Remember, part of the reason our Project 2025 White House is killing the Department of Education is that, under previous administrations, the Department of Education was an important force for combatting white supremacists in our schools:
Nearly a year since he took office, the department’s Office for Civil Rights has not entered into a single new resolution agreement involving racial harassment of students, a ProPublica analysis found.
…The OCR regularly resolves dozens of racial harassment cases a year and did so even during Trump’s first administration. In the last days of the Biden administration, OCR workers pushed to close out several racial harassment agreements, including one that was signed by the district the day after Trump was inaugurated. With Trump in office, the agency has shifted to resolving cases involving allegations of discrimination against white students [Jennifer Smith Richards, Megan O’Matz, and Jodi S. Cohen, “Monkey Sounds, ‘White Power’ and the N-Word: Racial Harassment Against Black Students Ignored Under Trump,” ProPublica, 2025.12.19].
Public education provides a setting where we can catch racism early and root it out, replacing it instead with the lesson that democracy depends on including everybody. White supremacists understand that positive power and are using the Trump Administration to dismantle public education and the federal civil rights safeguards that check their hate.