community feel loved, that they feel seen, that they have a safe place to go after school, that they are fed." And I think some of our earliest models — thinking back to people like the Panthers, thinking about Mississippi Freedom Schools, thinking about schools during Reconstruction, thinking about enslaved people teaching each other to read when it was illegal to do so — many of our most profound models of what it looks like to do education have always required this kind of fierce grassroots energy in a way that I don't think is a weakness. I think it's a strength.

A lot of the right-wing opposition to public schooling is a matter of people playing national-scale politics on a local level. The Moms for Liberty chapters are playing for a national audience. So how can people actually play down and think about, "Okay, how can we pay for this program?"

It’s about, “How can we do the things that we want to do?”

There are parents that I have spoken to and heard about who feel like their kids are not getting enough Black history in school. So the parents of the Black kids get together every Saturday, and they have a playgroup. And each parent takes a turn each weekend, and they're like, "All right, today we're going to learn about this thing." Which also democratizes who is an expert and also what kind of knowledge and folkways are worth learning about. So my mom is really interested in the history of black fashion and the Ebony Fashion Fair. And there are people who are jazz aficionados, hip-hop aficionados.

So what does it look like for a group of parents to say, "We're going to get together every weekend, and this weekend, I'm going to teach the kids how to make gumbo. This weekend, I'm going to teach the kids you know about the classic era of hip-hop. I'm going to teach the kids about the history of voter suppression.

And then for the kids to say, "This week, I'm going to teach my parents about this thing that's happening in contemporary black culture that they don't know about." And if that goes great, what does it look like to tell other people about it, to write that down, to blog about it, to post about it. Or don't, right? Keep it secret, keep it subversive.

But what the Moms for Liberty do is they create a playbook and they share it. I think that that idea of doing things at the grassroots and creating a playbook and proliferating that playbook is something that those folks do quite well. And so what would it look like for us to do much of the same?

A lot of people want a large-scale plan. They want marching orders. But the fact that that sentiment exists in a way is part of the problem. Because that's not the solution, or the way to make progress, for any individual group, in any locality.

That's true in so many arenas. And in education, I mean, we’ve had a wildly state-by-state-based education system that boggles the minds of our peers in other countries. You know I remember talking to a good friend in South Africa who was thinking about moving to the States several years ago, and she was like, "Well, what about the schools?" And I was like, "Well, you have this sister in Florida. And if you live in Florida, you're going to get this experience. And you know if you live in Massachusetts or Texas or California, you're going to get a totally different experience.”

And she was like, "Wait, are you saying that each state is totally different?" The idea of not having a centralized curriculum is really anathema to people in many other countries. And so already, at the state level, at the county level, at the district level, there's so much autonomy. And for better or worse, that's the way our system has always worked. So there's always going to be a limitation to the way you put it, these broad marching orders. And at the same time, if we do say that we want to get there, where do the ideas come from if not doing the thing at the grassroots? And to be able to say, like, "Wow, this is really effective. Let's do this." Thinking about the Panthers and the Free Breakfast Program is such an obvious and important example, right?

So much of the most powerful work that people do at this level is so easy and scalable, in ways that I think merit our attention and merit our effort.

I think of Head Start, which predates the Department of Education and itself looks back to the free breakfast programs.

Yes. Yes. Du Bois said this, and I think it's true. The way we think about public education, comes from efforts in both the pre-emancipation and post-emancipation South to say, you know this is what schooling can look like. The models are there. And I hope a lot of the wonky history in the book is for people to understand that so much of what we take for granted in the way our schools work comes from what were often very local, very small-scale, and very ideologically driven efforts. Those people are not fundamentally different from us, right? Those times are not fundamentally different from our times. We start somewhere, and then we see what flowers.

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From Original Sins: The (Mis)education of Black and Native Children and the Construction of American Racism

Schools serve as sites of political and ideological reproduction in society. Schools are the places where we project our collective fears, desires, aspirations, and insecurities. Schools are a mirror, reflecting the demands and tensions of the era in which they find themselves. Schools are where the nation-state tries to prove what it is and mani­fest what it wants to be. This basic fact has been the uniting thread throughout the history of schooling in the United States, the link that connects the schools of the eighteenth century with the schools of today.

