Donald Trump is following the dictator’s playbook as he uses his shock and awe campaign against American democracy and society. Little of what Trump and his agents and allies are doing is a surprise. One only has to look at Orban’s Hungary or Putin’s Russia (or Germany in the 1930s) as warnings and predictions for what the United States is quickly on the road to becoming. For Trump and his forces to succeed they will need compliant and obedient authoritarian subjects who either through surrender, agreement, self-interest, indifference, exhaustion or for some other reason(s) agree to the “legitimacy” of such a regime in America.
By the very nature of how power is concentrated around the Leader and their inner circle, autocracies and authoritarian regimes are almost always kleptocracies and plutocracies. Here, corrupt political power is a means to amass even more corrupt financial and economic power. The United States in the Age of Trump is closely following this model as well. The plutocrats and kleptocrats will also need compliant subjects who see themselves first as consumers and workers — most of whom will be stuck in a state of perpetual survival mode and economic precarity as they try to endure cannibal capitalism — and not primarily as citizens and responsible members of a humane society with any obligation or responsibility to other human beings beyond their immediate family and “community.”
In total, the new MAGA America that the Trump administration and its forces are trying to impose on the American people will need “citizens” who lack the ability to imagine other possibilities and a better and more just society and fulfilled life, cannot tell the difference between fact and fiction, truth and lies or good and evil. Control over America’s educational system and schools is essential for creating compliant subjects who will internalize and normalize these autocratic and authoritarian (and outright fascist) values, beliefs, and ways of living and thinking. Control over the country’s schools and education system will also mean denying young people and the larger public the means to understand and contextualize the present by distorting the past.
In an attempt to better understand how America’s educational system is under siege in the Age of Trump and how the lessons of the long Black Freedom Struggle can be applied today in the struggle to defend American democracy and freedom, I recently spoke with Derek W. Black. He is the Ernest F. Hollings Chair in Constitutional Law at the University of South Carolina and one of the country’s leading experts in education, law and public policy. Derek Black’s essays and other writing have appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Washington Post, The Atlantic and elsewhere. His research has been published in the Yale Law Journal, Stanford Law Review, NYU Law Review, California Law Review, Cornell Law Review, Northwestern University Law Review, Vanderbilt Law Review and dozens of others. His new book is “Dangerous Learning: The South’s Long War on Black Literacy.”
This is the second part of a two-part conversation.
The Trump administration is trying to destroy the Department of Education. Why does the right-wing hate the Department of Education so much?
Most people think of the Department of Education and the federal role in education as an invention of 1979. The truth is that the federal government has been instrumental in getting public education off the ground since the nation’s founding. Before we even had a Constitution, Congress was putting structures in place to ensure that all new territories and states provided public education. Congress redoubled that effort following the Civil War, requiring the states to guarantee public education in their state constitutions and establish the first Department of Education. Those post-war efforts brought public education to a region that previously had very little. White illiteracy rates, for instance, were four times higher in the South than in the North. Jim Crow and objections to federal overreach, of course, cut that legacy short.
"When the current administration talks about returning education decision-making to states, you have to ask what exactly is being returned to states, because as we currently stand, anti-discrimination is the only real area where the federal government plays a huge decision-making role."
Modern objections are not too far detached from that legacy. It was the Department of Justice and the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) at the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare that forced southern schools to desegregate. That office would later move to the Department of Education. It has been instrumental in ensuring equal opportunity based on race, sex, disability, language status, and other categories. And the general Department of Education’s testing and accountability standards are likewise focused on closing achievement gaps for those students. In short, the Department has always stood for expanding opportunity and closing equity gaps.
It, however, has never stood for curriculum, never dictated what is on the tests, how the teachers are trained or any of that stuff. Those things have always remained with the states. In fact, federal law specifically prohibits the department from dictating curriculum to states. So, when the current administration talks about returning education decision-making to states, you have to ask what exactly is being returned to states, because as we currently stand, anti-discrimination is the only real area where the federal government plays a huge decision-making role.
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This past week the administration sadly made good on its promises, firing half of the Department of Education’s staff. OCR was actually among the hardest hit at the Department, seeing over half of its regional offices closed. Those offices were already overworked and begging for more staff for the last decade. With these new losses, families hoping to secure equal access for their children in school may find that when they reach out to the federal government there is simply no one on the other end to help them anymore.
