RIP Department of Education

Why it matters that K-12 education will now be housed within the 'Department of the Boss'

The most telling explanation for what’s really motivating the Trump Administration’s break up of the Department of Education came, not in the form of official statements or op-eds, but in an event seemingly far removed from K-12 schools. On the same day that Linda McMahon et al were cheering the almost realization of a decades-long conservative dream, Trump himself convened a gathering of McDonald’s owners and operators. His remarks were classic ‘lame-duck’ era Trump—bloated, incoherent, enraged. Then, at last, he got to the meat of the matter. The minimum wage, he told the fast-food franchisees, is too high. “The minimum wage thing you’ll have to be talking about, you’re going to have to fight,” he said, referring to California, where, thanks to years of protests and organizing, fast food workers now earn at least $16.50 an hour.

What’s the connection between the president’s inchoate ramblings and the six new “partnership agreements” that effectively dispurse the Department of Education’s billions in grant programs across other agencies? The largest federal funding stream for K-12 schools, including the Title I money for schools that serve low-income communities, will now be housed at the Department of Labor. If you’ve been paying attention to Trump’s now ten-month-long siege on the federal government, the DOL ranks only slightly below ED as a target of right-wing enmity. Earlier this year, the administration sought to cut the department’s budget by one third, and as of today, DOL is no longer able to carry out one of its core functions: tracking the nation’s unemployment rate.

Back in 2022, writer John Ganz explained the right-wing backlash brewing among tech oligarchs as the product of an ideology he called “bossism,” a belief system as simple as ‘bosses on top.’ Strip away the faux populism and it’s increasingly clear that ‘bossism’ is at the root of nearly every move that Trump and his cabinet of billionaires make. Workers have too much power and need to be put in their place. Hierarchy is natural and good, and every American institution, including schools and workplaces, should reflect that. One of the administration’s first moves was to reverse a policy that kept corporations from paying disabled workers less than the paltry federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour. Remember the scene of Pete Hegseth tightening the screws on the bronze placque proclaiming ‘Department of War?’ The Trump-era Department of Labor, the new home of K-12 education, might better be thought of as the Department of the Boss.

Workforce prep, all the way down

“If we consider K-12 education as really preparation for adult life, preparation to enter the workforce, nowhere is it better housed than at the Department of Labor that thinks about this night and day,” was how one senior ED official justified the move. Except that the workforce that students are being prepared to enter is one where bosses belong on top. While one education pundit was quick to dismiss the K-12’s new home as a ‘nothing burger,’ that Trump believes the workers who make the actual burgers earn too much tells you everything you need to know.

I recently came across a fascinating paper about how programs that immerse students in work-based learning, a growing trend across the country, also inculcate them in the brutal logic of the marketplace. At BizTown, for example, operated by Junior Achievement, elementary students visit a simulated town where they learn to operate banks, manage restaurants, write checks, and vote for mayor. “Students are able to connect the dots between what they learn in school and the real world,” reads the promotional material. Not to mention the “indestructible loop of work and consumption that defines the real world,” adds writer Anya Ventura in a rather more skeptical take.

Then there is the rural ‘microschool’ in North Carolina where students run an Airbnb with the help of a local real estate group. Modeled on the red-hot (albeit, rife with red flags) edu-trend that is Alpha School, students learn core subjects in the AM. The rest of the day is spent on subjects that sound great in the abstract—entrepreneurship, logistics, business strategy and marketing—but boil down to ‘projects’ like furnishing the rental unit and creating guidebooks for guests. “[W]orking on the rental unit will impart valuable insights to the students and will provide market feedback about how well they are performing, based on whether the rental outperforms other nearby Airbnb listings,” explained a school district official. Also, the students’ work will be unpaid, which may be the most important real-world lesson of all.

AI, whether we want it or not

Did I mention that the Airbnb microschool is also a ‘a beachhead for artificial intelligence-based instruction’? Speaking of AI, barely had officials finished toasting the dismantling of the Department of Education when Trump himself called on Congress to keep states from regulating AI, or as he put it: “Investment in AI is helping to make the U.S. Economy the ‘HOTTEST’ in the World, but overregulation by the States is threatening to undermine this Major Growth ‘Engine,’” Trump wrote on Truth Social. An earlier attempt to essentially nullify state laws on AI, including laws covering the use of AI in schools, collapsed this summer. Now it’s back, as GOP leaders, at Trump’s urging, will try to sneak language that effectively bans state AI regulations into the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).

