The Machine They Built to Dismantle Public Education

On May 14, Education Secretary Linda McMahon sat in front of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce and calmly defended the gutting of her own agency. The U.S. Department of Education has shrunk from roughly 4,200 employees to about 2,300 since she took the helm of it. More than 100 programs have already been shipped off to other federal agencies, with bigger ones, including possibly the office that oversees the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, still being “looked at.” The president’s 2027 budget proposes a 35 percent cut to the Office for Civil Rights (OCR), even as McMahon insisted to the committee that “OCR is important” while she is busy rehiring the attorneys her own administration spent up to $38 million to try to fire.

While it’s easy to accuse the administration of incompetence or disorganization, no one can say their plan is incoherent. In fact, it’s very connected and cohesive…and it is working. But before we dive into that, spoiler alert: organizations like Education Law Center (ELC), which this Substack is in partnership with, are fighting back. Support them! Follow ELC on their social media platforms (@edlawcenter), join the ELC mailing list, and sign up for news alerts from their Public Funds Public Schools (PFPS) campaign to stay in the loop on education policy updates that matter.

What is happening to public education right now is the result of a very long effort that goes back to the creation of the modern U.S. Department of Education. The civil rights enforcement collapse, the gutting of the Department of Education, and the federal voucher program disguised as a tax policy and hidden in the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” are all connected moves to weaken the rules, hollow out the agency that enforces them, and redirect the money to a private system that never had to follow any rules in the first place.

Once you see it, every individual headline starts to make sense.

Public education in this country is held together by three things: A set of laws, including education policy laws that provide funding and support for disadvantaged students and hold schools accountable for improving student achievement, and civil rights laws that say schools getting federal money cannot discriminate based on race, national origin, sex, disability, or age. An agency with the staff, regional offices, and legal authority to enforce said laws and to make sure federal education dollars reach the kids they are supposed to. And third, the widely-held belief that public dollars belong in public schools which are accountable to elected school boards, open to every child, and obligated by law to serve each of them.

The Trump administration is going after all three at once. And the goal is to fundamentally change what “public education” means in the United States.

The Office for Civil Rights is not a household name, but you have benefited from it whether you realize it or not! OCR enforces Title VI (protects against discrimination based on race, color, national origin), Title IX (protects against sex-based discrimination), Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act (protects disabled folks), and the Age Discrimination Act.

The law says you can file a complaint with OCR for discrimination in schools. For example, if a kid with autism is denied their services, a Black student is disciplined three times as often as their white classmates for the same behavior, or a girl is pushed out of a STEM program, a transgender student is barred from a bathroom, or an English learner is put in a classroom with no language support… OCR is supposed to investigate these sorts of things and more.

That office is now ground zero for a planned demolition.

In March 2025, the administration shuttered seven of OCR’s twelve regional offices and put more than half of its employees on administrative leave. The courts blocked the reduction-in-force, but the department told its OCR attorneys not to do any work. They made them sit at home for months, fully paid, while complaints piled up. The Government Accountability Office estimated that taxpayers spent up to $38 million paying OCR staff not to work between March and December of 2025. The attorneys were finally recalled in December, but the damage had been done.

One internal source said the pending backlog of complaints was roughly 25,000, including about 7,000 open investigations. Between March and September of 2025, as the attorneys were forced to stay home, OCR received more than 9,000 discrimination complaints. But about 90 percent of the unresolved cases were dismissed because the administration has narrowed what OCR will actually enforce. At this point, civil rights enforcement has basically been reduced to challenging policies that protect transgender kids.

In April of this year, the agency went so far as to take back Title IX agreements with five school districts and a California community college because those agreements had been negotiated to protect LGBTQIA+ students.

In the May 14 hearing, Linda McMahon was pressed on why Trump’s proposed budget slashes the Office for Civil Rights by 35 percent. And in the same breath that she defended the cuts, she also insisted the office remains critically important.

The game plan seems to be:
1. Say you support civil rights.
2. Defund the office that enforces them.
3. Trust that no one is paying close enough attention to notice.

In practice, that means families are still able to file a complaint if their student is discriminated against. They just can’t expect anyone to read it.

Most people don’t have a strong opinion about the Department of Education because most people don’t know what it actually does and there is a lot of misinformation pushed to make sure it’s as confusing as possible.

First, what it does not do: It does not run schools. It does not write curriculum. It does not decide whether your district teaches phonics or whole language. Those are state and local decisions and always have been!

The Department of Education was created to send money where it needs to be sent, enforce civil rights laws, collect data, manage the federal student loan portfolio, administer Title I funding for high-poverty schools, Title III funding for English learners, administer IDEA funding for students with disabilities, and oversee research.

These are not glamorous functions. In fact, I like to compare these nitty gritty functions to plumbing. When you rip out plumbing or break the pipes, the building doesn’t fall down. It just slowly starts to smell and rot.

In this case, the plumbing they’re destroying is intended specifically for public education.

