Is Your Child Learning Good And Doing Other Stuff Good Too? Trump Will Fix It!
And welcome back Linda McMahon.
In the name of ending “wokeness” and “Marxism” and “discrimination” (against white people and rightwing Christians) in higher education, Donald Trump has big plans for fixing America’s colleges and universities, fixing them real good. So far, the “plans” aren’t yet developed beyond the level of slogans. But as we saw with so many of Trump’s terrible ideas in his first term, even though Trump himself can’t plan his way out of a wet paper bag, his rightwing supporters are happy to help him appoint weird creepy ideologues whose work may be haphazard but still manages to do incredible damage.
Yesterday, Trump offered one more signal of his intentions for education in our great nation by nominating former World Wrestling Entertainment executive Linda McMahon to be secretary of Education, perhaps so every headline writer in America would say something about Trump hitting schools over the head with a folding chair. McMahon, a longtime associate of Trump (he doesn’t have friends), has never worked in education in any capacity, making her the perfect Trump nominee to help wreck the department that Trump wants to eliminate anyway.
So we guess we can congratulate Trump on this much: He managed to find someone even less qualified than his first-term choice, Education Secretary Betsey DeVos.
We Don’t Need No (Department Of) Education
The most prominent goal of Trump’s education “policy” is his pledge to eliminate the Department of Education, a rightwing goal since shortly after Jimmy Carter created the agency in 1979. The department manages all sorts of programs for both public schools and higher education, including Title I funding for K-12 schools serving low-income communities, funding for special education (and enforcement of laws requiring equal access to education for students with disabilities), and on the higher ed side, processing applications for student aid and running the federal student loan program.
Then of course there’s Title IX, which requires equal educational opportunity based on sex, and has forced America to endure being oppressed by Caitlin Clark and the entire NCAA women’s basketball tournament. Not to mention Joe Biden acting like the Supreme Court’s ban on discrimination against trans people is the law, and not a regrettable mistake waiting to be overturned.
And while the slim Republican majority in Congress may be so dysfunctional that it can’t come up with any coherent plan to replace the Education Department or shift its functions to other agencies, it might manage a half-assed repeal that throws education funding into chaos. Would the Republicans eliminate the filibuster to do that? Probably, unless they eliminate it for some other awful legislation beforehand.
One of the biggest misunderstandings about the Department of Education is the rightwing notion that it sets any kind of national curriculum, which it does not, although wingnuts insist that its funding effectively does so via rules requiring schools to have some basic standards — like not discriminating on the basis of race or sex — that force “wokeness” into classrooms. As the Brooking Institution’s Jon Valant explained to Vox,
Much of what Trump and MAGA activists claim the agency is responsible for — like teaching critical race theory and LGBTQ “ideology” — isn’t actually the purview of the DOE; things like curriculum and teacher choice are already the domain of state departments of education. And only about 10 percent of federal public education funding flows to state boards of education, according to Valant.
Trumpers usually dismiss that, insisting that every last bit of education should be a state responsibility, and that they’re already working to take over state policies, as in Florida, suck it, libs. Then again, as with abortion, leaving things up to the states means that blue states would still have policies that are bad for real America, so Congress will have to pass national bans on wokeness, gender-anything, critical racecars, and dirty books that have rainbows in them, too.
No, that’s not contradictory. It’s very consistent: Every state will be free to have policies like Florida’s. Duh.
Oh, yes, and the Education Department is currently the chief source of funding to train special-education teachers, so Congress would need to move that somewhere, or more likely, let states decide whether to fund education for kids with disabilities if they wanna. There are probably some laws in the way of doing that, as if that would really stop Team Trump.
Standards Are Elitist, So Let’s Undo Accreditation
In one of his “Agenda 47” videos that stand in for actual policy proposals, Trump explains that the real secret to weeding out communism in higher education is to radically change the accreditation process that requires colleges and universities to meet some kind of standards. As the Guardian explains, Trump has a slogan-based plan for that:
Trump calls accreditors a failure and says he will “fire the radical left accreditors that have allowed our colleges to become dominated by Marxist maniacs and lunatics”. He will then seek new accreditors that will create standards that include “defending the American tradition and western civilization, protecting free speech, eliminating wasteful administrative positions that drive up costs incredibly, removing all Marxist diversity, equity, and inclusion bureaucrats” and more.
