President Donald Trump’s executive order on education, which seeks to re-examine the federal role in education policy, “will do nothing to strengthen our public schools or empower the children that depend on them,” AFSCME Pres. Lee Saunders says.
In a statement, Saunders blasted the order, calling it “a gross abdication of the federal government’s vital role in ensuring that all students get the education they deserve, regardless of who they are and where they live.”
While the idea behind the order is to identify areas where the federal government has “unlawfully overstepped on state and local control,” what the order really would do is target laws enacted by previous administrations, as well as make K-12 students more vulnerable to inequality and discrimination.
The order requires the Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, to conduct a 300-day study of “federal overreach” into public education. It’s part of a move by Trump and his congressional allies to peel back oversight of public education, including the promotion of for-profit charter schools and private schools, which divert scarce resources for public school education to privately-owned and administered schools.
However, the order is toothless, according to the Washington Post, providing DeVos with no more authority than she currently possesses. Also, as this New York Times article points out, the order will have little effect on current reforms like the bipartisan Every Student Succeeds Act, signed into law under President Barack Obama, which already curbs federal government involvement into how schools test and evaluate students.
Rather than improve public education, the order will ignore “existing inequalities and opportunity gaps that keep students from realizing their potential,” Saunders said.
More smokescreen than substance, Trump’s order appears to be an attempt to make it look like he’s made real progress within his first 100 days, when in fact, the opposite is true.