Backpacks are out. Bus routes are posted. In the coming weeks, a kid is standing in a doorway, working up the nerve to walk into a new classroom for the first time.
My daughter Thomasin spent years working for the DC’s public schools. It’s not glamorous work. It’s the unglamorous work that makes a school system actually function for kids who need it to.
So it’s personal when I tell you what’s happening to the Department of Education right now is abhorrent.
In June, Secretary Linda McMahon quietly moved the office that oversees special education for 7.5 million kids with disabilities out of the Education Department and into Health and Human Services. She moved the office that enforces civil rights in schools — protecting kids from discrimination based on race, sex, and disability — into the Justice Department. No vote. No debate. Just interagency paperwork.
Here’s the part that should worry you even if you don’t have a kid in public school: McMahon isn’t hiding the goal. She’s called these moves “proof of concept” — proof that the Department of Education can be hollowed out piece by piece without Congress ever having to touch it.
And this is just the start. Republicans in Congress have introduced bills to eliminate the Department of Education outright. They haven’t found the votes for that — so McMahon is just doing it for them anyway, one interagency agreement at a time, with nothing stopping her. Next up: Title I, the funding that keeps schools serving low-income kids afloat. Turn that into a block grant with no oversight and you’re looking at close to 180,000 teaching positions gone and 2.8 million kids in low-income communities losing out.
Thomasin didn’t spend her career in DC public schools so that the kids she worked with could become collateral damage in somebody’s plan to shrink the federal government down to a size where it can’t help anyone. Midwest Values PAC exists to elect Democrats who will stand up and say so — in Congress, in state houses, everywhere this fight is happening.
Al
P.S. Remember Betsy DeVos from Trump’s first administration? Trump really knows how to pick ‘em! Chip in and help us elect people who’ll actually fight for education.
