Top Down

  Will the last one out of the Department of Education please turn off the lights. 

If, that is, the building has not been burned to the ground. 

Being away from my classroom for the past month and a half, I have been able to keep my mind on the other tragedies that are befalling our nation as Project 2025 begins to take hold. While it is true that the ongoing siege by masked thugs in our cities and on the farms of this great land of ours reminds me that the families that I have served for nearly thirty years are at risk of being torn apart, I find myself wondering what I will be allowed to do once I get back there.

I suppose it would be easy enough to surrender to the seemingly inevitable end of the United States Department of Education. The very Republican ideal of turning the reins of education policy over to individual states wouldn't affect me abruptly, living as I do in the People's Republic of California. Here in the Bay Area, land of the Black Panthers and all things LGBTQ+, I expect it would take some time for the wokeness to be turned back. Here in Oakland, our hearts bleed proudly and profoundly. 

Sometimes to distraction. 

There are times when our push to be progressive gets in the way of our ability to affect change in our students. It's a forest/trees problem. But I am grateful to be working in a place where my profession is not bogged down by the dogma of a bunch of uptight bureaucrats whose focus is on the way things used to be instead of how things should be. 

The Supreme Court ruled that the Executive Branch  has the ultimate authority to make decisions about staffing levels, administrative organization, and day-to-day operations of federal agencies. This decision allowed The Trumpreich to cut staff in departments across the government. Nowhere is this more true than at the Department of Education, which is currently being razed in anticipation of the Secretary of Education doing exactly what her boss asked: To put herself out of a job.

For those of you who aren't familiar with the role of the Department of Education, this is the body that ensures equal access to education, and distributes federal funding for educational programs. It also works to enforce civil rights laws in schools and supports research to improve teaching and learning. More simply put, this keeps the playing field level across the aforementioned great land of ours. City to city. District to district. County to county. State to state. 

School to school. 

I would be lying if I said that I believed that public education in the United States does not need to be reformed. There has been a constant need for tweaking and revamping since the Boston Latin School opened in 1635. It continues to prepare students for college and the world beyond grades seven through twelve, and it's worth noting that it only became coed in 1972. The school where I work was opened in 1912. Things in Oakland were very different back then. What we teach has changed right along with who we teach. Over the past fifty years the additional federal funds have helped us continue to offer our best to the kids in our neighborhood. The money that came from the Department of Education. The Federal Government. 

The same Federal Government that just decided to double the budget of the Immigration And Customs Enforcement, just as they empty out the offices of the Department of Education. 

Something about that stinks. I take that back: All of that stinks. From the top down.