SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
It is the beginning of the school year, and in 2025, schools are right in the middle of the contentious politics of the moment. President Trump came into office promising to do away with the Federal Department of Education. Schools have also become immigration enforcement flash points in some places, and the administration is pressuring public schools to halt DEI efforts in both hiring practices and in the classroom, and there's more beyond all of that.
We're going to take a few minutes now to talk about K-12 education in the U.S. and what the White House wants to change about it. I am joined by NPR education correspondent Cory Turner - hey, Cory...
CORY TURNER, BYLINE: Hey, Scott.
DETROW: ...As well as NPR senior political editor and correspondent Domenico Montanaro. Hey, Domenico.
DOMENICO MONTANARO, BYLINE: Hey, great to be with you, Scott.
DETROW: Cory, I want to start with you since you cover education. Where do we stand with President Trump's promise to shut down the Department of Education?
TURNER: Yeah, well, since coming into office, he's already cut the department essentially in half. It's got roughly half the staff it had in January. But I think it's worth highlighting here. There's a real contradiction or tension, Scott, between this desire to close the department and what we've also seen the Trump administration do, which is to wield the power of the department in really new and forceful ways.
DETROW: Right.
TURNER: And that is largely by using old federal civil rights laws like the Civil Rights Act or Title IX, which prohibits sex discrimination, to threaten schools, school districts, state departments of education, that don't embrace Trump's policy priorities - as you said, ending diversity, equity and inclusion programs that the administration argues are discriminatory against white students or Asian American students, or ending protections for transgender students.
MONTANARO: You know, and this was a huge culture war issue during the campaign. Even before it, we saw conservative takeovers at school board meetings around the country with what they saw as, quote-unquote, "woke education in schools." Some of that resulted in book bans and curriculum changes. So this is really Trump following through and capitalizing on what his base has wanted.
DETROW: We have really seen Trump pick fights with higher education - right? - taking Ivy League schools like Harvard and Columbia, threatening their federal funding, making them pay fines in many ways. Is this the same approach he's taking at the grade-school level?
TURNER: Yeah, it is. It's just - it's gotten a lot less attention, I think. The Education Department's Office for Civil Rights has been initiating investigations into a bunch of different school districts, including Denver public schools, Chicago public schools. They tend to be blue-state districts. There are five districts in northern Virginia.
And the complaints tend to be around either these districts' embrace of diversity, equity and inclusion, which the Trump administration argues violates Title Vi of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination based on race, color, or national origin. Or it's around districts' embrace of protections for transgender students, which the administration argues violates Title IX.
It is essentially the same playbook, and what we're seeing is really fast-tracked investigations, like we've been seeing in - against Harvard and Columbia, and it's hard to know how this will play out. A judge in the Harvard case has already recently said they went too fast. They didn't actually follow the law.
DETROW: We've seen the way that these hundreds of thousands of dollars in federal funding being taken away on higher education levels is causing colleges to really shift tunes. What's the best way to think about how much federal funding local school districts get, how big of a problem this is when it is threatened in that way?
TURNER: So we know that on average, federal funding makes up a small but important piece of school budget. It's around 11%. The more important thing to know is that even though that may not seem like a lot of money, in most districts, the bulk of that money really goes to one of two really marginalized student groups. It helps pay for special education for kids with disabilities, and it helps pay for extra supports for kids living in poverty.
We're not just talking about big-city schools. We're talking about remote rural schools in red states. This money is really important. And the administration, just as it has tried to cancel, say, research funding to colleges - it's now using as a threat the potential cancellation of these important dollars to school districts and states.
DETROW: Domenico, you mentioned this fits in with a pattern that we have discussed a lot, with Trump taking aim at cultural institutions in the country. Can you tell me a bit more about how that applies to education here?
MONTANARO: Yeah, and look, there are a lot of people, including a lot of teachers, who see this as going backwards on acceptance and tolerance. I mean, schools and classrooms had, for a long time, been seen as controlled environments where people from different walks of life can come together. They can be civil despite their backgrounds, race, sexual orientation, whether someone has special needs, what have you. And sometimes that's meant explicit education of acceptance because, as we know, kids aren't always nice, Scott, you know?
(LAUGHTER)
MONTANARO: But conservatives have long chafed at that kind of thing. You saw Montgomery County, Maryland, for example, lose at the Supreme Court for not allowing people to opt their children out of teaching around a book with same-sex parents.
DETROW: Yeah.
MONTANARO: Remember, though, that kind of thing has been controlled at the local, not federal level. The Education Department has been responsible for things like keeping statistics, doling out funding, as Cory's mentioned, and resolving complaints of discrimination through the Office of Civil Rights. And as Cory said, we've seen a big change in approach there.
DETROW: So Cory, the interesting thing is there's - we didn't even get to all of the stuff that Trump is saying he wants to do in changing K-12 education. But this is the consummate local issue, right? So in the end, how much can the president of the United States drastically change about this over the next few years?
TURNER: I don't think he's going to have a lot of impact inside the classroom, but I think he's going to make a lot of states and even district superintendents really anxious with these very real threats to really important federal dollars. Just to underscore the point here, the Office for Civil Rights at the Education Department is putting some superintendents and state leaders in places like California, Maine, Illinois, in the difficult position of potentially having to choose between advocating on behalf of one marginalized group - say, transgender students - at the risk of losing federal funding that helps them support other marginalized students.
DETROW: That is NPR education correspondent Cory Turner and NPR senior political editor and correspondent Domenico Montanaro. Thanks to both of you.
TURNER: You're welcome, Scott.
MONTANARO: Thanks, Scott.
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