Flashpost: Reflections on the Department of Education Purpose

I cannot STRESS to you all how frustrating it is to hear so much misinformation surrounding the Department of Education. It is clear to me that people have such a limited understanding of government and even less understanding the history behind why things are the way they are.

For example, the ONLY reason we have a Department of Education is because of the legal racial and socioeconomic discrimination in the states during the 20th century (and if you want to go beyond the department itself to the historical foundations of the department - the DOE was only a possibility because of Reconstruction and the the role the formerly enslaved played in pursuing federal protection for education after they were legally prohibited from learning to read and write in most places prior to the Civil War).

When people (often GOP politicians) tell you that the DOE needs to be destroyed so that we can return education to the states - they are not lying, but they are mischaracterizing what that means. People usually want that to mean that the States control the substance of education. But here is the thing:

Currently, as the law stands now and has stood forever - states and localities control curriculum, they control teacher salaries, they control administrative salaries, for the most part they control school funding, they even control the level/amount of "choice" allowed in your state.

What they DO NOT CONTROL, or better yet what individuals are protected from them overstepping is civil rights protections for students - this includes race, this includes disability, this includes poor schools, this includes encouraging and making possible college education, and recently it has also included sex discrimination (which might be sufficient for some people to throw the whole thing out even if it means they lose their own protection).

My point is this, yes those of us who know history, those of us who live or know people that live in the most affected areas, are "afraid of getting away from what we are used to" because we know how fragile and unstable the equality progress we have made since the 1960s is.

Even if unintentional, a total reset in America means wiping away all the wins of Reconstruction, it means wiping away all the progress of the New Deal, it means wiping away all the wins of the Civil Rights Movement (which by the way in all instances led to increased rights and quality of life for more than just Black people, in fact it often meant more benefits for others - the New Deal especially so).

But perhaps that is in fact the point.