The Trump team’s radical plan to gut American public education

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In many ways, it’s one of the great mysteries of modern American policy debates: What does the political right aim to achieve by destroying public education?

The idea of siphoning off billions of public dollars to fund private school vouchers is more obvious: It’s a straight money grab that abets the longstanding desire of many people of means to avoid having to send their children to melting pot schools that include poor kids and kids of different races and ability levels.

But why the relentless attack on the public schools and the kids and families who remain in them?

Is it simply a matter of the fact that – as Willie Sutton infamously said of the banks he robbed – “that’s where the money is”?

Is it born of that strange passion still found in some corners of the market fundamentalist right that all things public are inherently evil and a threat to their “freedom”?

Is it just a function of the fact that public schools in states like North Carolina have become majority-minority?

Whatever the explanation, it’s impossible to deny that such a mission of destruction is a top conservative priority these days and well underway in many places.

Here in North Carolina, the facts are beyond dispute.

As veteran school funding analyst Kris Nordstrom explained in a recent op-ed for Newsline, when one combines all the dollars public schools receive in our state, three simple and damning numbers tell the story:

1. North Carolina schools receive $4,655 less per student in total funding than the national average.

2. That number places us 48th in the nation.

3. When one compares per pupil spending to the wealth of each state – that is what states can spend based on total state income – North Carolina comes in 50th. That’s dead last.

And while the blatant and sustained attack on public schools that North Carolina Republican lawmakers have implemented over the last decade-plus is not yet the narrative everywhere – see for instance, Alabama of all places, where teacher salaries put North Carolina to shame – such an approach is clearly a top priority for the people driving the national conservative movement in the run-up to the 2024 election. Indeed, they’ve spelled it out in black and white in a frightening document that’s gaining more and more national attention.

The document is the “180 Day Playbook” of a group called Project 2025, and it is the plan of attack – emphasis on the word “attack” – that people surrounding Donald Trump (e.g. Stephen Miller, Mark Meadows) have put together for what they hope will be second Trump administration.

The document is chockful of remarkably extreme objectives in dozens of areas, but few are more striking than the field of public education, where the plan calls for:

• Ending the nation’s oldest and largest federal program for the support of public education – Title I.

• Gutting the nation’s free school meals program.

• Eliminating the Head Start program.

Title I is the nation’s signature initiative for aiding schools with large numbers of low-income students. In the current fiscal year, $20.5 billion has been allocated across the nation. Ninety percent of the nation’s school districts and all 115 in North Carolina benefit. About half the public schools in North Carolina, as well as many private schools, receive Title I funding.

Not surprisingly, schools that enroll large numbers of children of color and that have historically been among the nation’s least well-funded, are among the chief Title I beneficiaries.

Amazingly, however, Project 2025 calls for “phasing” Title I out of existence and turning the responsibility over to the states. North Carolinians familiar with their General Assembly’s cheapskate approach to funding schools will find that notion laughable.

And the same is true with the other proposed draconian cuts.

Free school meals – an initiative that has been expanded wisely and to great benefit in recent years – is one of the most obvious and affordable things the U.S. government does to directly enhance the lives of millions of children.

Likewise, Head Start – which dates back to the Johnson administration’s War on Poverty — is a program that helps make preschool/childcare available to more than a million American children every year. If anything, it’s the kind of federal initiative that needs vastly more support, rather than less.

Of course, none of these programs is perfect. Each can be bureaucratic – a quality that arises frequently (and somewhat ironically) when conservatives demand that anti-poverty programs be rigorously policed to assure that no ineligible person benefits. And it’s true that many schools still struggle to serve needy kids and that childhood poverty and hunger remain huge problems in spite of them.

That said, the notion that such programs would be eviscerated or even eliminated at a time in which needs remain so high, bespeaks a brand of reckless and radical conservatism that’s rather stunning, and ultimately somewhat mystifying, to behold. One prays the nation is paying attention.

Note: This commentary has been updated to clarify that it was Willie Sutton, not Al Capone, who infamously explained his reasons for robbing banks.

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