Nine days into his second term in January of 2025, Trump signed Executive Order 14191, “Expanding Educational Freedom and Opportunity for Families,” which directed every agency possible to find ways to take existing federal money intended for public schools and child care and reroute it toward private schools, homeschooling, and charters. In March, a second executive order told McMahon to begin shutting down “non-essential” functions of the department itself (which they were already doing).

Since then, the administration has signed at least six interagency agreements moving programs to Labor, Interior, State, and HHS. Mind you, these departments have no history of running any of the Department of Education’s programs and already have plenty of other work to do.

The administration has signaled that IDEA itself, the federal law that has guaranteed a free appropriate public education to children with disabilities for fifty years, may follow…if they can figure out how to do it without Congressional approval.

The legal problem they’re running into is that you cannot abolish a federal agency by executive order. Congress created the Department of Education and only Congress can dissolve it. So the administration is ripping its insides out and then telling the public that the agency was always too big and clearly nobody is using it anyway.

The thing that kills me is that they are just moving functions to other departments, not getting rid of the actual functions themselves. By moving functions and staff out of their specialized department and putting them in unspecialized agencies, they are creating the very kind of bureaucratic nightmare they always say the Department of Education is.

A coalition of states, school districts, unions, and disability rights organizations is suing in Somerville v. Trump and New York v. McMahon, arguing that these interagency transfers are unlawful and that they are causing harm to children. In addition, a coalition including the NAACP and public school parents, represented by Education Law Center and co-counsel, filed a lawsuit to prevent the Trump administration from terminating federal grants and shuttering regional OCR offices. Recently, a Maryland court denied a motion to dismiss this case.

I mean, one thing they are kicking around is putting the oversight of IDEA under HHS. IDEA is not a medical program. It’s a Civil Rights law. A child with dyslexia does not need a doctor. A child with autism in a fifth-grade classroom does not need a hospital. They need a teacher, trained school staff, and a school legally required to provide everything they need to be successful.

Even Republican senators have flinched at this part. But it is clear what the administration wants to do.

On July 4, 2025, the president signed Public Law 119-21 (which I refuse to call the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” without putting it in quotes, because that name is ridiculous). Inside the OBBBA is the country’s first federal private school voucher program, and it will take billions of dollars that are meant to fund public services and convert them into private school tuition.

The new Education Freedom Tax Credit, which Education Law Center’s Public Funds Public Schools campaign has been tracking from the start, allows individual donors to give up to $1,700 to a “scholarship granting organization,” or SGO, and receive a dollar-for-dollar federal tax credit in return. Not a deduction. A credit. That means you take money you would have paid in federal income tax, send it to an SGO, and the SGO uses that to write scholarships for private school tuition. This tricky maneuvering means the federal government is the donor, but the SGO is a laundering mechanism of sorts.

Senate Democrats introduced a bill in April to repeal the credit which kicks in for the 2026 tax year, which means donors can claim it on the returns they file in early 2027.

States have to opt in, but at the time of publication, almost 30 states have indicated that they plan to do so. If you want to get the lowdown about this voucher scheme and have the right ammunition to convince your governor to opt out, check out this PFPS webinar scheduled for June 4.

The administration is very motivated to get states to opt in because the federal voucher program is designed to grow. It creates a permanent pipeline of federal money into private education with no antidiscrimination requirements attached to the SGOs or the schools they fund. (The anti-DEI push running parallel to all of this doesn’t help, either.)

Private schools that take voucher money can still refuse to admit students with disabilities. They can still expel a student for being gay. They can still decline to provide special education services or English learner support. They have to follow none of the laws that public schools follow, and they’re going to get federal money anyway.

If you remember - the Department of Education is supposed to make sure that public schools actually serve all students because public schools receive federal funds.

This voucher program is busting on the scene in a country that is already going voucher-crazy at the state level. Two-thirds of states now run private school voucher programs. Eighteen of those programs are universal or near-universal, meaning they give public money to families regardless of income, and crucially, regardless of whether the kids were ever in public school in the first place.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed SB 2 last year creating a universal ESA program that promises up to $10,000 per family. Tennessee has expanded its program. Florida’s universal voucher already cost taxpayers nearly $4 billion in 2024-25, triggered a state budget crisis, and set off school closures and mass layoffs in public districts across the state.

This is what the data has been telling us for years. Arizona’s voucher program blew a massive, nearly $1 billion hole in the state budget. A recent audit of one of Florida’s ESA programs could not account for over $270 million in spending. Arizona ESA dollars have been spent on jewelry, lingerie, luxury travel, and wedding gifts. In Louisiana, voucher students saw their academic achievement drop in math, reading, and other subjects, on a scale researcher Joshua Cowen has compared to pandemic-level learning loss. Across study after study, vouchers don’t improve outcomes for the kids who use them, harm public schools, and mostly act as a tuition discount for families with kids already enrolled in private school.

If your honest goal were to improve education for kids, this is not the policy you would pick.

So let’s look at the big picture… When this goes live in 2027, billions of public dollars will start flowing out of the public system. Those dollars will land at private schools that are not required to follow Title VI, Title IX, IDEA, Section 504, or the ADA. (Even if those schools were required to follow those civil rights laws, the office historically responsible for enforcing them has been wrecked.) But even if OCR still had teeth, the Department of Education that houses it is being broken into pieces and scattered across other federal agencies which have never run an education program and don’t really have the bandwidth to do so.

