Zeroing Public Ed

As the year winds down and the federal Department of Education continues to whittle away at public education, it's worth revisiting a ProPublica article by Megan O'Matz and Jennifer Smith Richards from back in October. Yes, I know that feels like a million years ago, but that, I think, is one of the troubling effects of living in the flooded zone of our moment-- things seem like they happened a million years ago and so surely they must be over. Except they aren't.

The piece highlighted how Linda McMahon has brought into the department many folks from the way-right-wing thinky tank advocacy world. 

That includes Lindsey Burke, the Heritage Foundation ed policy honcho who wrote Project 2025's education section-- which kicks off with a paean to Milton Friedman, granddaddy of school vouchers. The project's education priorities included erasing LGBTQ persons, turning federal money into stringless block grants, and most of all, vouchers for everyone. ProPublica analyzed hours of video and audio and discovered the same thing-- the Trump/McMahon department is focused on vouchers for everyone as a path out of public schools. They found one quote from Burke, speaking at an event for the Association of Classical Christian Schools in 2024

I'm optimistic that, you know, five years from now a majority of kids are going to be in a private school choice program.

The department also picked up two folks from Defending Education, formerly Parents Defending Education. You may have missed that back on April 9, 2025, this astroturf activist anti-public ed group dropped "parents" from its name, which may be the one honest thing they've done since they grabbed a pile of dark money and started harassing public schools across the country under the pretense that they were a group of concerned parents and not a professional political operation.

The department also hired heavily from McMahon's own group-- America First Policy Institute-- which came close to being blunt about their goals in a 2023 paper titled “Biblical Foundations” in which they wrote that "the Bible makes it clear that it is parents alone who shoulder the responsibility for their children.” That's the Friedman ideal-- no collective or societal responsibility to educate children and certainly no such responsibility exercised through government action. It's all on you, parents.

The Department has also partnered with another fresh Heritage hire for Heritage Action, the political action wing-- Tiffany Justice. Justice has dropped the whole "regular mom sitting at the kitchen table baking cookies and running t-shirt sale fundraisers" baloney and embraced her role as a professional political operative. Justice had made it known that she would be delighted to serve as Trump's education secretary. Justice helped launch the DEI tattling site (which only lasted about three months). 

It was Justice who gave ProPublica the clearest, most direct quote. They asked her what percentage of children should be in public school:

I hope zero. I hope to get to zero.

So much of what these folks do is best understood through that lens. Even the attempts to inject their religion into public schools can be understood as just an attempt to turn public schools into private religious schools.  

It's not about fairness or "rescuing" students from poor schools or the improving power of competition and not even about choice. It's about ending public education, about getting the government out of the business of overseeing and providing education, about ending the theft-by-taxation that forces some folks to pay to educate Those Peoples' Children, about ending a system that keeps True Believers from fully empowering their biased discrimination, and most especially about ending a system that tries to elevate people above their Proper Place in a society that doles out power and privilege only to those who Really Deserve it. And right now these folks are in the halls of power in the United States Department of Education.