This week, I had the pleasure of hearing independent journalist and scholar Audrey Watters speak. Watters, if you are somehow unfamiliar with her brilliant work, describes herself as the Cassandra of education technology; she’d hoped to hang up her shingle and move on from edtech, then came AI. Audrey came to Yale, where I’ve been teaching a course on the politics of public education, to speak to students about why Silicon Valley’s vision for the classrooms of the future turns out to be the exact same vision that education ‘disruptors’ have been pedaling since the Soviets launched the satellite known as Sputnik into the skies.

The students in attendance, who are on the receiving end of a constant AI sales pitch, were rapt. Then Audrey began to talk about AI and labor, and the energy in the room noticeably crackled. “People say robots are coming for your jobs, or AI is coming for your jobs,” but that’s not accurate, she explained. “Technology doesn’t have agency. Management is coming for your jobs. Bosses are coming for your jobs.” Then there is the the labor that stands to be ‘disrupted’ by AI in schools, the largely female workforce in the schools. As Audrey reminds us, “Teachers unions are the largest union in this country. So when we talk about AI disrupting education, we have to consider that this also about disrupting one of the few remaining strongholds of labor power.”

I’ll be turning Audrey’s talk into a podcast so that you can hear her wisdom for yourself, but there was one bit that I won’t be able to capture on audio. As a parting gesture, Audrey showed off the striking tattoos she sports on each forearm: lines of poetry turned into the ones and zeroes of binary code. On one arm is a line from Lord Byron’s “Song for the Luddites,” the 18th century textile artisans who resisted, at times violently, the mechanization of their craft. The oft-caricatured Luddites, Audrey reminded us, were not against technology, but against the exploitation of workers and ordinary people. “They were resisting losing their jobs to the machine.” On her other arm can be found Walt Whitman’s imploring command from “Leaves of Grass: “resist much, obey little.”

Resisting much, by the way, is exactly what we’re about to see when it comes to the forced “partnership” between AI companies and schools, the skids greased by the federal government. I’m guessing that versions of this recent letter from parents and teachers in Malden, Massachusetts, furious that the local schools are considering ‘integrating’ AI tools, will soon be popping up across the land. The highlight of the letter is the analogy drawn between AI and another once-transformative invention: asbestos.

Yes, it had some remarkably promising characteristics – fireproofing! – and had some real utility in science, research, and industrial applications. But a profit-driven industry bullied us into inserting it everywhere; into our homes and schools and public spaces, before we really understood the risks. This resulted in decades, if not centuries, of illness, injuries, deaths, and the astronomical financial burden of trying to remove the stuff.

Thrown to the wolves

Back to what’s left of the Department of Education and, at last, to the end of this post. One of the most striking things about this week’s announcement that most K-12 programs will be migrating to other departments was the downplaying by top officials of ED’s significance. “We are a pass-through agency for grants that are authorized and appropriated by Congress,” said one official, echoing a claim made by Secretary of Education Linda McMahon. After years of being told that the department is to blame for everything from the collapse of reading scores to the rise of litter boxes in schools, now we’re hearing that ED does nothing at all.

It was heartening, then, to hear even Republicans sounding dismayed over ED’s dismantling. Pennsylvania Representative Brian Fitzpatrick objected to the premise that the department’s core offices could just be parceled off to other entities. “They safeguard civil rights, expand opportunity, and ensure that every child, in every community, has the chance to learn, grow and succeed on equal footing.”

Whether this push back ultimately amounts to anything remains to be seen. It is voters who will have the final say on the significance of this particular ‘nothing burger,’ and here the signs are more encouraging. In the wake of the Democrats’ romp in this month’s Virginia election, the Wall Street Journal interviewed voters who backed Trump in 2024 but changed teams this time. One of them was the father of a first grader who switched parties out of fury over government cuts to the program for autistic kids in which his son was enrolled. “They’ve thrown him to the wolves,” the dad told the reporter.

Resist much, obey little.