And if you have a “college” that wants to sell degrees without too much book-learning, shouldn’t you be able to let the market decide if that’s a good enough standard? Just as long as there are no Marxist maniacs or lunatics.
Taxing Harvard To Create Trump University II
Trump also thinks that while education should be left to the states, we should also have a national online “American Academy” that would replace colleges and universities that are “turning our students into communists and terrorists and sympathizers of many, many different dimensions.” He’s been pushing this vague idea since last year, but the details remain foggy. You can see the plan in two weeks.
The idea is that Trump would increase taxes on private university endowments, as well as suing and fining them for all sorts of bad things, and then use the revenue to create online classes that would provide a “free world-class education” with no other federal funding. In the video announcing this one, Trump promised it would teach everything imaginable as long as you imagine the correct things:
“Whether you want lectures, or ancient histories, or an introduction to financial accounting, or training in a skilled trade, the goal will be to deliver it and get it done properly using study groups, mentors, industry partnerships, and the latest breakthrough in computing.”
It would be free of “wokeness and jihadism,” and government and industry would have to treat its credentials as equivalent to any college degree, or else. But Trump and his supporters have yet to explain how any of it would work, so look for this to be outsourced, maybe to PragerU, so people can say they went to college by watching a bunch of shitty videos.
I Want To Privatize A Loan. All Of Them.
Now that the Trump Courts have stymied most of the progress Joe Biden made on untangling the mess in our student loan programs, including forgiveness of $175 billion in student loan debt, Trump wants to fuck up college financing too, ideally by having Congress eliminate federal student loans altogether or at least having them taken over by for-profit banks.
As the Washington Post reports (gift link), that might even include ending one of the most popular loan programs out there, the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program, which allows people who go into teaching, government service, and some nonprofit jobs to have their loan balances forgiven after making 10 years of payments. You see, while that’s a popular idea, the best thing about PSLF in Trump’s first term was that most of the applications for loan forgiveness were denied, so it sounded like a real great thing without actually erasing much debt. And besides, Trump’s not-quite-a-majority two weeks ago means America hates teachers and government employees now.
We also hate all other income-driven repayment (IDR) plans that write down debt balances after a certain term (usually 20 years of payments), like Biden’s revolutionary SAVE income-based repayment plan. Because even though IDR programs have around since Congress authorized them in the 1990s, and are popular with borrowers who know they exist, they too were so badly managed that almost nobody actually had their debts forgiven. When Biden’s Education Department untangled the mess, it looked like he had made up those programs just to make Fox News viewers angry.
Most of those Biden student loan reforms are now on hold due to lawsuits, and Trump wants them gone. He could tell Congress to rewrite the Higher Education Act to eliminate income-driven repayment plans altogether, or he could simply have his Justice Department refuse to defend the lawsuits, effectively killing the loan programs. The 8 million people enrolled in SAVE would then be back on the hook for higher payments and ever-ballooning interest that they can never pay off, and that’s what they deserve for majoring in gender studies anyway (it is the only thing taught in universities now). Many will undoubtedly default, meaning that they still wouldn’t pay off their balances, but at least they’d suffer for it.
If Republicans get ambitious, they might even radically change federal student loans as part of a reconciliation bill to extend Trump’s 2017 Big Fat Tax Cuts for Rich Fuckwads forever, and won’t that just make all the Marxists howl!
[Guardian / Vox / Politico / WaPo (gift link) / Image: Knoxville Fire Department]
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Before you know it, they will ALL be schools for ants
The federal government already doesn't fully fund education for students with disabilities (I think we get about 40 cents for every dollar we spend on special education from the feds). Turning it over to the states would likely mean many of them simply giving up and going back to the bad old days of "warehousing". It's not like Trump's DoE would sue to enforce the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act anyway...