Introduction
As part of the Trump administration’s overall strategy of gutting federal programs and social services, suppressing free speech, and criminalizing resistance, they have especially targeted education at every level. They have placed the Department of Education on the chopping block, whose funds primarily serve students with disabilities and low-income school districts. They have used the power of federal funding to police schools, impose curriculum controls, shut down departments and research, and criminalize protests on college campuses. And they are trying to open up public education funding at the state and federal level to far-right Christian nationalist private schools, as they work to cut funding to traditional public schools. Many of these sorts of attacks have happened under previous administrations, both Democratic and Republican, but under Trump, these attacks have been accelerated to a completely new level. Congress, the courts, the Democrats, and state legislatures have been completely unable to put a stop to any of this. How much this administration is able to get away with, how deep these cuts eventually go, and what education will look like in the future will be determined by the kind of organizing and resistance the population is able to mobilize against these attacks. The future of education is at stake and depends on us.
Attacks on K-12
In early March, the Trump administration began laying off half of the employees from the Federal Department of Education. Less than two weeks later, on March 20, Trump signed an executive order instructing the Secretary of Education to dismantle the Department. Although court orders have stopped some of the mass layoffs and so far prevented the outright shutdown of the agency, the aims of the Trump administration and his supporters remain the same. Their goal is to attack public and other forms of education on as many fronts as possible, destroying and dismantling their ability to function. Then, remold what remains into the type of educational system they desire. Needless to say, the effects of these attacks could be catastrophic for millions of working-class students and their families.
Although the federal government does not legally set educational standards or provide the majority of education funding to state and local governments, those programs and priorities that it does finance and support directly benefit millions. Poor people, working-class people, people with special physical and developmental needs, and Black people and other minority groups have all been helped in many ways by these programs.
About 10% of all funding for K-12 public education comes from the federal government, but most of that funds programs for low-income districts and neighborhoods, helping the poorest, working-class parts of the population, particularly schools in many poor urban and rural neighborhoods, disproportionately students of color. These programs are not perfect or nearly enough, and of course they have not managed to overcome the inherent inequalities and vast social problems that are embedded in U.S. capitalist society. But these funds still help provide some basic standards for schools and for the equal treatment of students in those schools.
About 7.5 million K-12 public school students get a variety of their special educational needs met by the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), managed by the Department of Education. Cutting funding or moving the responsibilities for managing these services to other government agencies or to states will mean loss of expertise and funding that may not be replaced. This could leave millions with a variety of disabilities without basic supports they need to pursue an education.
Thousands of schools nationwide serving tens of millions of poor and working-class families get supplemental federal funding assistance through Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the largest single program run by the Department of Education. The Trump administration has suggested that it may allow individual states access to some of that money, and for the states to decide how to spend it. But it is likely that the administration wants to use that funding as leverage to impose cooperation of states with the administration’s overall agenda — including but not limited to attacks on immigrants, on trans people, on education curriculum, and criminalizing dissent. Billions in funding meant for low-income students may be lost and spent for other purposes.
The Office of Civil Rights (OCR), a wing of the Department of Education dedicated to ensuring that students are not discriminated against, will likely be done away with entirely, affecting thousands who are targets of harassment or discrimination, or whose needs are simply ignored unless the OCR intervenes to assure their services.
This doesn’t even mention possible cuts to funding assistance for school breakfasts and lunches, programs for English language learners, and dozens of other more focused programs. Already, the Trump administration has cut funds for and even proposed ending Headstart, the program that serves 500,000 pre-school children nationwide. It has eliminated the Local Food for Schools program that provided over $600 million in federal funding every year for locally grown produce for local schools. We can expect more of the same.
And if we use states like Texas as a guidepost to the future, we can expect a nationwide push to transfer public K-12 funds into voucher programs to send children to private Christian schools, continuously draining the public education budget.
Attacks on higher education students and research
Millions of students get college loans or Pell Grants from the federal government to help them pay for higher education. If these programs are cut in even small ways, or if their requirements are not fully enforced, millions could see increased college costs and higher interest rates for loans, or become victims of fraudulent practices by lenders no longer worried about federal oversight.
Millions also benefit from the research and the jobs provided by hundreds of federal research grants distributed by the Department of Education and used by colleges and universities for many types of research that advance our understanding of science, medicine, and much more. If the federal government cuts funding for these many initiatives, millions will be thrown backwards, not to mention the loss of new knowledge and discoveries that could benefit humanity.
Attacks on free speech
The Trump administration will likely cut many of these initiatives, but it is also using them as tools to destroy free speech and academic freedom. Beyond the cuts to programs and financial assistance listed above, the Trump administration is carrying out a nationwide repression against individuals who participate in protests or types of speech that challenges the right-wing. Schools that allow protests that are critical of Israel’s genocide of Palestinians or other U.S. policies have been accused of allowing antisemitism. Students have been arrested, and schools have been threatened with loss of grants, funding, the closure of entire departments, or worse. These threats are part of a focused attack on critics of U.S. policy in the Middle East, which supports Zionist aggression including the current genocide in Gaza. Major universities like Harvard, Columbia, Brown, Princeton and dozens of others are being threatened with massive funding cuts or partial federal takeovers. Campuses are becoming militarized, presidents and professors forced out, academic departments attacked, essential funds withheld, and a severe limitation of institutional independence, academic freedom and free speech is underway. One historian of the Red Scare and McCarthy era of the late 1940s and early 1950s has recently argued that what is happening today is even worse than what occurred during that period in U.S. history.
