After he won
the Nevada Republican caucuses in 2016, the
current President crowed about his victory.
“We won with young. We won with
old. We won with highly educated.
We won with poorly educated. I
love the poorly educated.” Congressman
Bobby Scott (D-VA) reflected on this comment
as he asked Republicans to join Democrats in
preserving the Department of Education.
The 47th President
loves the poorly educated because he knows how
to manipulate them, and because the less you know, the more
you can be persuaded by false rhetoric.
The cuts in education, including cuts in
educational services for the differently
abled, both physically and intellectually, will likely
have a long-term deleterious effect on the
condition of education in our country.
The President’s reason for cutting the
Department of Education is poor test scores,
but the first phase of cuts, separating at
least 1300 workers from their jobs, will also
likely reduce the amount of educational data
that is available. So, we may not learn,
from the Survey if Doctorate Recipients (SDR),
which academic areas we need to boost.
We are not able to follow graduates over
time to analyze career trends. Fewer
employees collecting data may impact data
accuracy.
Given this
President’s anti-DEI stance, we may not
measure achievement gaps appropriately.
Many of my researcher colleagues are
concerned that this anti-detail-oriented
President and his motley crew of incompetents,
prefer aggregate numbers to disaggregated
ones. That means they may continue to
report an overall unemployment rate, but fail
to report changes in Black, Latino, and Asian
unemployment. Data collection costs
money, and the President’s aim is to cut
budgets. That includes more than $600
million in grants, many which go to benefit
the “least and the left out”. Further,
many are concerned that the Office of Civil
Rights has reduced effectiveness because of
staff cuts. The Office of Civil Rights
lost at least 240 employees, including 180
staff attorneys. Regional offices have
been closed, making it more difficult for
people to file civil rights complaints.
People aren’t
taking this action lying down. The
National Education Association (NEA), the
NAACP, and the American Federation of Teachers
(AFT) are all suing the Department of
Education to prevent its closure.
According to the NEA “If the Education
Department is broken apart, the rights of
students, particularly our most vulnerable –
to an education that imparts academic lessons,
civil rights protections, and prepares them
for their future, will be undercut”. In
addition, with fewer worker protections, and
an indifference to safety net supports, people
will be forced into low wage work instead of
workforce development activities that will
better prepare them for good jobs in the
future.
This president
loves the poorly educated because they are
most easily exploited. We are headed
into a dystopian nightmare unless Democrats
are willing to take some action. This
President and his allies, assisted by a woman
who used to lead Worldwide Wrestling (great
preparation to lead the Department of
Education) will reorganize or eliminate many
critical functions of the Department of
Education. Our young people will be the
ones to pay.
This year 3.9
million young people are slated to graduate
from high school. About 62 percent of
them will enroll in either two or four year colleges.
What will be
the atmosphere on campuses this fall? Unless
some of the lawsuits are successful,
lower-income students, differently abled
students, and those in need of
extra services will be sidelined. DEI
programs that offered counseling and solace to
some students are likely to be dismantled.
Tens of thousands of students, if not
millions, will be disadvantaged by the way the
Department of Education is being transformed
to the Department of MisEducation.
This is the era
of the MisEducation of the Marginalized.
Scrubbing our history books of references to Black,
Brown, and other patriots is just a first step
towards dismantling
any notion of critical thinking. This
current President and his minions are
dedicated to ignorance, and indeed they love
the “poorly educated”. What does this
mean for our nation’s future?