The move to give public money to private charter schools — and in particular Christian schools is central to the right wing’s decades-long war on America’s public schools. What does the empirical research tell us about the comparative outcomes of charter schools versus public schools?
There is a lot of misguided, fanciful thinking around these topics. When you compare apples to apples, public schools, on average, have long outperformed charter schools. The difference between private and public schools is only marginal, with public schools just slightly outperforming private schools. People don’t understand this because all they see is that the average SAT at a private school may be higher than the average SAT at the local public school. This doesn’t tell you much, however, because the “average” student doesn’t attend private school. You have to look at whether the child from a high-income family, both of whose parents have advanced degrees, is performing better at the private school than the public school. The truth is that that student does very well in either school, so the private school is not actually improving education for that student.
The reason why some private schools have higher average scores isn’t because they are teaching something special but because they don’t have any or many low-income students. And even if there was something special about those schools, they do not actually want to enroll more low-income or harder-to-teach students. Vouchers are not going to open those schools up to a new set of students.
If you understand this, you understand that private school vouchers are really about breaking up public schools, giving rebates to private school families who don’t need them, and further facilitating the fracturing of public schools that serve everyone into demographic private silos. Vouchers came into existence in the 1960s as a way to avoid racial desegregation.
Poor and working-class Black and brown parents whose children attend “failing urban schools” have been made the spokespeople and symbols of the school privatization and school charter movement. The school privatization industry and its public relations and marketing people are very skilled. What would you tell those parents who just want the best for their kids?
I have always said that I am in no position to tell Black and brown parents what to do. Many live in communities that have never for one moment in this nation’s history fully met the needs of students of color. I get it when those families say they feel compelled to try something new, that they are tired of waiting. I can’t second-guess that. However, with that said, I am confident that we as a society will not find our educational promised land anywhere but in our public schools. And if we give up on public schools, that land will only become more and more distant. I think the onus, however, cannot fall just on students of color to get us there. White families have to see our common interests with families of color and their children and step up — in a hurry.
Even in the 21st century, the pernicious lie that Black Americans do not value education still persists. What are some of the broad strokes of this lie and myth?
It was illegal for Black enslaved people to learn to read. As a practical matter, it was official state policy for Black people to remain an illiterate population through the end of Jim Crow (and beyond). Black people resisted this at every turn.
As I detail in my new book, the Black struggle for literacy is the closest thing we have to a holy testament to the connection between literacy and our humanity. People were willing to risk their lives to learn to read and write long before they ever thought about voting, and they protected literacy over the course of decades, passing it on in the dark of the night to their children and friends. That passion then fueled the fire of public education after slavery. As Du Bois wrote, public education in the South was a Black idea.
I think David Walker’s words are as true today as they were in 1829. He saw Black people and democracy itself laboring under the burden of oppression, delusion and ignorance. He called on Black people to rise up and seize their freedom. At the time, the ultimate goal was physical freedom. But he was very clear that the first step to physical freedom was mental freedom and that would be had through education. Those words still ring true today. He also called on America to live up to its highest ideals, which required a hard look in the mirror and an unvarnished appreciation of facts.
To borrow from Faulkner, "The past is never dead. It's not even past." That certainly resonates today as we are seeing the decades of hard-won progress along the color line being literally whitewashed and erased by the Trump administration, the MAGA movement and the larger White Right. They are attempting to push American society back to the Gilded Age if not before with all of the horrors that will be bring, not just for Black and brown people but for anyone who is not a rich white heterosexual man.
I think that we have gotten to this moment of imperiled democracy not because the forces of regression are so much stronger than those of the past. I would posit that they may very well be weaker. We have gotten to this point because our society recently pushed for more justice, particularly in our schools, and that push summoned our demons and now they are lashing out more violently. Yet, I do believe our democracy is more imperiled than in the past because we fail to take the moment seriously and those sleepwalking alongside the assault on democracy think our institutions are immune to collapse.
