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Immigration raids, masked ICE agents, Operation Patriot.

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Our podcast Here and Now Anytime is looking at Trump's agenda of mass deportation.

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Through the eyes of one state.

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I'm bringing hell with me. Listen to the podcast here and Now Anytime from NPR and wbur. It's Consider this from npr. As students go back to school, we wanted to look at what the White House is trying to do on K12 education, what is actually changing in schools and what hasn't. So I am joined by NPR education correspondent Cory Turner. Hey, Cory.

C (3:55)

Hey, Scott.

A (3:56)

As well as NPR senior political editor and correspondent Domenico Montanaro. Hey, Domenico.

B (4:00)

Hey, great to be with you, Scott.

A (4:01)

Cory, I wanna start with you. Since you cover education. Where do we stand with President Trump's promise to shut down the Department of Education?

C (4:08)

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. And that is largely by using old federal civil rights laws like the Civil Rights act or Title 9, 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.

B (5:02)

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 bases wanted.

A (5:21)

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?

C (5:34)

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 eight 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 6 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 9. It is essentially the same playbook. And what we're seeing is really fast tracked investigations like we've been seeing 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.

A (6:40)

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?

C (6:56)

Yeah, absolutely. So we know that on average, federal funding makes up a small but important piece of school budgets, 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. And 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.

A (7:46)

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?

B (7:56)

Yeah. And look, there are a lot of people, including a lot of teachers, who see this as going backwards on acceptance and tolerance. And 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. 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. 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 Corey's mentioned, and resolving complaints of discrimination through the Office of Civil Rights. And as Corey said, we've seen a big change in approach there.

A (8:53)

Corey, the wild thing is all of the stuff we've talked about already isn't even, you know, a significant percentage of the stuff that Trump has been talking about when it comes to making change to education. He's talked about a lot of other things, too, including school choice and options for parents. Is that something he's followed through on?

C (9:08)

Yeah, I mean, he's talked a lot about influencing curriculum. I think there his hands are pretty clearly tied. Federal law is very explicit about the federal government's inability legally to influence curriculum or learning standards or anything like that. When it comes to school choice, though, President Trump has already managed to notch a pretty big win, and that is including a federal private school voucher program in the Big Beautiful Bill Act. That's been on the bucket list for Republicans for years, including in his first administration. He got it through this time.

B (9:44)

Yeah. And another big change I have to say overall here is that politically, education was far less of a culture war battleground and was a relatively bipartisan issue. I mean, back during the Obama administration, you heard arguments over whether there should be more charter schools, school choice maybe just decrease, increasing some union powers, and even all that talk about Common Core math. But Republicans felt it was one area where they could work with former President Obama on. And that's just not at all what we're talking about now in the arguments.

A (10:11)

Yeah, big picture, Corey. This gets a lot of attention. The federal government gets a lot of attention and has a lot of power and sway. But education, it's like one of those core local government issues. How much can Trump really change K12 education in America over the next three years?

C (10:26)

I mean, I don't think he. 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 marginal group say transgender students at the risk of losing federal funding that helps them support other marginalized students.

A (11:05)

That is NPR education correspondent Cory Turner and NPR senior political editor and correspondent Domenico Montanaro. Thanks to both of you.

C (11:12)

You're welcome, Scott.

B (11:13)

Thanks, Scott.

A (11:14)

You heard reporting at the top of the episode from NPR's Frank Langfit. This episode was produced by Tyler Bartlam and Connor Donovan, with audio engineering by Ted Mebane and Hannah Glovna. It was edited by William Troup, Nicole Cohen and Kelsey Snell. Our executive producer is Sam McEnagun. Thank you to our Consider this Plus supporters who make the journalism you hear on this show possible. Supporters also hear every episode without messages from sponsors. You can learn more at plus.NPR.org It's Consider this from NPR. I'm Scott Detrow. Finding great candidates to hire can be like, well, trying to find a needle in a haystack.

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