I’ll give you an example. On September 2, 1958, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the National Defense Education Act, or NDEA—less than a year after a basketball-sized aluminum sphere had changed the world forever. The Soviet Union’s successful launch of Sputnik 1, the first satellite crafted by human hands, sent the United States into a tailspin, spurring despair and panic. Sputnik circled Earth once every ninety-six minutes, emitting beeps that could be perceived through radio signals like small, inescapable taunts. NBC called it “the sound that will forever separate the old from the new.” Amid this new front in the Cold War, the very survival of the nation appeared to be at stake. How could this have happened? How could the global power of the United States, assumed to be unassailable and graced by God, be threatened by Soviet dominance? In the search for an institu­tion first to blame and then, accordingly, to reform, military and re­search enterprises somehow escaped the critical view of the public. Instead, one explanation rose to prominence: the nation’s schools had failed. The furor around the Space Race was deemed an educational crisis.

In a Gallup poll, 71 percent of those surveyed agreed with the state­ment that “if we are to compete with Russia, high school students in this country must be required to work much harder than they do now.” In a 1959 press conference, Eisenhower told journalists that he was “astonished” to speak to scientists who told him that shoring up the nation’s educational institutions was an “absolute necessity.” The NDEA, authored by Senator J. Lister Hill and Representative Carl A. Elliott, declared that the nation was in the midst of an “educational emergency” and that the purpose of the legislation was to “insure trained manpower of sufficient quality and quantity to meet the na­tional defense needs of the United States.” The NDEA authorized $70 million annually to strengthen high school instruction in science, math, and “modern foreign language” (Latin nerds need not apply); established “national defense fellowships” to expand graduate educa­tion; provided for new testing regimes “to identify students with out­standing aptitudes and ability”; funded new language institutes at colleges and universities where students would also learn about cul­tural and geographic history; and provided new grants for experiment­ing with the use of TV, radio, and film for educational purposes. The NDEA authorized almost $300 million in low-interest federal student loans over the course of four years, making it the first such investment—equivalent to about $3.1 billion today. The loans came with a hitch, though: every student loan beneficiary was required to take an oath of “true faith and allegiance to the United States of America” and sign an affidavit swearing that they did not “believe in, and [are] not a member of and [do] not support any organization that believes in or teaches, the overthrow of the United States Government.” Each of these pro­visions was to support a central goal: “the security of the Nation [which] requires the fullest development of the mental resources and technical skills of its young men and women.”

So if we were to ask ourselves about the purpose of schools in 1958, one clear answer would be: the purpose of schools is to win the Cold War and ensure the defeat of Communism at home, abroad, and in space. In 1978 or 1998, the answer would surely have been different, and so too would it vary across geography and political ideology. “What we have wanted from schooling has changed dramatically over time,” writes historian Patricia Albjerg Graham, who refers to these ever changing demands as “shifting assignments given to schools,” from teaching citizenship to solving social problems to providing preparation for employment.

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Preparation for leadership, citizenship, and assimilation into the cohe­sive body politic that defines the American republic has not histori­cally been the purpose of schools for Black people—because that body politic has been understood to be White, as the ideal of American citizenship has been understood to be White. For Black people in the United States, schools have had a different purpose: civilization. With civilization comes its underlying ethos, saviorism, and its underlying purpose, social control.

Education for Black people, like education for all people, has hap­pened in infinite ways and spaces, some of which are most profound when they have happened outside of formal settings. Enslaved people teaching one another to read, children learning songs and jump-rope games from their peers, families passing cherished recipes from gen­eration to generation: these are all forms of education, the human en­terprise of teaching and learning through social interaction. But if we are to understand the history of schooling for Black people as an insti­tutional practice, our story takes root in the first mass effort to create formal learning structures for Black people in the United States: Re­construction.

The story of schools for Black people in Reconstruction is a com­plicated one, because it involves Black people seeking self-determination through schools and White people seeking a “civilizing” instrument of social control through those same schools. In the American South in the years following Emancipation, formerly enslaved Black people were strong advocates not only for their own education, but for univer­sal public schools. As W. E. B. Du Bois wrote in his classic work Black Reconstruction in America, “Public education for all at public expense, was, in the South, a Negro idea,” as establishing mass public education—for anyone—in the South prior to Reconstruction had not been a so­cial priority. In the 1850s, nearly one in five White men in the South was unable to read. As newly freed Black people fought fervently for schools, their work inspired fear and contempt, as education was per­ceived as a barrier to continuing an extractive labor relationship. Du Bois explained that every Black person who was educated represented “labor lost,” and too much teaching “encouraged directly or indirectly, insolence to employers. ‘Schooling,’ felt the South, ‘ruins a nigger.’” Even many Northerners who identified as progressive allies to freed­people were often unwilling to extend their philanthropic spirit be­yond basics like food and clothing, as they found the premise of educating Black people to be a discomfiting one. But eventually, the efforts to offer schooling to formerly enslaved Black people would become one of the largest mass expansions of the public schooling proj­ect in American history.

