Trump wants to change education. What's that mean for kids?

0:00Here is how Al Moyer describes the fights in his school district over the past few years. It was pretty ugly, to be very frank with you. Moyer serves on the Gettysburg Area School Board in Pennsylvania, and he says two big issues set things off. First, the debate over masking during COVID. And then in 2023, some community members were upset about a tennis coach who was transitioning from male to female. Those two situations really caused kind of the second civil war. battle in Gettysburg. All across the country, the most polarizing issues dividing American adults are also showing up on the doorsteps of K-12 schools, sometimes literally.

0:41Back in April, federal agents from the Department of Homeland Security visited two elementary schools in Los Angeles County. The district superintendent, Alberto Carvalho, told NPR the schools prevented the agents from accessing students. How would you feel if you were a parent of a child in your school and somebody called you and said, you know what, Homeland Security or the FBI or the Secret Service or ICE showed up at the school when we provided them direct access to your child. DHS said the visit was a welfare check on immigrant children who had arrived unaccompanied in the U.S. Carvalho disputes that.

1:14Looming over all of this, of course, is President Trump. On the campaign trail, he promised to bring the federal government into fights over classroom instruction and policies. When day one, I will sign a new executive order to cut federal funding for any school pushing critical race theory, transgender insanity, and other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content on our children. It actually took until day 10, but that was just the start of Trump's moves on K-12 education. He signed an order seeking to ban transgender athletes from competing in women's school sports. His administration rescinded guidelines that prevented immigration enforcement at schools.

1:57And he's also trying to eliminate the Department of Education. My administration will take all lawful steps to shut down the department. We're going to shut it down and shut it down as quickly as possible. It's doing us no good.

2:13Consider this. Trump has turned federal education policy upside down. But what does that mean for kids headed back to school.

2:24From NPR, I'm Scott Detrow.

2:33It's Consider This from NPR. As students go back to school, we wanted to look at what the White House is trying to do on K-12 education. What is actually changing in schools and what hasn't. So I am joined by NPR education correspondent Corey Turner. Hey, Corey. Hey, Scott. As well as NPR senior political editor and correspondent, Domenico Montanaro. Hey, Domenico. Hey, great to be with you, Scott. Corey, I want to start with you. Since you cover education, where do we stand with President Trump's promise to shut down the Department of Education? Yeah, well, since coming into office, he's already cut the department essentially in half.

3:06It's got roughly half the staff it had in January. But I think it's worth highlighting here. There's a real contradiction or tension, Scott, between this desire to close the department and what we've also seen the Trump administration do, which is to wield the power of the department in really new and forceful ways. And that is largely by using old federal civil rights laws like the Civil Rights Act or Title IX, which prohibits sex discrimination, to threaten schools, school districts, state departments of education that don't embrace Trump's policy priorities, as you said, ending diversity, equity and inclusion programs that the administration argues are discriminatory against white students or Asian American students or ending protections for transgender students.

3:55You know, and this was a huge culture war issue during the campaign. Even before it, we saw conservative takeovers at school board meetings around the country with what they saw as quote unquote woke education in schools. Some of that resulted in book bans and curriculum changes. So this is really Trump following through and capitalizing on what his base has wanted. We have really seen Trump pick fights with higher education, right? Taking Ivy League schools like Harvard and Columbia, threatening their federal funding, making them pay fines in many ways. Is this the same approach he's taking at the grade school level?

4:27Yeah, it is. It's just it's gotten a lot less attention, I think. The Education Department's Office for Civil Rights has been initiating investigations into a bunch of different school districts, including Denver Public Schools, Chicago Public Schools. They tend to be blue state districts. There are five districts in Northern Virginia. And the complaints tend to be around either of these districts' embrace of diversity, equity, and inclusion, which the Trump administration argues violates Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination based on race, color, or national origin.

5:05Or it's around districts' embrace of protections for transgender students, which the administration argues violates Title IX. It is essentially the same playbook. And what we're seeing is really fast-tracked investigations like we've been seeing against Harvard and Columbia. And it's hard to know how this will play out. A judge in the Harvard case has already recently said they went too fast. They didn't actually follow the law. We've seen the way that these hundreds of thousands of dollars in federal funding being taken away on higher education levels is causing colleges to really shift tunes.

