"But can he...?": Looking ahead at a second Trump administration

image of a card at Target
It simply reads "ugh"

This post is based on the following principles:

1. Despair, psychologically, makes us powerless. If we view something as impossible, we teach ourselves not to act. Things are not a given; all changes require actual action from many people. We cannot give up in advance. 
   I'm not going to do that.
   
   
2. Donald Trump is many things, and among them is erratic (which only increased during this past campaign) and lazy. We do not yet know who in his circle will have actual power, but we do know from last time that people tend not to keep it long.
   
   
3. We live under a federal system, and changing that would require changing the U.S. Constitution. Education is a power largely left to the states.
   
   
4. Most of the power of the federal government under this system of government--which, again, cannot be changed without Constitutional change, which is beyond the power of the executive, legislative, and judicial branches even together!--is coercive; that is, they cannot force states and educational agencies to behave particular ways, but they can offer inducements to act in that fashion. 
   
   
5. Schools are greatly impacted, always, by the reality that surrounds them. If you are as old as me, you may remember the old ad for the Yellow Pages: "If it's out there, it's in here." That is also true of schools.
   
   
6. Our charge in public education remains to create and sustain a system that nurtures every student as and who they are. We aren't giving up on anyone, anywhere. 

With me so far? 
I also, as always, speak only for me, and I speak only from what I know. I don't have a crystal ball, but here's the thing: neither does anyone else. 

Onward. 

On funding

The vast majority of funding for K-12 education in the United States comes from local communities and from states. In FY22, for example, nationally just under 14% of funding for public schools came from the federal government, and that, remember, was an ESSER funding year. That is higher than it has been in the past, where we could generalize that about ten percent of funding has come from the federal government. 

As such, removal of all federal funding from schools--which I think unlikely to happen--does not remove the majority of funding from schools. Most funding comes from other sources.

The funding that comes from the federal government comes as grants; grants are not just free money, but are contracts, in which those receiving the money agree to do particular things. The title grants come to the state, and then to districts, as a result of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), which is the most recent update of the federal education law the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. Every state has an ESSA plan with the U.S. Department of Education, which school districts then work to fulfill. 

Thus much of that funding--Titles I, II, III, IV and IDEA, which is special education--is as the result of a law passed by both chambers of Congress, signed by the President, and administered by the Department. That administration has required action and agreement by each of the fifty states. All of that would need to be unwound in order for that to no longer happen, or for it to happen under different circumstances.
Could the conditions under which the distribution of those grants change? Yes, but note all of the parts of the above that would need to work in concert for that to happen.
Oh, and technically ESSA is overdue for reauthorization, as also frequently happens.

By virtue of taking federal funds, organizations put themselves under the Office of Civil Rights in the U.S. Department of Education. The charge of that office is to ensure that there is no discrimination in all programs receiving federal funds. 
There are two ways that this could go wrong: 

1. The OCR could simply stop enforcing civil rights. That means, then, the enforcement of lack of discrimination in schools at the federal level would be gone. As such, schools could discrimination on the basis of sex, race, and so forth unless otherwise enforced. 
2. The OCR could be weaponized, being used to enforce ideological positions of the Trump administration, whether that's discrimination against students or others or inspection of curriculum.
   
   

Note that all of the above requires there to still be a Department of Education. That, from what I have seen, is the contradiction in the professed past positions of the incoming administration: trying to force people to do things takes administration. If you eliminate the administration, you eliminate your power of enforcement. 

Also note: without federal laws, we still have state laws. Massachusetts, for example, passed special education legislation before the federal government did; thus, if IDEA somehow goes away or stops being enforced, we have chapter 766. Comparing the two is beyond the scope of this post, but the legal requirement to educate all children does not vanish simply because the federal government stops enforcing it.

This is also where state recognition of civil rights matters, too. Discrimination on the basis of sex, race, sexual orientation, and gender identity are all illegal in Massachusetts. That remains true, even without Title IX enforcement and the like.

Obviously, what state you are matters quite a bit here. I do not know the laws in other states well enough to opine, but I will suggest that we all get to know our states' laws quickly. 

On school lunch

The line of federal funding that does not flow this way which has substantial daily reach in schools is school lunch. The free and reduced lunch program funds meals for low income students and for all students in districts where the direct certification of students allows for enough reimbursement for that to work. 
School meals are funded through the Farm Bill, which is, as the name suggest, an agricultural bill, and that program is administered through the U.S. Department of Agriculture. This deliberately ties the funding for lunch for students to aid for farmers; it creates a larger constituency served by the bill. 
I have heard it suggested that this could be split, to either eliminate school nutrition or to provide for other conditions under which that funding was provided. To do that is to weaken the constituency the bill covers. 
This is also the kind of bill that brings real money home to the areas Congress people represent. While we have seen a history of some voting against something and then claiming credit, if the Republicans now have the majority, will some still vote against such bills if it means the bills will actually fail?
I am more concerned about the administrative leeway that USDA has in administering the program. As part of the Nutrition program, USDA also has a civil rights office. Schools are required not to discriminate in their feeding of kids. Parallel to the above, though, this office could either stop enforcement or move to weaponization. 

Important note: The above is why I rushed to say that states need to make plans for supplanting funds if particular ideological positions or discrimination is required to access federal funds. The choices should not be "discriminate against kids or they starve." We need to remove the power. 

on all that surrounds schools

Of all that possibly is coming, this is the one that concerns me the most. 

First, we have already seen bigotry empowered in the past week, as I posted on Monday. Bullying remains bullying, and we must treat it as such in schools, regardless of who is in the White House. Such bullying has been empowered, now, though, and managing that in schools, particularly with families who may see it as not an issue is going to be a continued issue for schools. This poisons the atmosphere in schools. And you cannot learn if you don't feel safe. 

There are also many aspects of federal law that are not directly education-related that matter. Prior to the election, for example, Chalkbeat wrote on deportation of families. Are schools prepared to face down ICE? If the Trump administration goes forward with their ridiculous tariff proposal, we'll see costs to schools of many things impacted. If we have someone who doubts or rejects science on vaccinations (or who knows what else?) around public health, we may not only see vaccination rates continue to drop, but we'll see the outfall of that.
This is the section that I think is least able to be foreseen, frankly. We're going to have to keep an eye on pretty much everything and consider how that hits schools.

And we have to be ready to respond with policy, budget, and advocacy changes. That's a lot. 

I do also want to say one more thing: while we cannot give in to despair, we also need to not just say "we'll be okay." Clint Smith has put this much more eloquently than I in his poem "When people say 'we have made it through worse before'" Some of us won't make it.
But it's up to us to fight to get as many of us through as possible.