“Education, then, beyond all other devices of human origin, is the great equalizer of the conditions of men [sic], the balance wheel of the social machinery.” – Horace Mann, 1848
Though it's never, ever reached that ideal, the federal Department of Education has always been focused on leveling playing fields between states and districts with wildly disparate resources and commitments to equity.
It appears that the Department of Education is in its last days.
Here are two pieces on what will be lost.
First, Jennifer Berkshire writes of the demise of the first attempt to create a federal role in education to after the Civil War as reformers were committed to advancing the idea of public education for everyone across the newly reunited country.
The department was revived in 1979, again with the explicit goal of equalizing schooling and maintaining data on the sprawling network of public school districts. Already, there have been major staff layoffs at DOE, the shuttering of investigations of the civil rights division, the unprecedented directives prohibiting entire topics of study in schools and colleges, and the removal of major data bases from websites.
Berkshire is clear about what is driving all of this:
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.
Second, Jill Barshay reports on a former Trump official's dire warnings about what will be lost as Musk and DOGE destroys decades of data collected and maintained by the DOE:
Vital data collections have been canceled. Historical data could be lost. And there’s a looming threat of future political tampering. Woodworth says that policymakers and the public would be operating in the dark without basic data on student achievement, enrollment, poverty and school finances.
That data, this former DOE employee insists, belongs to the people, not to any president.
We have never attained the goal of equality through schooling. Reform projects of the DOE have often been short-sited and ill-conceived. We have placed too much belief in the power to education to level opportunity in the next generation, often at the expense of building a robust social safety net for families in the present.
And still, the destruction of the federal Department of Education will leave us with neither that safety net nor the capacity to even trace and to talk about persistent inequalities in schooling. Funding for reading support for little kids, for special ed, for college student financial aid, for enforcement of basic civil rights in schools and colleges are all up in the air.
It's egregious that these elites are are declaring that we're done with a commitment to educational equality.
