Up next on Trump's to-do list: defunding the Education Department

Given the frenzied pace with which Donald Trump is signing executive orders, it may come as no surprise that his dream of dismantling the US Education department is next up.

Speaking anonymously, insiders have indicated that the order will be signed sometime this month by the President and will stipulate a two-tier strategy for closing the department down and farming its powers and responsibilities out to other agencies, something that will require congressional approval, Politico reports.

Donald Trump made it clear in his  inaugural speech that the US public education system would be in the firing line given his conviction that it is among the "horrible betrayals" visited upon the American people.

“We have an education system that teaches our children to be ashamed of themselves — in many cases, to hate our country despite the love that we try so desperately to provide to them,” he told his audience at the inauguration ceremony on January 20.

“All of this will change starting today, and it will change very quickly,” he added to deafening applause.

But what exactly has Trump in mind when he refers to these drastic changes to the public school system, which neither he nor his children attended?

Trump himself was driven to his private school, Kew-Forest School in the Queens neighborhood of Forest Hills, by the family chauffeur until bad behavior saw him moved to a military academy, reports PBS.

All five of his children by his three marriages were educated at private schools, including the youngest Barron from his current marriage to Melania.

First off, the new President is determined that more Americans get a private education by expanding the “school choice” programs with tax breaks for people wanting to send their kids to private schools.

Republicans believe the government should help parents pay for private schooling but teachers’ unions and many Democrats say such a program negatively impacts the public system that educates 50 million US children, Reuters reports.

One of Trump’s main beefs with the public system is that it offers students a perspective on America’s history that clashes with the traditional version.

In his July 4 address in 2020, Trump maintained that students were led to “believe that the men and women who built it were not heroes but villains,” leading to the toppling of statues such as that of George Washington, The Washington Post reports.

In a precursor to the actual dismantling of the department,  funding cuts will mean the suffering of critical services targeted at low-income students and pupils of color, resulting in poor educational outcomes for these groups, say experts.

Trump plans could also alter how the department investigates civil rights complaints to “reshape civil rights enforcement towards their (the Republicans’) ideological purposes,” Rachel Perera, a fellow at the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institute, told The Guardian.

In fact, Trump has promised to get the department to investigate “anti-white” civil rights violations, which could interfere with race discrimination investigations, Perera added.

To be led in the interim by Linda McMahon, who is yet to have her nomination hearing scheduled, the department will also attempt to change the public school curriculum which will involve a ban on race and s e x education.

“While they seek to reduce or eliminate [the department], they are directly seeking to insert the federal government in reviewing and determining appropriate curriculum content for students and programming run by schools,” said Sarah Hinger, the deputy director of the ACLU racial justice program, in The Guardian.

“We’re really seeing a whole flip of the idea of the federal government’s role in education,” she added.

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