From the early part of the Civil War through 1870, more than fifty religious and secular organizations were engaged in schooling the Black people of the South—first, the Black people referred to as “contraband,” who through escape or military participation found themselves in the care of the Union Army; later, the masses freed by the Emancipation Proclamation. By July 1870, over 3,500 teachers were involved in this effort.

These teachers were not uniform in their motivations nor in their principles. Some came from a missionary tradition, from religious or­ganizations that saw educating freedmen as a necessary step on the way to saving their souls. Others, inspired by the tradition of aboli­tionist William Lloyd Garrison, believed that the new schooling ef­forts should be nonsectarian and non-evangelical. But the majority of these teachers, who were either White reformers from the North or local White women recruited in the South, were united by the same basic premise: the task of civilization. In their view, Black people’s ways were wild, untamed, and backwards, and the job of the school­marm was to bring them closer to the White man’s way of life.

Compared to some of their contemporaries, these teachers’ views were “progressive” in that they did not profess Black people to be in­nately backwards or beyond redemption—only savage and barbarous as a result of their savage and barbarous circumstances, but neverthe­less eligible to be “saved” through benevolent efforts. “The instruction most needed by the blacks was not in the knowledge of school books, but in that which should lead them to appreciate the advantages of civilized life,” wrote the Boston Educational Commission for Freed­men in its first annual report. John W. Alvord, who served as the general superintendent of education for the Freedmen’s Bureau, wrote that education was necessary to uplift the moral character of the for­merly enslaved. “With it they will at once start upward in all character. Without it they will as quickly sink into the depravities of ignorance and vice; free to be what they please, and in the presence only of bad example, they will be carried away with every species of evil.”

Despite their avowed dedication to the cause, Unitarian ministers William Gannett and Edward Everett Hale wrote with caution that observers should not too readily believe the sunny reports of effective Negro education coming from the South in the 1860s, which they called “very exaggerated.” They conceded that freed Black people could certainly develop those mental abilities that were “in close con­nection with the outward senses,” such as memorization. However, Gannett and Hale wrote, they were “deficient in the more ideal opera­tions, which require reflection and reasoning.” An 1864 questionnaire of representatives overseeing Negro education efforts reflected similar ideas. “They have great aptness for language, music and the imitative arts,” said some superintendents. “Perhaps they will prove deficient in logic and the mathematics,” said others. John William De Forest, a Union captain born in Connecticut who was an assistant commissioner of the Freedmen’s Bureau in South Carolina, wrote that the desire for education was “the most hopeful sign” for the future of Black people in the United States. But on the question of Black intelligence, De Forest wrote that it was a point­less one. The Black children he observed in school, he believed, “could not compare with the Caucasian youngster of ten or twelve,” a fact De Forest attributed to a lack of a “refined home influence,” “advanced ideas from the daily converse of [the] family,” and “ancestral intelli­gence, trained through generations of study.” De Forest put it clearly: “I am convinced that the Negro as he is, no matter how educated, is not the mental equal of the European.” Whether Black people were humans at all, according to De Forest, was “quite another question and of so little practical importance. . . . Human or not, there he is in our midst, millions strong; and if he is not educated mentally and morally, he will make us trouble.

In addition to the archetypal “Yankee schoolmarm,” some White leaders born in the South participated in Reconstruction education efforts, if they could overcome the Northern-led missionary leaders who often saw them as either ignorant and uneducated themselves or too loyal to the Confederacy to safely be allowed access to Black stu­dents. But given the desperate need for teachers, even avowedly pro­gressive supervisors were willing to look the other way. Laura Matilda Towne, an abolitionist from Philadelphia, described observing a school led by two teachers who were “in the war undoubted rebels. Indeed, we hear that they whip the children in their school and make them call them ‘Massa’ and ‘Missus,’ as in the old time.” Nevertheless, Towne wrote, she was still responsible for these teachers, so rather than fire them, “I did my duty by them as agreeably as I could.” Other school founders had previously owned slaves. One White teacher in Vir­ginia, applying for state funds to open a freedmen’s school, wrote that education was a way to determine whether Black people were indeed “people or entirely of animal creation, as they have always been consid­ered and treated.”

Anthony Toomer Porter was another such local leader. Porter was a son of the South who saw the work of schooling freedmen as an extension of his prior calling as a minister, and he characterized the institution of slavery as “the greatest missionary work ever done by man. Not five hundred thousand naked African savages were brought over to America before the trade was stopped, and had they remained in Africa, if they had not been eaten by the king of Dahomey, their descendants would be naked African savages still. . . . I love the Afri­can race, and think they are the most wonderful people (taking all their history) of the present day, and yet, I believe they are an inferior type of men, and the mass of them will be hewers of wood and drawers of water till the end of time—at the least, to the end of many genera­tions. Do for them as we will, a black man will never be a white one.”

