Donald Trump promised during his campaign to abolish the Ministry of Education. It’s been a favorite policy goal of the right since the agency’s founding in 1980 under former President Jimmy Carter and is laid out in Project 2025, the conservative playbook that Trump will likely use once he returns to the White House. .

But Trump doesn’t need to shut down the department to launch an all-out war on public schools.

He outlined his plan for education in a video last year, saying he would not only close the agency, but restore prayer in schools, end the alleged indoctrination of students and remove politics from schools.

“We will ensure that our classrooms are not focused on political indoctrination but on teaching the knowledge and skills needed to succeed,” Trump said, adding: “We will teach students to love their country, and not to hate him as they were rightly taught.” NOW.”

It’s the same agenda that right-wing culture warriors have been pushing in red states for four years — and Trump wants to expand it across the country.

“This new desire to go after the Department of Education is not so much a sincere desire to reduce the size of government or even reduce the role of the federal government,” said Jon Valant, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution, said HuffPost. “It’s more about this continued attack on public education as a concept and the erosion of support for public schools in general.”

The primary functions of the Department of Education are to fund programs for low-income populations. schools and children with disabilities and protect students from discrimination. If Trump managed to abolish it, it would be a disaster for the entire country. But public education has become increasingly politicized, and support for public schools, particularly among Republicans, is now at an all-time low.

The next Trump administration will likely seize on this sentiment to further attack public schools by repealing Biden-era rules designed to make them safe and equitable for all students, supporting the expansion of programs that take away funds from public schools and by promoting laws that restrict public schools. books and censor teachers.

“One of their first actions would be to remove Title IX protections for LGBTQ+ students,” Valant said. Title IX is the federal regulation that protects students from discrimination based on sex. The Biden administration expanded it to include protections for students in the LGBTQ+ community. Republicans have fought the change from the start, and several GOP-led states have filed lawsuits to block the rule.

A overwhelming majority of transgender students reported feeling unsafe or unwelcome at school.

Then there’s the Office for Civil Rights. This branch of the Department of Education allows students, parents, and families to sue their school districts for civil rights violations. Often, the department works with both parties to seek a resolution, as it is a low-risk means of resolving civil rights violations. But Project 2025 proposes to empty the office and only allow lawsuits to go to court, eliminating any opportunity to combat discrimination in our nation’s schools.

Parental rights have been at the forefront of the conservative agenda for years, and the incoming Trump administration has already indicated it will follow suit. The term is broad, but Republicans use it to pass laws and measures that restrict books and censor teachers.

“There is broad support among Republican Party for some form of parental rights bill and there is some common understanding of what that should mean,” Valant said.

Several states have already passed their own versions of parental rights bills, such as Iowa and Tennessee. These laws often ban books that conservatives consider sexually explicit, but generally target books with LGBTQ+ themes. Teachers are generally limited in what they can say about gender identity and sexual orientation and are required to inform parents if their child wishes to use a different name or pronoun at school, even against the will of the student.

Abolishing the Department of Education would also mean getting rid of Title I funding, the program that supports low-income schools across the country. But because red states are disproportionately dependent on these funds, the Trump administration would face fierce bipartisan opposition to any rollback of Title I. Instead, Republicans would likely focus on voucher programs. studies.

These programs, which are often expensive and operate with little oversight, give parents the option of sending their children to alternative schools, such as religious schools, that are publicly funded.

“I think they’re going to try a federal school choice program,” Valant said. And if there is a new tax bill, he noted that “Republicans could incorporate tax credits that would essentially function as a school voucher program to channel public funds to private schools.

But diverting funds from public schools can have disastrous consequences for left-behind students and state resources. In Arizona, the state faces a deficit of $1.4 billion. And after North Carolina expanded its voucher program, the number of students already enrolled in private schools obtain taxpayer funding to subsidize tuition costs exploded.

“These large universal voucher programs are radically restructuring how schools are run in some states and creating threats to public education systems that we have not had in the recent past,” Valant said.

The Department of Education does not need to be abolished for Trump to undermine public education. He’s unlikely to succeed in abolishing it, but there’s a reason he made it a priority during his election campaign. As his base against public schools grows ever larger, cutting them has become a way to shore up his support.

“This is just a way to go after public schools, and it’s not just a symbolic battle that scores political points, but it has real consequences,” Valant said.