How our public schools are tied to the health of our democracy

[marmar]

How our public schools are tied to the health of our democracy
If you think our democracy is struggling now, imagine a day when our schools are segregated by race

By Chauncey DeVega
Senior Writer
Published March 24, 2025 7:07AM (EDT)


(Salon) Donald Trump is following the dictator’s playbook as he uses his shock and awe campaign against American democracy and society. Little of what Trump and his agents and allies are doing is a surprise. One only has to look at Orban’s Hungary or Putin’s Russia (or Germany in the 1930s) as warnings and predictions for what the United States is quickly on the road to becoming. For Trump and his forces to succeed they will need complaint and obedient authoritarian subjects who either through surrender, agreement, self-interest, indifference, exhaustion or for some other reason(s) agree to the “legitimacy” of such a regime in America.

....(snip)....

In an attempt to better understand how America’s educational system is under siege in the Age of Trump and how the lessons of the long Black Freedom Struggle can be applied today in the struggle to defend American democracy and freedom, I recently spoke with Derek W. Black. He is the Ernest F. Hollings Chair in Constitutional Law at the University of South Carolina and one of the country’s leading experts in education, law and public policy. Derek Black’s essays and other writing have appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Washington Post, The Atlantic and elsewhere. His research has been published in the Yale Law Journal, Stanford Law Review, NYU Law Review, California Law Review, Cornell Law Review, Northwestern University Law Review, Vanderbilt Law Review and dozens of others. His new book is “Dangerous Learning: The South’s Long War on Black Literacy.”

The Trump administration is trying to destroy the Department of Education. Why does the right-wing hate the Department of Education so much?

Most people think of the Department of Education and the federal role in education as an invention of 1979. The truth is that the federal government has been instrumental in getting public education off the ground since the nation’s founding. Before we even had a Constitution, Congress was putting structures in place to ensure that all new territories and states provided public education. Congress redoubled that effort following the Civil War, requiring the states to guarantee public education in their state constitutions and establish the first Department of Education. Those post-war efforts brought public education to a region that previously had very little. White illiteracy rates, for instance, were four times higher in the South than in the North. Jim Crow and objections to federal overreach, of course, cut that legacy short.

Modern objections are not too far detached from that legacy. It was the Department of Justice and the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) at the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare that forced southern schools to desegregate. That office would later move to the Department of Education. It has been instrumental in ensuring equal opportunity based on race, sex, disability, language status, and other categories. And the general Department of Education’s testing and accountability standards are likewise focused on closing achievement gaps for those students. In short, the Department has always stood for expanding opportunity and closing equity gaps. ..................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2025/03/24/how-our-public-schools-are-tied-to-the-health-of-our-democracy/

[Comrade Citizen]

2. A different era

Texas Rep Jack Brooks led the House effort to establish the Department of Education, sponsoring H.R.2444 in 1979.
Now Texas is defunding its public schools and giving vouchers to private schools.
Public schools have already been closed throughout the state.