The Great Disappearance Act

If you'd like to contact the U.S. Department of Education to discover what issues might be relevant to it, good luck. You'll have to find them first, as well as the department itself.

The gonzo, insipid excuse for our national administration completed a 70-year process of eliminating any essence of providing a place for educational priorities the other day, when it announced that for the most part, the USDOE would be gutted and absorbed into several other Cabinet positions.

Oh, yes. It started way back then. The minute that the Supreme Court announced its decision in Brown v. Board, segregationists began planning and plotting for integration in our schools to disappear--even though at that particular moment, it hadn't yet started.

The first state to take a measured approach to this was, ironically, Virginia, which is now a state controlled by Democrats. But most of the rest of the old Confederacy has stood its ground, gathering up opponents of federal intervention into just about anything, including White Citizen's Councils and various other ersatz organizations which, among other things, scream about godless public schools (as noted in a recent book called Money, Lies and God, by Katherine Stewart. It'll open your eyes about the pervasiveness of these crazies.).

But it took Ronald Reagan, the emergence of the Federalist Society, and thorough funding behind a stubborn, closed-minded devotion to "originalist" legal philosophy that has kept education from becoming anything near a national priority. So did the Founding Fathers include education in the original Constitution? Well, no. But four years before the Constitution was written, the seriously self-hampered but functional Congress passed the Northwest Ordinance, which had as one of its parts the raising of funding for public schools by land sales. So you could say with some justification that they determined education to be so important that they included it as a priority before the rest of the country fell apart so badly that they had to start over.

No matter. It has culminated in the utilization of the same 'Deep State' that right-wing radicals have condemned for decades now--all the more useful in watching educational priorities dissolve, like the Mafia dumping corpses into acid vats or inside walls. Michael C. Bender notes in a New York Times article (11/18) that these have been adjustments in moving educational directives around:

• A child care grant program for college students and foreign medical school accreditation--to Health and Human Services;
• Fulbright programs and international education grants--to State;
• Indian Education--to Interior;
• About three dozen programs that provide funding for low-income schools will be siphoned--to the Labor Department;
• A serious reduction in the department's Office for Civil Rights, created to enforce Congress's promise of equal educational opportunity for all students, so that what's left will be shifted--to the Justice Department (and good luck for that initiative; they're too busy feeding 47's temper tantrums);
• Eliminated the DOE's research arm for tracking student achievement, which has dropped due to a number of things, including COVID-19;
• Adult education, family literacy programs and career and technical education--to Labor.

All that will, of course, allow some empty desks created by DOGE to be filled up. But tracing them? Best wishes. All in line with making education as a national emphasis disappear. "We're going to shut it down, and shut it down as quickly as possible," said our unesteemed president of the DOE. Check back in six months to see if any of those programs, of course funding by Congress, have as much as a name plate on someone's desk.

The most important removal is that which will be missing after decades of activity: Lobbying by teachers' unions. Knowing who to contact, and where, is essential to monitoring attention and funding. With the absorption of educational programs into various other Cabinet agencies will come along with it a xeroxed response to inquiries: We'll get back to you. Which means: You might as well be looking for the Loch Ness monster.

The underlying idea of all this is to hand education back to the states, to avoid any federal commitment whatsoever. The most vital lynchpin to this is the guarantee that children of color get the same kind of instruction, supplies, and attention that white students have always had. Leave it to the states, and once again, they get swept under the rug. That was the idea behind the resistance to the Brown decision in 1954, and it hasn't changed a bit. 

The Republicans have finally managed to gain control over education so that it can back-handedly dismiss it. Lip service? Plenty of that. But little else.

Some time ago now, I recall a state legislator in Wisconsin who off-handedly suggested to me that the federal government just give its money to the states. That was Glenn Grothman, then a West Bend state legislator, now the Republican Congressperson from Wisconsin's 6th District. 

That conversation was about 30 years ago. I never asked him why he took that position. I wish I would have. At any rate, you won't find an objection to the dismantling of the Department of Education coming from his office, for one example. That would make the big crab in what's left of the White House very unhappy.

In the meantime, education, which has always struggled to find a place in national priorities, will be taking a very definite step backwards. 47 would rather you not worry about it at all. He'll use the bureaucracy he says he otherwise hates, creating a handy smokescreen so that you don't: the Great Disappearance Act. Out of sight, out of mind.

Be well. Be careful. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.

Mister Mark