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Fired for Wokeism: the U.S. Department of Education

By Walter Donway

February 21, 2025

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President Trump has proclaimed the end of the U.S. Department of Education and is expected to issue an executive order to dismantle it. He directed his nominee for secretary of the department, Linda McMahon, to “put herself out of a job.”

Trump directed his nominee for secretary of the department, Linda McMahon, to “put herself out of a job.”

In 1979, after more than two centuries of local and state authority for U.S. education, President Jimmy Carter signed the law creating the department; it began operating in 1980 after the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare broke up as directed by the same legislation. In its inaugural year, it employed about 450 people and had an operating budget of about $14.2 million. In 2024, the payroll had lengthened to about 4,400 and the budget expanded to $238 million. Yet, supporters never tire of repeating that it is the smallest federal department.

Has it been “pivotal” in U.S. education policy? The chief argument advanced for its creation was that only a federal department could address “educational disparities” across states and promote “equal access” to quality education. But was it constitutional? Did the founders of the nation include education among its missions? Under the 10th amendment, the last in the Bill of Rights ratified in 1791, the federal government has only those powers delegated to it by the Constitution; all other powers not expressly forbidden to the states are “reserved” to them or the people.

Supreme Court decisions are viewed as reinforcing the 10th Amendment, which, in turn, implies that the Department of Education can provide funding and enforce civil rights laws, but does not have the authority to mandate specific curricula or establish schools. For instance, in Epperson v. Arkansas (1968), the Court invalidated an Arkansas statute that prohibited the teaching of human evolution in public schools, ruling that the statute violated the Establishment (separation of church and state) clause of the First Amendment. In effect, the Court is interpreted as having exerted its role in ensuring that state educational policies comply with constitutional protections and, by the same token, affirming the primary authority of states over educational content.

 

Money and Control

The Department, created to support education, is not allowed to get involved in education—not what is taught.

So, the Department, created to support education, is not allowed to get involved in education—not what is taught. Its real mission is enforcing civil rights, “equal access,” overcoming racial and other “disparities,” and, being government, doing so by spending money. It sounds like a federal budget to promote diversity, equality, and inclusiveness (D.E.I.) in the schools.

Title I Grants provide money for financial assistance to schools with high numbers of children from low-income families. [Equality?]

Federal Pell Grants offer grants to low-income undergraduate and certain postbaccalaureate students. [Equality?]

The Disabilities Education Act provides money for services to children with disabilities and governs how states and public agencies provide early intervention, special education, and related services. [Inclusiveness?]

Federal TRIO Programs are “college opportunity” programs for children from disadvantaged backgrounds. [Diversity? Equality? Inclusion?]

The Heritage Foundation reports the score to date:

The achievement gap between students at the highest and lowest ends of the economic scale has stayed the same for half a century. Today, reading and math scores, on average, are near historical lows. Meanwhile, taxpayers spent some $200 billion at the federal level on schools during the COVID-19 pandemic, on top of the more than $60 billion they spend annually just in federal school allocations (including state and local revenues, taxpayers spend some $800 billion yearly on education).

The grants programs seem to come down to another source of government welfare under the subheading: education. But it is a supremely useful adage that “he who pays set the terms”—i.e., calls the shots. As the Department has grown, its programs, “initiatives,” and directives have inventively diversified into a vast emporium of plans (all accompanied by a check) to drive every variant of diversity—racial, ethnic, “gender”—every conceivable lesson plan on equity—economic, “gender,” sexual—and an egalitarian approach to “inclusion” to assure that everyone is a high achiever and our “intelligence” cognitively, emotionally, socially, and politically “equal.”

 

How to Teach Johnny Postmodernist Ideology

Hoover Institution economist Thomas Sowell summed up his conclusions in Inside American Education: The Decline, The Deception, The Dogmas, writing: “The problem isn’t that Johnny can’t read. The problem isn’t even that Johnny can’t think. The problem is that Johnny doesn’t know what thinking is; he confuses it with feeling.” And:

We are raising whole generations who’ve come to regard facts as optional.

We are raising whole generations who’ve come to regard facts as optional. We have kids in elementary school who are urged to take stands on political issues, to write letters to congressman and the president about nuclear energy…They are taught that it’s important to have views and they’re not being taught that it’s important to know what you’re talking about, that it’s important to listen to the opposite viewpoint. And more important how to distinguish how view point A and viewpoint B are different, and which one has the most evidence or logic behind it… Objections to such propaganda programs are called objections to letting children think. Anything less than a blank check for indoctrination is called ‘censorship.

Here, Sowell is talking about the philosophical progeny of the 19th-century German “transcendental idealism” of Kant, Nietzsche, and Heidegger that inspired both Marxism and National Socialism and that, in the 1960s, wedded with neo-Marxism, became the prevailing philosophy of the late 20th century: postmodernism, which has dominated academia and increasingly the intellectual professions at large.

William Bennett, secretary of the Department from 1985 to 1988, assessed the results of its ever-expanding role and reach: “If you look at those numbers, you get the story for 30 years. If there’s a bottom line, it’s that we’re spending twice as much money on education as we did in ’83 and the results haven’t changed all that much.” (The Book of Virtues, Simon & Schuster, 1993.)