Porter believed that if Southerners did not make an effort to lead Reconstruction schooling efforts, formerly enslaved people would come to look upon Northerners as their “deliverers.” He therefore trav­eled across the country to raise funds for a freedmen’s school in South Carolina. Meanwhile, in Georgia, avowed Confederate sympathizer James R. Smith believed that many in the North were determined to “degrade,” “destroy,” and “oppress” the South—and also that he was called by God “to this work… of educating the African.” William Hauser, who also ran a freedmen’s school in Georgia, wrote that the hundreds of bright eyed, smart little darkies” he observed around him “must become educated and useful citizens of the country, or they will relapse into barbarism, and become a curse to themselves and the country.”

The textbooks created for newly freed Black people were accordingly designed to counter any threat of such a relapse into barbarism. Books like The Freedman’s Third Reader, published by the Boston-based American Tract Society, laid bare the kinds of curricular priorities that reformers viewed as essential for Black learners. Alongside basic pho­nics and stories from the Bible and American history, the text con­tained parables and short stories designed to provide Black people with moral instruction about their role in the world.

A lesson titled “Love to Enemies” reminds readers of God’s desire that we love and forgive those who have trespassed against us, using the biblical story of Stephen, who prayed for the wicked as they stoned him to death. A passage about Toussaint L’Ouverture, leader of the Haitian Revolu­tion, describes his years of enslavement as “days of quiet domestic joy.” (In reality, conditions of Haitian enslavement were deplorable, marked by ceaseless work, hunger, and beatings; estimates suggest that as many as one-third of Africans who arrived in the Caribbean and were forced into enslavement died within a year.) L’Ouverture, we learn, “was sedate in manner, and exceedingly patient, being possessed of an even­ness of temper which scarcely any thing seemed capable of disturb­ing.” In his fight for freedom, according to the Reader, L’Ouverture “had no feelings of revenge to gratify, but was the same amiable and charitable person as ever.” (His famous proclamation of 1793, in which L’Ouverture declared, “I have undertaken vengeance,” doesn’t get a mention.)

“Virtue, order, industry, and necessary self-restraint” were traits equally emphasized in The Freedman’s Book, edited by abolitionist writer Lydia Maria Child. The Freedmen’s Book included biographical sketches of people like John Brown and Benjamin Banneker written by Child herself. Incredibly, Child’s account of John Brown conveniently omits any mention of rebellion, instead recounting a story of how he paused on his way to the gallows to kiss a small Black child because it’s what Jesus would have done. (The details of why he was going to the gallows are not included.) At the end of the volume, Child included an essay titled “Advice from an Old Friend.” Addressing Black readers directly, Child described her­self as someone with “great sympathy for you, my brethren and sisters, and I have tried to do what I could to help you to freedom.” Accord­ingly, Child offers what she believes to be the keys to Black thriving post-Emancipation:

You can do a vast amount of good to people in various parts of the world, and through successive generations, by simply being sober, industrious, and honest. There are still many slaves in Brazil and in the Spanish possessions. If you are vi­cious, lazy, and careless, their masters will excuse themselves for continuing to hold them in bondage, by saying: “Look at the freedmen of the United States! What idle vagabonds they are! How dirty their cabins are! How slovenly their dress! That proves that negroes cannot take care of themselves, that they are not fit to be free.” . . . Your manners will have a great effect in producing an impression to your advantage or disadvantage. Be always respectful and polite toward your asso­ciates, and toward those who have been in the habit of considering you an inferior race. It is one of the best ways to prove that you are not inferior.

“If your former masters and mistresses are in trouble, show them every kindness in your power, whether they have treated you kindly or not,” she urged. “Remember the words of the blessed Jesus: ‘Do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you and persecute you.’” Child encouraged readers to go work for these former masters if they were kindly enough, but also emphasized that freedpeople should react with forgiveness and charity regardless of any mistreatment they might receive, and to never cheat their employers or break promises to them. If the employers tried to sexually assault Black women, “teach them that freed women not only have the legal power to protect themselves from such degradation, but also that they have pride of character. If in fits of passion, they abuse your children as they formerly did, never revenge it by any injury to them or their prop­erty.”

In this moral curriculum, there was no indignity so harm­ful, no violence so obscene that a Black person should not receive it with grace.

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Eve L. Ewing’s latest book is Original Sins: The (Mis)education of Black and Native Children and the Construction of American Racism

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Photo by Pete Kiehart for The Washington Post via Getty Images; Eve L. Ewing portrait by Nolis Anderson