Until Donald Trump no President has seriously attempted to put an end to the Department of Education since Ronald Reagan carped about the Department created only a few years earlier by his immediate predecessor Jimmy Carter. In his first term he was content to hand it over to a billionairess critic of public schools who has tried to steer public money into private and parochial schools. That was the Tupperware Queen DeVos.
Now by Executive Order he claims to have the right to gut the Department created by the United State’s Congress. He is taking it apart piece by piece starting with Title One which helps the poorest children. Trump is doing it in the guise of teaching that slavery shouldn’t be badmouthed in public schools because it hurts racists feelings……I suppose you can sense a little overdramatization in my description……but its only a little.
I’ve been watching two previous presidents George Bush and Obama dance around fixing schools for their combined 16 years of service. Its not easy. I’m inclined toward the Union explanation for the difficulty. We short change poor people because really. Does the Republican Christian party give a shit about the Beatitudes???? Ef the poor. Reagan was right to empty the sanitoriums and put poor people on the streets. oops. a little….very little overdramatization again.
I’m also rather enamored, after seven years of learning French and visiting France, with French Maternals that every French child is entitled to attend starting at age 3. Of course, it is a nationalized school system. Unlike America where state’s rights states can stiff the poor the French provide a roughly equal education to their children.
And it made sense for Carter to create a National Department of Education even if the fifty states were in charge of their local schools: Again from the Opinion piece
Opinion: Full article here
“When he arrived in Washington, there were more than 260 education-related programs spread across various federal agencies; creating a separate department — one that wrapped program administration and rights enforcement together — would streamline bureaucracy. The department would support states in addressing the deep educational inequities they faced, and it would be a backstop if states failed in that mission.”
NOW HERE IS SOME MORE CONTEXT starting with this event that I recall vividly as I was 13 and watching Axe Handle Maddox on the television The man in the middle here is Lester Maddox one of the last restaurateurs in the Deep South to refuse to serve black people. He was soon to be elected Governor of Georgia and was Jimmy Carter’s predecessor.
Donald Trump the man who like Maddox refused to let blacks into his appartment blocks and chased around the nation thirty years later claiming President Obama was born in Africa considers the Civil Rights movement over and done with. He takes no account of its lingering effects on people whose children he wants to deny Title One funds. The Opinion piece spells a little of that history out:
“At nearly every moment when America could have expanded educational opportunity, the nation chose inequality. The 1862 Morrill Act doled out millions of acres of land that states could sell to fund colleges that Black students were almost exclusively barred from attending; discrimination prevented Black veterans from enjoying the spoils of the G.I. Bill which Congress passed to provide World War II veterans money for college, housing and unemployment insurance. At the same time, in America’s public schools, students were being taught an incomplete, revisionist history.”
I have one more post in me also from the NY Times of a couple days ago which clearly shows we are shortchanging poor kids. Next post please.