President Signs Order to Scrap Education Dept

Today’s lead story by Michael C. Bender, Erica L. Green and Alan Blinder documents President Donald Trump’s remarkable executive order to shut down the Department of Education yesterday.

Next up: a new department for spreading plague? Allowing Darth Vader to run NASA? What world are we living in where this is a thing a president can do and expect to get away with? Late night T.V. hosts had a field day with the story:

And so did the New York Post.

The department was also established by an act of congress. That means that only congress can shut it down. That’s why “no other modern president has tried to unilaterally shutter a federal department,” the reporters write. 

Mr. Trump has already slashed the department’s workforce in half and eliminated $600 million in grants. The job cuts “hit particularly hard” at the office for civil rights, which ensures all students have an equal opportunity for education. 

I’ve been to Little Rock in Arkansas and visited the school where desegregation began. I can see that it holds a special place in our president’s heart but because he resents it. Not as a site of progress in our nation’s troubled history. He’s, like, the girl in the back:

The article quotes Virginia Rep. Bobby Scott, D-Virginia, being savage about all of this.

Mr. Trump is “implementing his own philosophy on education which can be summed up in his own words, ‘I love the poorly educated,’” Scott said, referencing a Trump remark from the year of his first election. 

Even a right-leaning Think Tank leader, Frederick M. Hess (presumably no relation), thinks the idea sucks.

“We’re going to have this whole huge national debate and not solve the practical problems along the way,” he said. “Because we’re so focused on the 30,000 foot conversation we’re not fixing the stuff that’s actually making life tougher for educators and parents.”

Ja!

My mom was an elementary school teacher. She retired at 60, sick of the bureaucracy and nonsense that prevented her from doing what she loved to do: reach and inspire children. I briefly considered a career in the profession before I realized it’s rigged against teachers and children. But I do think that the federal department of education needs to exist. Trump has said it’s too deferential to things like unions but really he wants the private sector to profit from the education market and paying teachers fairly and protecting them for the long run has never been a thing anybody in education cares about, in my experience. It’s like health care. The heroes are only doing all these thankless jobs because they’re called to do them. We should be more grateful. 

Trump appears to think the department should exist too, bizarrely, insisting to reporters yesterday that the important functions of the department like administering loans and grants, enforcing civil rights protections and doling out funds for district tax with high levels of student poverty would continue and be “preserved in full.” Say, one great way to do that would be to preserve the department that administers them, don’t you think? 

“This is political theater, not serious public policy,” said Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council in Education.

Lawyers for various groups say they’ll challenge the order in court and that they expect to win, citing recent Supreme Court rulings in their favor in similar cases. 

The order “presents a predicament for congressional republicans,” the story reports, because it’s extremely unpopular with voters, two-thirds of whom support keeping the department. In other words, Trump is putting pressure on his congressional colleagues to support his initiative but can’t force the issue. They’re unlikely to risk their political lives along with his.

He signed the order yesterday surrounded by schoolchildren—no trans kids, amazingly, although one girl wearing a black ribbon in her hair did evoke a swastika—sat at school desks. I can’t help feeling that the images of the signing evoke a confused schoolboy trying to keep up with the class. God forbid that schoolboy has a disability or needs special assistance of some kind because from now on it’s going to be harder to make that happen all over the country.

My favorite quote from “All the President’s Men” is when “deep throat” source Mark Felt describes those propping up Richard Nixon as “not very bright guys.” And that’s what’s going on here. We have some unintelligent people making cack-handed moves that will backfire spectacularly. 

I love the poorly educated too, Donald. But not because I expect them to be more likely to be easily fooled into voting for me. 

Thanks for reading the newspaper with me so that you don’t have to.

Matt Davis lives in Manhattan with his wife and kid.