Henry Abbott

Last fall, President Trump campaigned on a promise to close the federal Department of Education and return the regulation of public schools to the states. Two weeks ago, he signed an executive order attempting to do so by instructing the Secretary of Education to “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education.”

The idea is that somehow, by allowing states to individually govern education, children will be better off than they were under federal guidelines. It is naive to believe that schooling across all fifty states was properly regulated with federal involvement; now, lacking any standards, the disparities will only increase.

I am a born and raised Southerner. I grew up attending a tiny public school in coastal Mississippi. Compared to other schools in Mississippi (which is a state consistently ranked low for its poor education system), mine was highly rated. I was able to take enough AP and college-level courses to prove that I was “hardworking” enough to be accepted to Bowdoin. Still, in many ways, the education I received pales compared to that of many of my peers here. At least it often feels that way.

The easiest, most straightforward way of distinguishing between my school and the schools my friends attended in the northern and western parts of the country is in the sexual education we received. At my school, there was a complete lack of any actual sexual education. For two days, the freshmen were separated by gender and taught only abstinence. We were shown graphic videos and images of sexually transmitted diseases and told the only way to prevent them was through marriage. There was no acknowledgment of queer sexualities. There was absolutely no mention of contraception; in fact, when someone raised her hand to ask about it, the counselor responded that it was a topic she wasn’t allowed to broach.

I must emphasize that the education I received at my rural, Southern high school was still better than most others in the state or the region. I was lucky in that way. Plenty of schools across the country, predominantly in these rural areas, are far more underfunded and underrepresented. There are states already pushing to make the Bible a part of their curriculum, refusing to address race or gender disparities and eliminating teaching about slavery.

With federal standards in place, there was at least a means of managing the inequity of education. Without them, the current presidential administration is actively encouraging this inequity. “School vouchers,” cry conservatives, who believe that such a system would provide parents with “school choice,” when in actuality, thousands of families would be left behind as their public schools are stripped of funding.

In rural communities, like where I grew up, there are very few private schools for these parents to “choose” to send their children to. The ones that do exist are hyper-religious and lack diversity. Some of them are much farther away and more inconvenient than public schools, not to mention costly. Even with “vouchers” to combat the price, many parents would not be able to go the distance to get their children to and from school at all. A Catholic girls’ school in the town adjacent to my hometown was the only nearby private school, and it was made up of 90 percent white students.

The effects of the dissolution of the Department of Education on states like the one I grew up in will be devastating. American public education is being destroyed; as public schools are deprived of their federal funding, there will be fewer bus drivers, fewer routes and, as a result, fewer children able to make it to school in the first place. Underpaid and underappreciated teachers will try to resist, but there is only so much they can do on their own. Southern politicians once resisted desegregation in the ’60s and ’70s. President Trump’s actions are allowing officials to once again hide behind coded language in order to promote racist policies that will ultimately harm children across America and feed into a cycle of poverty, miseducation and inequity, a cycle which already heavily contributes to the current state of American politics.