Why Are We Getting Rid of the Department of Education Again?

The real target isn't 'DEI' but equality

I have a piece out this week in The Baffler where I try to make sense of the Trump/Musk efforts to dismantle the Department of Education. In a nutshell, my argument is this: Americans have long placed their faith in the idea that schools can “equalize” us. Now that equality is a banned term, not just the department but public education as an institution are on the chopping block. I open the piece with a trip in the time machine to visit the very first Department of Education, back in 1867. It lested a mere year before the states of the now former Confederacy quashed it because they hated its attention to the education levels of formerly enslaved students.

“No such department exists in the federal government,” Elon Musk pronounced recently of the Department of Education. While the official dismembering of ED—as it is referred to distinguish it from the other DOE, the Department of Energy—will require an act of Congress, Musk’s wrecking crew has already succeeded in hollowing out the beleaguered agency, laying off staff, shutting off funding, and winnowing its mission.

This isn’t the first time the department, a perennial target of conservatives, has been stripped for parts. The OG version of ED survived just one year before losing its department imprimatur. Roughly 150 years ago, a brand-new Department of Education had been chartered with an ambitious vision: evening out the quality of schools throughout the land in the aftermath of the Civil War and making the case for public education as a worthy investment.

But the project and its head, Henry Barnard, the nation’s first commissioner of education, quickly ran into the buzzsaw of Reconstruction politics. Abolitionists were keen on the new department, while the former Confederate states revolted against the idea that the federal government would now be monitoring the literacy rates of the formerly enslaved. Barnard barely survived long enough to deliver his first report on the state of the nation’s schools to Congress before his agency was demoted to a mere office, its funding reduced. Even Barnard’s own salary was cut.

“The tactics were very similar to what we’re seeing today,” says education historian Adam Laats. The funding cuts ensured that people would leave, the department’s programs withering in their wake, but the nineteenth-century version of the wrecking crew also understood the power of demonizing civil servants. If the cuts to his budget and staff made the job more difficult, his sense that he’d somehow become the enemy in the eyes of the officials he served made it impossible. “Henry Barnard felt personally humiliated. You can smell it in his papers,” says Laats.

Barnard resigned in 1870 and returned to his native Connecticut, his dream of transforming American education abandoned. In the words of present-day administrative state smasher Russell Vought, he’d been “traumatically affected.”

Fast forward to the present and we’re still fighting over the same questions: Should the federal government be involved in education at all or is that a job for the states? What do we owe the students with the least? And is using state power to further equality the goal, or the problem? It’s this last question that, IMHO, is at the heart of everything that Trump and Musk are up to right now. When you hear Trump’s allies rail against the “administrative state,” pay attention to how often they invoke the New Deal. There’s a reason for that.

The 1930’s was the key moment when the government put it’s thumb on the scale in the interest of furthering equality. This is when we got the welfare state, such as it is, unionization, and the modern version of public education. It’s not a coincidence that all are now on the chopping black.

There’s another reason why Trump/Musk seem to be taking aim at both the Department of Education and public schools more broadly. As I argue, the fact that so many of these guys are race scientists is hugely consequential.

Hanging over all of these claims, of course, is the putrescence of race science, and the belief, shared by Musk and his fellow oligarchs, along with many Trumpian intellectuals, that hierarchy is both good and natural. In this view, a cognitive elite with the highest of the high IQs deserves to rule over the rest of us, all in our natural places. In this fixed economy of spoils, there is little point to an institution whose goal is “equalizing.” It can’t be done.

Finally, I end the piece by revisiting Horace Mann’s (in)famous "education as the great equalizer” line. I cannot count the number of times I’ve had someone repeat this line, but it was only recently that I read the report from which it came. And while we tend to ‘hear’ it in human capital terms—study STEM youngster and you’ll go far—Mann actually intended it as a blunt warning to wealthy elites who, just like today, weren’t particularly eager to pay the taxes necessary to fund universal public education.

I recently had my students in the Boston College Prison Education Program (I teach once a week inside a medium security prison in Massachusetts) read Mann’s words and they immediately picked up on the menace contained in what might have been a run-of-the-mill administrative report. They particularly appreciated Mann’s listing all of the different kinds of criminality likely to ensue if kids were deprived of an education.

Mann penned that report back in 1848, another moment of global populist revolt. With inequality widening, he clearly feared that revolution was inevitable in this country, that is unless the elites had the good sense to invest in education. We remember only the “great equalizer” line, now the stuff of coffee mugs and motivational wall art, but Mann feared pitchforks.

Today’s fake populists, Musk and his DOGE wrecking crew chief among them, seek to deepen inequality, in part by dismantling not just the federal Department of Education but the institution of public education itself. They may find that Mann’s prediction comes back to bite them. Deprive your lessers of learning, and before long, the pitchforks will come for you.

You can read the whole piece here.