One Teacher’s Thoughts On Losing the Department of Education

On Easter Day 2018, I was crossing the street at around 9:45 AM when I was struck by a car. Though I broke my leg and embarked on a long recovery that was complicated by two other unrelated surgical events (2018 was a fun year for me), I genuinely consider myself lucky. If I had injured my back, head, or even hand, it could have been so much worse and I’m thankful for that. Having three back-to-back post-surgical recoveries created the most intense depression I’ve ever experienced and I had to work to marshal myself through it. Aside from wanting to regain my mobility, I needed a goal to work toward once I was well again. That goal became teaching, and I was able to use this terrible era to make it happen. The settlement I got from the accident covered lawyer fees and my medical bills, but there was enough left over to pay for my living expenses for a while. I left my day job and entered a teaching residency program that had me working as a teacher’s assistant during the day and taking graduate classes at night. It was a long and challenging road, but I made it through and am blessed to do work I love. It’s one of the most difficult jobs there is, but I feel called to do it. I say this not to bore you with a personal essay but to demonstrate how much education means to me. I’m a teacher and I am terrified by what the current administration is doing to the Department of Education.

Part of the terror comes from not knowing what DOGE will do. It’s well understood that the administration plans to “dismantle” the Department of Education, but how they’ll do that and what that means in execution is much speculated. The Department of Education disperses Title 1 funds to schools with higher low-income enrollments, governs the accreditation of educational institutions, gathers data about American schools, and strives to protect the civil rights of students across the country, including their right to be free of bigoted treatment. The current idea (which could very well change) is that if the Department of Education is abolished, Title 1 money would be given to each state in block grants with the states left to decide how to use the money. The impacts of this would vary from state to state, but given that the public education system is already underfunded and regularly assailed in partisan crusades, it seems likely this money would not necessarily be used for the betterment of students. At the very least, the transition from federal funding streams to a no-strings block grant would cause enough chaos and confusion to delay and impede student access to resources. Most of the country already doesn’t provide free school meals to students, so this would only further subtract from student support.

If imperiling the money used to educate children wasn’t enough, DOGE and new Secretary of Education Linda McMahon released a letter threatening to pull federal funding unless school systems get rid of their DEI programs. On a similar note, the Department of Education has halted more than 10,000 civil rights investigations in favor of pursuing bathroom bans and trans athlete bans. For any curious about civil rights investigations, they’re launched by the Department of Education to look into student complaints about disability access, sexual harassment, and racial bigotry. Even though trans people constitute 1-2% of the American population, are statistically not the aggressors and are more than four times more likely to be subject to violent crime than cisgendered people, the current administration sees fit to strike against them instead of looking into the real concerns of real students.

Current estimates suggest that 7-9% of American youth identify within the LGBTQ+ spectrum, which comes to about 6,670,096 kids (using data from 2023). There are also around 33,754,000 children of color (using data from 2021). In the 2022-2023 school year, there was an estimated 7.5 million students with disabilities in America. As a thought experiment, let’s set aside all the anti-DEI discourse and whatever feelings we may each have as individuals and approach a simple question: do those millions of kids (children!) deserve education in a safe and supportive environment? As a teacher, I can think of no moral or logical reason to answer “no” to that question. There will always be queer kids, there will always be kids of color, and there will always be kids with disabilities; it’s a question of whether they will be more or less safe and I will never understand how subtracting from their resources and their safety will ever make us better as a country. It seems easy for some to forget that we’re talking about children here, children that not only rely on us to equip them for this world but also to make this world livable for them. What poisoned world do we hope to give when we use the mechanisms of the state to make their lives worse?

The tragic irony of this situation is that the states that voted for this administration will likely be the ones to suffer most with the Department of Education abolished. I understand the urge to say, “We told you so,” and draw some vindication from that, but I can’t. The kids in those states who depend on federal support are going to suffer and there’s no gain in that. No child anywhere in this country should be without rigorous education, no matter what the local politics are. The Department of Education is being weaponized against the kids it’s meant to serve, which makes me very scared about where this is all going. Our ability to educate the next generations of Americans is under serious fire, and I’m not so sure the importance of education alone will stop the current administration in its quest.