president Donald TrumpWinner in Battle of billionaires At Wrestlemania 23, I maintained close relationships with Linda McMahon, former CEO of World Wresting Entertainment, for decades. During the period of the first president, she worked for two years as head of small business administration, as in 2019 he stepped down to lead America and I have been working, and he is a supporter of Trump Super Pile. Now McMahon is Trump’s candidate to employ the US Department of Education, although she may seem to lack the traditional good deeds of this position. (She spent a year at the Connecticut Education Council, although she later appeared that she had not obtained a certificate of education, as she claimed.)
If McMahon is confirmed by the Senate, its individual mission will be to assume the responsibility of an agency in order to get rid of it. “I told Linda, Linda, I hope you do a great job and put yourself from a job,” Trump He saidOn February 4. Its administration wants to cancel the Ministry of Education-which will require the action of Congress-or at least to reduce its jurisdiction, which includes the Federal Student Program, financing the first address of low-income areas, special education services for students with disabilities, civil rights complaints, and more.
In fact, this demolition work is underway. Members of Illon Musk obligated and burning Dodge The team was inside the agency during the past week, where the employees were placed on a paid vacation, and, According to To Washington mailFeeding “sensitive data from all over the Ministry of Education in artificial intelligence programs to investigate the agency and spending programs.” Perhaps I have informed artificial intelligence. The agency’s decision Eliminate Nine hundred million dollars of current contracts related to education research. NBC News stated that the agency will behavior The internal review aims to “ensure that the management grants are not funded discriminatory practices – including in the form of Dei.” On February 7, Democratic Congress members tried to enter the Ministry of Education building, only to obtain a security guard on their way. When a representative of Congress posted X around the accident, Musk replied, “There is no such part in the federal government.”
The Ministry of Education, assuming that it exists, has the smallest employees in any cabinet agency, and its duties are not necessarily well understood by the general public; Descriptions tend to rely on words such as “administration” and “censorship” – which feels sticky with the red tape. He does not decide how to teach and evaluate K-12 students in public schools-and this is mostly within the jurisdiction of individual states and local educational areas. In most of those areas, the federal government provides a relatively modest percentage of the school budget, usually in the thirteen percent stadium, although it varies in the state by state. Trump often speaks in terms of “sending all teaching and education work and needs the United States”, but most public education work is already done at the local level.
However, overcoming the agency will make a terrible blow to public schools, especially in rural areas and in high -density urban areas with low -income, which receives more shares than its funding from the federal government. Defenders also fear that the dismantling of the Ministry of Education will have an immediate and tangible impact on students with disabilities.
McMahon mission is compatible with the school selection movement (or educational-candidate), which, as opponents say, seeks to erode people’s confidence in public schools through their hunger from resources-most of them by supporting rented schools and voucher programs-by setting destabilization Critical race theory and gender ideology. The weapons offered by the school selection movement can be seen in its attacks on public schools in two executives issued by President Trump on January 29.
One of these orders that the Council of Ministers directed to review how the states use federal funds “to support families that choose educational alternatives to government entities, including special and appropriate options.” In other words, the Trump administration wants to nationalize K-12 vouchers ’programs already provided in seventeen states, where public funds for parents who want to put them in education in a private or narrow school are redirected or towards home education expenses. The other executive order, which dealt with “ending the radical indoctrination in teaching the kindergarten to the twelfth grade”, threatened to block federal funding from any school that fills “American anti -sabotage, harmful, and false to the children of our nation”, including “students towards surgical distortion The chemist “and” demanding contact with the “white concession”.
Dan Stewart, the administrative lawyer for education and employment in the National Disability Rights Network, which is the legal defense group, told me that through these executive orders, “This administration shares education at the partial level as well as the diamond level. It looks at the curricula, which traditionally in the strength of schools Local and the state, at the same time, are looking for different ways to transfer public dollars outside the system.
There is a lot of evidence for that Vertical programs You have negative educational results and a huge strain on state budgets. It is not common in the ballot box, too. In the last electoral cycle, Kentucky voted nearly two to one against amendment 2, which would allow the state legislature to put taxes in schools and rented vouchers; Fightly, this measure did not receive a majority in one province throughout the state. The pro -school polling measures failed in Colorado and Nebraska.
However, both the First Institute of Policy in America (AFPI), the general research tanks headed by McMahon, and the Heritage Foundation, where Project 2025 It has supported the educational selection law for children, which would provide a federal tax credit to stimulate charitable donations of voucher programs. AFPI estimates that the draft law “will enable 85-90 % of students in the country to benefit from the selection of schools through scholarships”, and the Arizona Country Program has allocated as a successful model-which is “saved the taxpayer money and comes under the budget”
This is the support of a mind by the McMahon thought reservoir. According to the non-profit organizations, our schools saved us, the state selection program cost the state for nine hundred million dollars during the fiscal year 2023-24, which exceeds its budget by three hundred million dollars; It now represents nearly half of the budget deficiency in Arizona. Most of the families who joined the program did not get their children out of public schools – instead, the vouchers work as a discount on the special tuition fees they were already paying, and as Souss Arizona said, “It represents a completely new cost for the state.”
Even allocating the dark financial burdens imposed by voucher programs, there are many families that are not provided by freedom of education, which have a lot in the way to choose the school. Some of these families live in rural societies (often dominated by Republicans) where private school options are limited or not present, and where public schools are major local employers; The voucher programs are bleeding only their budgets. Other families cannot carry the difference between the “scholarship” that their child receives through the state vouchers program and the actual study fees that local private schools receive. Others still have children who suffer from physical, intellectual, social or social disabilities. Their rights in the school are guaranteed to the Federal Law known as the Law of Education of Individuals, or the idea.
“The vast majority of ideas rights apply only to public school students,” Jessica Levin, the director of litigation at the Center for the Law of Non -profit, told me. IDEA imposes certificates requirements for special education teachers and students from being punished due to the manifestations of their disability. It also devotes parents’ rights to participate in developing their children’s education plans and arguing for more different services or services, which can range from speech therapy or professional therapy to auxiliary technology. “All these rights are lost when the student goes to a private school,” Levin said.
The project proposes 2025, which is circulating in the first federal address and special education financing in the granting of the bloc, which the states can manage without widespread federal supervision. “The states will not have an examination of how they comply with the idea or other federal laws,” Stewart said. The possible scenario for children with special needs, which is “fewer teachers, less money, late money, and less certainty.” Of course, according to the school selection movement, parents should have an opportunity that is not satisfied with the public school that suffers from financial hardship for their child to choose one in a prosperous educational market. In fact, Levin said: “It is legally allowed not to accept or serve students with disabilities, and therefore it ends up with a higher concentration than students with higher needs in schools that now have fewer resources.”
One of the global paradoxes at the intersection of school selection and private education is that not even the most supportive of public schools is to argue that the system is working well for children with disabilities. Currently, the federal government provides only about thirteen percent of the average cost of special education services under the idea-through its original pledge of forty percent half a century ago, when the idea was first transferred to the law. The vast majority of the states of education are not fully funded, leaving the provinces to cover the gap by dipping in public education budgets. Or not – often, they do not provide the services allocated legally.
Stewart told me that public and private schools alike are motivated to display students with disabilities as “a depletion of their resources.” The areas with a lack of financing in red, blue and purple are routinely failing these students, whether they are Illegal dam The percentage of children who can receive services or maintain parents intentionally In the dark About their constitutional rights. The idea may be legally called appropriately, as its protection often appears more theory than concrete.
