Donald Trump has repeatedly said he plans to shutter the Department of Education. Dismantling it is central to Project 2025, the 900-page blueprint for his second term. Shifts to larger class sizes due to budget cuts and bans against teaching accurate U.S. history could be on deck. Educators serving Black students are preparing to fight back.
“We should be nervous about the way that — speaking from a Black person’s perspective — curriculum has rarely, if ever, actually been culturally responsive towards us,” says Jose Vilson, director of the national education nonprofit EduColor.
Conservative politicians and policymakers are likely to continue promoting controversial school choice options as the solution to boosting student achievement. But nearly 50 million children from pre-kindergarten to 12th grade are enrolled in public school, so school choice simply isn’t the universal solution its supporters make it out to be.
“There’s no system that’s going to be able to hold our children and educate them for six to eight hours a day while we’re trying to work,” says Zinn Education Project organizer Jesse Hagopian.
Some educators don’t think Trump can demolish the Department of Education or the Office for Civil Rights without massive pushback from communities and organizations. But Vilson says the DOE would become easier to obliterate once targets like the Office for Civil Rights are weakened and no longer an ally for those filing complaints for disability, race-based issues, gender issues, and more.
Hagopian, a veteran Seattle Public Schools high school teacher and co-editor of the books “Teaching For Black Lives” and “Black Lives Matter at School,” worries both professionally and as a father to a Black son who attends public schools.
Hagopian says regardless of what a second Trump administration has planned, building community and continuing to protect one another is necessary if the Black community wants to safeguard Black children and their schools.
“Four students who went into a drugstore and sat down at the lunch counter broke the segregation law and refused to move — that sparked a struggle throughout the South,” Hagopian says.
“You see an injustice, you name it, and then you act against it. You can change the world, and I think that building community is the most important thing right now. Getting together with people who want to resist Trump’s overt fascism, his overt racism, transphobia, xenophobia, misogyny.”
Vilson says the best way to move forward is to continue rallying people behind the cause by ensuring they understand the importance of pushing back against right-wing ideologies in schools. Folks, he says, need to be ready to protect students’ lives by paying attention to what happens where decisions are made: local school site meetings and school board meetings.
“I’m going to try to continue to help organize students across this country to build the same kind of youth uprising that brought down Jim Crow,” Vilson says. “We’re going to be getting teachers and mentors together across the country to bring youth and educators together to strategize about how we build that uprising.”
Larger entities like the AFT have long fought attacks on public education, with its 1.8 million members rallying for equitable school funding, safe school facilities, higher teacher pay, and adequate school staffing.
“We’ve been fighting a blueprint for Project 2025 in Florida for a couple of years now,” said Frederick Ingram, secretary-treasurer for the American Federation of Teachers. “They’re trying to do an all-out assault on public education, defund our public schools, ban books, close libraries, make it difficult for teachers to teach honest and true history, oversized classrooms, an inundation of testing about your program that seeks to take students out of the public sector into private schools, parochial schools, and charter schools.”
Ingram says the courage of district-level leaders, state superintendents of education, and state governments is crucial to push back policies that will destroy public schools.
“We’re going to have to fight back if they are not good for kids,” Ingram says. “If they’re not good for teaching and the teaching profession.”
Aziah Siid writes for Word in Black.