President Trump’s proposal to dismantle the Department, if approved by Congress, would fulfill a promise, pledge, and plea by Republicans almost since Jimmy Carter created the Department. The Republican Party platform of 1980 called for the elimination of the Department; in 2000, the Republican Liberty Caucus passed a resolution to abolish the Department; in 2008 and 2012, presidential candidate Ron Paul campaigned in opposition to the Department.

It is difficult to imagine that anyone not steeped in the doctrines of “woke” education could read The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture by Manhattan Institute scholar, Heather Mac Donald, without marveling that ideology could get such a grip on a department not involved in “curriculum” and “content.” With documents, interviews, statistics, and anecdotes, she details DEI programs that have eroded academic standards under the banner of diversity and inclusion and the radical feminist agenda that has driven the wildly exaggerated claims of campus rape with policies that compromise due process and inflate the perception of danger.

In When Race Trumps Merit: How the Pursuit of Equity Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty, and Threatens Lives, Mac Donald looks at the application of “disparate-impact” analysis to school-discipline policies under federal guidelines. During the Obama administration, says Mac Donald, the Education and Justice Departments had “threatened schools with litigation and the loss of federal funding if they did not bring down black and Hispanic disciplinary rates to the same level as whites and Asians.”

That is, the Department mandated a shift from accountability for individual actions to equalizing the number of disciplinary infractions among races, regardless of behavior. Teachers became helpless when minority students acted out in class—and both teachers and students knew it. The policy? “Restorative-justice,” to ensure that disciplinary infractions and suspensions do not “disproportionately punish students of color.”

Of course, for ideologues, education is never an end in itself; but only a means to social change. And Mac Donald makes the urgent point that racial preferences and the entire woke agenda are rapidly extending beyond the schools into every American institution, and there reshaping America at large. A philosophy of individualism is the foundation of educational systems focused on the student’s development, achievements, and preparation for life. But the ideas and ideologies that Mac Donald characterizes and traces are rooted not in the needs and best interests of the student, but in the epistemological skepticism and collectivism (systemic doubt, emotionalism, identity politics, political correctness) of postmodernism.

One key to understanding the fundamental philosophical revolution that the Department of Education was promptly co-opted to advance is philosopher Ayn Rand’s definition of “collectivized rights,” promoted by postmodernism to supplant individual rights:

Since only an individual man can possess rights, the expression “individual rights” is a redundancy (which one has to use for purposes of clarification in today’s intellectual chaos). But the expression “collective rights” is a contradiction in terms.

Any group or “collective,” large or small, is only a number of individuals. A group can have no rights other than the rights of its individual members.

A group, as such, has no rights. A man can neither acquire new rights by joining a group nor lose the rights which he does possess. The principle of individual rights is the only moral base of all groups or associations.

 

“Anti-American, Subversive, Harmful, and False Ideologies”

Trump’s executive order of January 29, 2025, “Ending Racial Indoctrination in K-12 School,” set forth a remarkable list of definitions of “discriminatory equity ideology” that are “imprinting anti-American, subversive, harmful, and false ideologies on our Nation’s children.”

Examples of such ideas:

An individual, by virtue of the individual’s race, color, sex, or national origin, is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously;

An individual’s moral character or status as privileged, oppressing, or oppressed is primarily determined by the individual’s race, color, sex, or national origin;

Members of one race, color, sex, or national origin cannot and should not attempt to treat others without respect to their race, color, sex, or national origin.

“Patriotic education” means a presentation of the history of America grounded in: (I) an accurate, honest, unifying, inspiring, and ennobling characterization of America’s founding and foundational principles.

The four “definitions” of patriotic education are put in positive terms.

And we move on to the definition and exemplification of “social transition…the process of adopting a ‘gender identity’ or ‘gender marker’ that differs from a person’s sex…” and examples such as names changes, bathroom use, athletic competition. Again, these are tendered as “definitions” then employed in the following eight pages of comprehensive legal detail about laws, programs, prohibitions, required actions.

 

From Revolution to Reaction

The new administration has mounted a full, frontal, and unabashed denunciation of “the politically correct,” “the woke,” “indoctrination” in schools. After decades of tiptoeing around self-righteously asserted “woke” imperatives, punctuated by regular cries of incredulous anger and ridicule from critics who thereby risked being “cancelled” for bigotry, these theses are nailed on the door of the church.

To most Americans, this raid on Harper’s Ferry (to change the metaphor) was inconceivable until Donald Trump became the champion of reaction. Reaction had to come. The Sixties ideal of “color blindness” had become D.E.I., “toleration of different lifestyles” had become same-sex marriage and transgenderism, and clean-air-and-water had become an anti-industrial revolution to change the earth’s long-term climate.

The new administration has mounted a full, frontal, and unabashed denunciation of “the politically correct,” “the woke,” “indoctrination” in schools.

The reaction came after eight years of almost daily outrage at the latest new thing from Trump. After years of concerted attacks to label him a “racist,” “fascist,” ‘bigoted” peril to democracy, and after the 2024 election, it finally became evident that he dismissed every attack and cared not a damn for the consensus of left-liberal postmodernist opinion—and neither did a startling number of voters and mega-well-heeled financial supporters.

The revolution had met the reaction. The Department of Education epitomized the woke revolution. Its proposed elimination epitomizes the reaction.

You can only get away with so much:

We sit by and watch the barbarian. We tolerate him in the long stretches of peace, we are not afraid. We are tickled by his irreverence; his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creed refreshes us; we laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond, and on these faces there are no smiles.

 

 

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