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Many of our elected officials and leaders see the current moment as simply a policy dispute over vouchers, charters, or curricular topics. They do not appreciate how these issues are tied to a long war on equality and opportunity in education, nor do they appreciate how our public schools have always been tied to the health of our democracy. As a result, they are willing to tinker with a sacred public institution, not realizing that if they break the one institution that pulls us together, we may never pull ourselves together again — or as I often say, if public schools become the place where only low-income students go, the public education project as we know it is over and it is hard to imagine it coming back. And if you think our democracy is struggling now, imagine a day when our schools are segregated by race, religion, wealth, and political party. I don’t know how we move forward as a people at that point.
In doing the research for “Dangerous Learning: The South’s Long War on Black Literacy”, what surprised you the most about the role of education as resistance in the long Black Freedom Struggle?
This book is first and foremost in honor of the Black heroes who used literacy to propel freedom. The secret schools that managed to operate under white people’s noses for decades impressed and inspired me the most. But maybe I was most surprised by the diversity of thought in the South in the early 1800s. I had always assumed that the South was of one simple mind on questions of slavery. I found that there were more than just a few enslavers who questioned the system. There were more than just a couple of religious leaders who resisted the status quo. I am not suggesting that those folks would have ever turned the South in a different direction, but I do know that when the South silenced those folks in the 30s and 40s, the South radicalized and became unsafe for anyone who did not espouse the new party line. In the 1820s, for instance, the North Carolina Manumission Society had 1,600 members.
Eight years later, only twelve people attended the annual meeting, the last it would ever hold. In 1831-32, the Virginia General Assembly debated the abolition of slavery for several weeks. A year later it had ended that debate and turned toward a more repressive agenda. No serious talk of abolition would ever be uttered in polite company again.
What will America’s schools, including colleges and universities, look like if the Trump administration and larger right-wing’s “reforms” as detailed in Project 2025, Agenda 47, and elsewhere are put in place?
They clearly want to dramatically expand private school choice and end what they call the “public school monopoly.” The result will be the end of public education as we know it. Kids will sort into socioeconomic, religious, racial, and other enclaves. And if our public schools become the place where only low-income students attend school, the public education project is over. We tried a system like that in the 1800s. It never worked and we abandoned it for common schools that would serve everyone. That is the backbone upon which we moved to a more perfect union.
At the higher education level, they are also going directly after universities and colleges that remain committed to diverse and inclusive environments. I believe that some of our higher education leaders are going to stand their ground and ultimately prevail in court. But in the meantime, I fear that a lot of others are going to be afraid and the composition of our college campuses and the instruction they offer may dramatically change.
What role does America’s schools and educational system play in what will be a very long struggle in defense of and to rehabilitate and renew America’s democracy in the aftermath of the Trump years (and the years and decades prior that spawned the disaster)?
The expansion of public education and access to the ballot box have walked hand in hand across the long arc of American history. Each time one expanded, so did the other. At the same time, attempts to restrict democracy have run through the ballot box and education. I think this is, again, what people miss. I am hoping that relatively few Americans think it is a good idea to deny people the right to vote or to intentionally make it hard for particular people to vote. That same group should be equally concerned about policies that will shrink the one institution perpetually committed to the expansion of educational opportunity and equality — and that is our public schools.
There are many models of schooling and education that exist outside of the formal public school system. Black and brown and other marginalized communities have created these parallel institutions for centuries. How can those models and lessons be applied today?
I think we should look back at our secret schools and freedmen schools for inspiration. Those communities did not allow larger circumstances to define the stories they would tell or the opportunities they would share. So now may very well be the time for our religious and other communities of good faith to start freedom schools, or whatever they want to call them, to keep the flames of freedom and truth alive and well. I know some communities in Florida did exactly that in the aftermath of the first anti-CRT bills.
Your new book will likely be banned by Trump’s administration per its thoughtcrime regime. How does that feel?
I honestly had never considered that until you and a few others mentioned it. I tried to tell as honest and complete a story as I could. While the introduction and conclusion involve some editorializing, the 15 internal chapters of the book are straight historical facts that leave the readers to draw whatever conclusions they like. If we start banning historical facts, I don’t know what is left of American freedom. I suppose that would put us back to something close to the censorship of the 19th century that I write about in the book.
Where do we go from here?
I will just say that we have seen worse than this. When I say I believe we can get past this moment, it is not just wishful thinking. But those before us came at the challenge with a level of determination. They didn’t overcome it by sitting on the sideline. Those of us who believe in public education must be active and in the game. I will leave the plays we call for another day.
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