Members of the Chicago Teachers Union in Springfield at the Illinois State Capitol       Catrina Petersen | The Center Square

From The Center Square

By Thérèse Boudreaux

Lawmakers, school advocates and teachers’ unions are taking swift action after President Donald Trump’s executive order to begin dismantling the Department of Education, one of his most controversial moves yet.

Opponents of Trump’s action responded with promises of legal retaliation. But supportive lawmakers may beat them to the chase, with U.S. Sens. Bill Cassidy, R-La., and Mike Rounds, R-S.D., each planning to introduce legislation to completely eliminate the department.

“I agree with President Trump that the Department of Education has failed its mission,” Cassidy said. “Since the Department can only be shut down with Congressional approval, I will support the President’s goals by submitting legislation to accomplish this as soon as possible.”

Rounds said he is already discussing legislation with Secretary of Education Linda McMahon “that would return education decisions to states and local school districts while maintaining important programs like special education and Title I.”

Trump already shrunk the department’s workforce to half its size last week. His executive order Thursday directs McMahon to “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education and return authority over education to the States and local communities while ensuring the effective and uninterrupted delivery of services, programs, and benefits on which Americans rely,” as far as legally possible.

For now, that means the department  like enforcing Title IX and civil rights laws, funding special education and disability programs, and overseeing student loans and Pell grants, Trump said. On Friday, Trump said the Small Business Administration would take over the nation’s student loans.

But the ultimate goal is to redistribute these programs among other federal departments and agencies, which would require congressional approval.

School choice organizations are praising Trump’s plan to eventually eliminate the Education Department as a necessary development that will save taxpayers’ money and return power to states, local governments, and parents.

“These are the first steps towards reforming an American education system that should have always been a state and local proposition,” Parents Defending Education Vice President Sarah Parshall Perry said. “We are looking forward to continuing our mission to empower parents and students in educational environments that are once again value-neutral, and devoid of radical ideologies”

Supporters also point to how the department has spent $3 trillion taxpayer dollars since its creation by congressional legislation in 1979. Meanwhile, U.S. students rank 28 out of 37 member countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and standardized test scores have remained flat for decades.

ACE Scholarships, which provides aid to lower-income K-12 students, said in a statement that the Department of Education’s efforts have been “a wasteful distraction” and that the president’s “new approach” to education “puts children first by increasing choice and empowering parents instead of Washington bureaucrats.”

But public school advocacy organizations and teachers unions are already preparing lawsuits against what they say is an unconstitutional move.

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, which represents 1.8 million pre-K through 12th-grade teachers, had a simple message for Trump after the executive order: “See you in court.”

The New York-based United Federation of Teachers stated that “we are working with our partners to file lawsuits to stop this executive overreach.”

Democracy Forward, a legal services nonprofit, is also planning to join the fight.

“We will be filing litigation against this action and will use every legal tool to ensure that the rights of students, teachers, and families are fully protected,” President and CEO Skye Perryman stated. “Since Inauguration Day, the Trump-Vance administration has been taken to court more than 100 times, and we will do it again this time.”

Trump opponents argue that dismantling the department will cause property taxes to spike nationwide, strain public school resources and could cause struggling schools to close, expanding class sizes in the remaining schools.

“Beyond the obvious issue that the Education Department can’t be eliminated without an act of Congress, Trump’s order is yet another wild and illicit power grab,” Co-President of Public Citizen Lisa Gilbert said. “Attempting to destroy the cabinet agencies tasked with promoting and improving education isn’t just irresponsible, it is immoral, and will hurt the very fabric of our nation, as we keep generations of students from achieving their full potential.”

The Education department provides roughly 10% of funding for public education, with the vast majority of funding coming from state and local taxes.

The majority of Americans also appear opposed to ending the department, with a Marist poll in early March showing 63% of U.S. residents either oppose or strongly oppose getting rid of the U.S. Department of Education, while 37% of residents either strongly support or support abolishing the department.

From The Center Square

By Casey Harper

A close look at the Department of Education’s grant funding shows that millions of taxpayer dollars are being spent at universities to train social workers to push Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at K-12 schools.

Now that President Donald Trump has banned that kind of funding, schools will have to find workarounds or drop the programs altogether.

The parental rights group, Parents Defending Education, released a report this week showing over $100 million in Education Department “social work” awards for colleges and universities that has increasingly been used to push DEI ideas into the classroom.

“On the surface, these federal grants were given out to help mitigate mental health issues; in practice, the grant funds went to support programs that explicitly advance social justice ideologies based in critical race theory that include anti-racism and DEI,” the report said. “In fact, the vast majority of university social work programs that we reviewed prioritize anti-racism practices and social justice activism.”

PDE said it found 33 colleges and universities with these kinds of programs, 25 of which were receiving taxpayer-funded grants.

A quick look at the program materials show they train social workers how to push ideas related to “anti-racist and anti-oppressive social work” and “racial capitalism, white supremacy, and structural and institutional racism,” among other related ideas, often in K-12 schools.

One federal grant to Nazareth University in New York supports its program with the stated goal “to promote diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging and address bias and oppression.”

Another at Miami University in Ohio promises that students will “advance human rights and social, racial economic, and environmental justice” and “engage in anti-racism, diversity, equity, and inclusion… in practice.”

Most of the federal funding for these kinds of programs comes from the Department of Education’s Mental Health Service Professional Demonstration Grant Program or the School-Based Mental Health Services Grant Program, according to PDE.

From the University of Alaska Anchorage social work program “engaging in anti-racist and anti-oppressive social work” to a California State University, Fresno course teaching students how “definitions of race and whiteness have been used to disenfranchise people of color,” social work has seemingly made a fundamental shift in its focus in recent years.

Proponents of these programs say social workers need to be equipped to deal with complex issues facing students, which often include racial factors.

They argue systemic racism is a key factor in mental health, while critics say that emphasis reveals an ideological bias.

A quick look at the website for the National Association of Social Workers, which boasts 120,000 members, shows a plea to stop “Trump administration policies” accompanied by a picture of several raised fists, a gesture often linked to political activism.

“The Trump administration is bent on repealing or ignoring just about every law that gets in the way of its drive to remake the federal government.”

Anthony Estreet, CEO of the National Association of Social Workers said in an editorial in the liberal outlet, Salon.

Estreet goes on to attack Trump’s stance on deportations, transgenderism, cuts to the federal government.

“But the administration can’t repeal the law of unintended consequences,” he added. “And plenty of people outside the executive branch — particularly health care providers, mental health professionals, and social workers — will have to clean up the messes the president’s directives are creating.”

The PDE report comes as President Donald Trump signed an executive order to dismantle much of the Department of Education while still performing the critical programs. Trump’s decision raises a question of which parts of that federal agency may be extraneous.

Given Trump’s other executive order banning federal promotion of DEI, grants like those uncovered by PDE are unlikely to keep going out the door.

“School social workers did not use to spend years marinating in highly ideological courses about privilege, oppression, racial capitalism, and white supremacy, but today, this is common practice in public and private universities,” Erika Sanzi, Director of Outreach for Parents Defending Education, said in a statement. “While this is obviously disturbing, the fact that the U.S. Department of Education has been funding it since 2021 is a major red flag. How can a social worker help students become the best version of themselves if they see them as oppressors with unearned privilege?”

Trump’s executive order may push the social work DEI programs to become less obvious, avoiding certain radioactive phrases but pursuing many of the same goals.

Many of these schools now have a choice: Drop the DEI social work model altogether or go underground.

How these operations pivot with the ban on DEI funding remains to be seen.