Playing Defense

Trump's sweeping school voucher order shows where we're headed

Fresh off of freezing Medicaid and Head Start payments, the Trump Administration is out today with another policy directive aimed at the kids: a sweeping school voucher directive. Largely symbolic for now, the latest Executive Order shows just how committed Trump 2.0 is to school privatization (very committed!) despite resistance in his own base, as I wrote about in a new piece for Jacobin. The EO is also a shot-across-the-bow in service of the expansive—and aggressive—vision of religious freedom that the GOP has now coalesced around.

The Trump order directs the still-around-for-now Department of Education to prioritize school choice funding through its discretionary grant programs in a move we might call ‘Race to the Bottom.’ And it assigns a new mission to the new Department of Defense chief Pete Hegseth: draw up a plan for how military families can use federal funds to send their kids to private religious schools.

Now if you’ve had the misfortune of reading Hegseth’s book, Battle for the American Mind: Uprooting a Century of Miseducation, then you already know that in addition to rebranding the Crusades, Christian education is among Hegseth’s top priorities. I won’t dwell on his book here, save to say that he argues that public schools represent a 125-year-long-conspiracy to control the kids, culminating in the current obsession with STEM. In other words, he’s not really a test score guy.

Which brings me to Hegseth’s new assignment, to break up the Department of Defense schools. You see, today also happens to be release day for NAEP scores, aka ‘the nation’s report card.’ (This from Nat Malkus on the trends over time is worth a read.) And it happens that in recent years, and amid a steady stream of bleak results, the schools run by the Department that Hegseth now leads have performed better in reading and math than any other state. Now, in the education reform days of yore this might have sent a million scribes off to witness the miracle first hand, as they once scurried to Finland and Shanghai. That’s not happening today, because the ‘secret ingredient’ of these schools’ success is the very thing that Trump 2.0 is now rooting out stem and branch.

“Who Runs the Best U.S. Schools? It May Be the Defense Department,” pronounced the New York Times last year. Among the many reasons that the 66,000 students who attend the Pentagon-run schools—well-paid teachers, centralized control—this one stands out:

[T]he schools are more socioeconomically and racially integrated than many in America. Children of junior soldiers attend classes alongside the children of lieutenant colonels. They play in the same sports leagues after school.

That reflects a history dating back to 1948, when President Harry S. Truman ordered the military to desegregate its forces. In the years that followed, the military established integrated schools, primarily in the South, at a time when local public schools remained segregated.

In other words, these schools do so well because they are ‘woke’ in the most expansive version of the term. They start from the belief that equality is a worthy goal and that education should be organized in a way that reflects that goal. And that is exactly the vision that is on the chopping block today.

In just the second week of Trump 2.0, we are officially in what MAGA strategist Steve Bannon calls ‘the zone’ — as in flood the zone with so much crap that Democrats and especially the media are essentially paralyzed and unable to resist in any meaningful way. What exactly is the connection between ordering federal employees to report on the coworkers who “defy orders to purge diversity, equity and inclusion efforts from their agencies” and, say, freezing funds that pay for free school meals?

The central principle underlying the anti-woke crusade that animates Trump and his allies is that our pursuit of equality has gone too far. Not only do they NOT believe the government should play any role in trying to make the country more equal, but they’re committed to rolling back the clock on the progress made over the past fifty years. Of course, this puts public schools in a bit of a bind as, more than any other single institution, we task them for helping us realize the elusive goal of equality. As I wrote earlier this year:

[U]sing state power in the interest of furthering equality is the defining purpose of public education in this country. It’s why we fund public schools with our tax dollars, expect them to deliver similar outcomes for students of dizzyingly different backgrounds, and are collectively crushed when they fail to deliver.

So as you take in the dizzying stream of directives and headlines coming down from the Trump Court, ask yourself a simple question: will this thing make us more or less equal as a country? I think you already know the answer.