5:42What's the best way to think about how much federal funding local school districts get, how big of a problem this is when it is threatened in that way? Yeah, absolutely. So we know that on average, federal funding makes up a small but important piece of school budgets, around 11 percent. The more important thing to know is that even though that may not seem like a lot of money, in most districts, the bulk of that money really goes to one of two really marginalized student groups. It helps pay for special education for kids with disabilities, and it helps pay for extra supports for kids living in poverty.

6:16And we're not just talking about big city schools. We're talking about remote, rural schools in red states. This money is really important. And the administration, just as it has tried to cancel, say, research funding to colleges, it's now using as a threat the potential cancellation of these important dollars to school districts and states. Domenico, you mentioned this fits in with a pattern that we have discussed a lot with Trump taking in at cultural institutions in the country. Can you tell me a bit more about how that applies to education here? Yeah. And look, there are a lot of people, including a lot of teachers, who see this as going backwards on acceptance and tolerance.

6:55And so schools and classrooms had for a long time been seen as controlled environments where people from different walks of life can come together. They can be civil despite their backgrounds, race, sexual orientation, whether someone has special needs, what have you. And sometimes that's meant explicit education of acceptance because, as we know, kids aren't always nice, Scott. But conservatives have long chafed at that kind of thing. You saw Montgomery County, Maryland, for example, lose at the Supreme Court for not allowing people to opt their children out of teaching around a book with same-sex parents.

7:27Remember, though, that kind of thing has been controlled at the local, not federal level. The Education Department has been responsible for things like keeping statistics, doling out funding, as Corey's mentioned, and resolving complaints of discrimination through the Office of Civil Rights. And as Corey said, we've seen a big change in approach there. Corey, the wild thing is all of the stuff we've talked about already isn't even, you know, a significant percentage of the stuff that Trump has been talking about when it comes to making change to education. He's talked about a lot of other things, too, including school choice and options for parents.

8:00Is that something he's followed through on? Yeah, I mean, he's talked a lot about influencing curriculum. I think there his hands are pretty clearly tied. federal law is very explicit about the federal government's inability legally to influence curriculum or learning standards or anything like that. When it comes to school choice, though, President Trump has already managed to notch a pretty big win, and that is including a federal private school voucher program in the big, beautiful Bill Act. That's been on the bucket list for Republicans for years, including in his first administration. He got it through this time.

8:37Yeah. And another big change I have to say overall here is that politically education was far less of a culture war battleground and was a relatively bipartisan issue. I mean, back during the Obama administration, you heard arguments over whether there should be more charter schools, school choice, maybe just decreasing some union powers and even all that talk about common core math. But Republicans felt it was one area where they could work with former President Obama on. And that's just not at all what we're talking about now in the arguments. Yeah. Big picture, Corey. This gets a lot of attention.

9:08The federal government gets a lot of attention and has a lot of power and sway. But education is like one of those core local government issues. How much can Trump really change K-12 education in America over the next three years? I mean, I don't think he's going to have a lot of impact inside the classroom, but I think he's going to make a lot of states and even district superintendents really anxious with these very real threats to really important federal dollars. Just to underscore the point here, the Office for Civil Rights of the Education Department is putting some superintendents and state leaders in places like California, Maine, Illinois, in the difficult position of potentially having to choose between advocating on behalf of one marginalized group, say transgender students, at the risk of losing federal funding that helps them support other marginalized students.

9:58That is NPR education correspondent Corey Turner and NPR senior political editor and correspondent Domenico. Montanaro, thanks to both of you. You're welcome, Scott. Thanks, Scott. You heard reporting at the top of the episode from NPR's Frank Langfitt. This episode was produced by Tyler Bartlam and Connor Donovan, with audio engineering by Ted Meebane and Hannah Glovna. It was edited by William Troup, Nicole Cohen, and Kelsey Snell. Our executive producer is Sam McGannigan. Thank you to our Consider This Plus supporters who make the journalism you hear on this show possible. Supporters also hear every episode without messages from sponsors.

10:31you can learn more at plus.npr.org.

10:38It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Scott Detrow.