Each move makes their next one easier.

This pattern is very familiar to anyone who has watched what privatization does in other sectors. They call the public option broken while starving it and breaking it more. Then, they say “Oh my gosh, that public option is so bad! Look how bad it is!” and their data acts as evidence that the private option was necessary all along.

When you look at it like that, it’s no wonder Trump wanted someone with a business background to be the Secretary of Education. The difference here is that education isn’t a business. It’s infrastructure which serves roughly 50 million children.

The framing is “freedom” and “parental choice,” but that is easily debunked if you look at how the Department of Education has been engaging with Democratic-led states. The only people with “choice” are those who are bought-in on this administration’s goals for education.

That being said, I think there are a lot of things we can do here.

It may not seem like it, but a huge amount of what the administration is attempting is being contested legally. In fact, the judicial branch is one of the last meaningful checks and balances we have. Federal courts have already blocked parts of the Department’s anti-DEI enforcement campaign. Coalitions of states, school districts, unions, disability rights groups, and civil rights organizations are suing over the attempted dismantling of the Department of Education, the collapse of OCR, and the administration’s abuse of executive power and attempts to undo programs Congress created.

Organizations like Education Law Center are not just publishing reports and explainers (although those are helpful!) They are actively helping lead legal and advocacy fights around school funding equity, disability rights, civil rights protections, and the privatization of public education itself.

ELC’s Public Funds Public Schools campaign, which created many of the voucher resources cited throughout this piece, exists specifically because voucher expansion has become a coordinated national strategy.

However, courts cannot save public education by themselves. We have a role to play and there are a lot of options because fights are happening simultaneously in state legislatures, governors’ offices, school boards, and federal agencies all at once!

Here’s the game plan:

What to tell your governor: First, you need to know if your governor intends to opt in, out, or if they are on the fence regarding the Education Freedom Tax Credit. (If they have not commented, they are deciding right now.) The opt-in decision is theirs to make unless your state designates someone else.

“No” is an option! Don’t let them tell you it isn’t!

Public Funds Public Schools has published a resource called Debunking the Trump Administration’s Claims about the Federal Voucher Program that exists specifically for the political conversation governors are having right now.

What to tell your state legislators: First of all, dear reader, you need to watch your own legislature like a hawk. The PFPS Voucher Bill Tracker monitors voucher legislation in all 50 states and updates weekly. California’s most recent voucher proposals, SB 64 and AB 19, both failed in committee in the 2025-26 session but they will be back. (They always come back in one form or another.) The Educational Freedom Act, the Children’s Educational Opportunity Act, the School Choice Flex Account Act…these are all the same idea repackaged by the same well-funded groups.

The PFPS Universal Voucher Price Tag Tool at pfps.org/universal-voucher-tool lets you estimate what a voucher program would cost your state. Whenever you call your state legislators, bring those numbers to them. Money talks, even if your state loves vouchers.

What to tell lawmakers at the federal level: Call your senators and your representative and tell them you support the Senate Democrats’ bill to repeal the federal tax credit scholarship. Tell them you do not want the Department of Education dismantled, you do not want IDEA moved to HHS, and you do not want OCR’s budget cut by 35 percent.

And locally… Get to your school board! Watch your local school board and vote in your school board elections! The federal pressure is real, but most of what happens in schools is still decided down the street.

The PFPS Federal Voucher Program webpage, the campaign’s FAQ, and its Explainer are the cleanest and simplest breakdowns available. Read them and send them to people who think this is a fight about “school choice!”

If they are going to flood the zone with disinformation and chaos, we have to work triply as hard to combat it.

Public education in this country was built by people who knew that a country with a functioning democracy needs a system that educates every child. And it has taken many fights to make sure that “every child” really means every child.

What is happening now is an attempt to dismantle yet another cornerstone of our democracy. They can’t do it all at once, because that would be politically impossible, but rather in pieces small enough that most people will not notice until it’s too late.

Have you ever seen an optical illusion where everyone sees different images at first? But once you see both versions, you can’t go back to just seeing one?

That is kind of what the administration is afraid of. They know that once enough people see their attacks for what they are, they won’t be able to continue dismantling public education. That’s why they rely so heavily on confusion, exhaustion, and fragmentation…and that’s why they are so afraid of the courts.

Public opposition would look very different if everyone saw the culture war distractions for what they are and knew that every fight for democracy is connected.

I’m so grateful that courts are slowing pieces of this down and I’m so glad that you, reader, are here in this fight with me so none of this happens in the dark.

Public education has survived previous attempts to segregate it, privatize it, defund it, and politicize it. I know that if we stick together, it will survive again.

Till next time,
Frazz

P.S. If this piece fired you up, let’s help Education Law Center continue their valuable work by donating. (Or if you’d like to show your support for public education all over town, the ELC merch store is here: bonfire.com/store/education-law-center.)

They are in the courts, boots on the ground, hands in the policy fights we talk about all the time. Every dollar helps them keep going.