Part of a broader attack
As with many of Trump’s federal policy priorities, the cuts to the Department of Education are part of the longstanding push to slash the budgets for public needs to free up more money to extend tax breaks for billionaires and their corporations. Most state governments have already enacted some versions of these policies in the past 25 years, saving money through attacking teachers unions, closing schools, cutting services, ramming in charter schools — all while simultaneously cutting taxes on the rich.
The strategy is quite straightforward and completely bipartisan: corporations can only make so much money by exploiting workers. There is still competition, and there are just limits to how many goods corporations are able to sell. So over the past decades, we have seen both the federal and state governments continuously enrich the wealthiest through tax breaks paid for by massive cuts to social spending. This is exactly what we are seeing by the Trump administration, only on a more aggressive scale.
Today, the Trump administration has tried to mask this blatant transfer of wealth behind racist and anti-trans rhetoric. They have cloaked many of the cuts as an attempt to eliminate anything that even seems like it might promote equality for racial, ethnic and gender minorities (often generically labeled DEI programs). And so, programs of this sort are taking the most public hit. So-called DEI programs are not of course their primary concern, but are being used by the administration as a scapegoat to distract attention from their real goal of slashing funding for every social service they can get away with, while also trying to control curriculum and subordinate higher education to their dictates as they suppress dissent in any form.
Trump and his billionaire supporters have made their agenda quite clear. Their priority is to free up more money for their desired tax cuts and military spending, while gutting spending on anything else, and to carry out a systematic repression of protests and any department, research, or curriculum with ideas that are not aligned with their agenda.
And they are more than happy to dump the burden of these once federal programs onto the states, which would then have to dramatically increase state taxes to make up for federal cuts. More likely, most states will not raise the money to make up for the federal cuts and will simply watch their educational systems and social services decline even further. This is already happening in California under Governor Gavin Newsom, who has recently imposed massive cuts to education, along with major cuts to transportation, enormous cuts to housing assistance for the unhoused, and the largest cut coming out of health care for undocumented immigrants, the elderly, and the disabled. Those states with Governors more aligned with Trump’s overall agenda will continue to expand voucher programs that suck their public systems dry and funnel money to private schools that already promote patriotic, Christian nationalist education.
This is already becoming reality in states like Texas, where in the spring of 2025 the Legislature and Governor enacted a law that allocates $1 billion to give $10,000 per year for children to attend a private school of their choice. This will drain public schools in the state of desperately needed funds and encourage more families to leave the public schools as they decline further. But because $10,000 per year does not cover the tuition for most private schools, many of the poorest families will never use it, and much of the money will in effect help already wealthy families pay a tuition that they were already paying by themselves — effectively making it yet another handout to the rich. And on the federal level, Congressional Republicans have inserted a massive tax break to fund a nationwide voucher program that would offer scholarships to send kids to private schools.
The growth of private and religious schooling will continue not only in those states, but even in states that previously had comparatively better public K-12 and university systems. The result will be a nationwide decline in the already limited and unequal quality of public schooling on both the K-12 and university levels. As more and more cuts occur, and as people lose confidence further in their public systems, there will be continued shifting of funds to and reliance on versions of Christian and private schooling. Some will be able to afford to pay for this, and for those who can’t, the state will help, further eroding the public systems in a vicious cycle.
Is a restructuring of education underway?
Trump’s education overhaul has two main goals.
First, the administration is trying to accelerate a restructuring of the U.S. educational system that has been ongoing for more than a decade to better meet the needs of the changing economic landscape of capitalism. For years, the priority of education has shifted towards science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) related fields. It seems there is a growing consensus in ruling class circles that given the current global economic competition, a reassessment is needed of which academic fields at the university level need to be prioritized, and which might be expendable, opening up opportunities for major cutbacks and reorganization of education and departments.
And at the same time, the administration is also trying to control education as a tool for ideological indoctrination and political repression, eliminating dissent or the teaching or research of any ideas that are counter to the agenda of the Trump administration.
The move towards these two goals has certainly accelerated since the current Trump administration came into office, but they are not entirely new. They have been visible for the past 30 years in the policies of both Democratic and Republican administrations on the local, state, and federal levels of government.
An oversupply of highly educated workers
The Trump administration is now working aggressively to take advantage of an oversupply of college graduates in order to drastically reduce and restructure higher education.
There have always been many college degrees that weren’t directly tied to profitable industries and their needs, like literature, philosophy, history, and others. Although a certain number of highly educated individuals in these fields are needed to help manage various aspects of the capitalist system (from editors and analysts to lawyers and political strategists), there was clearly beginning to be an oversupply of graduates in these fields.
Additionally, several academic subjects and departments were added as concessions of the student upsurges in the 1960s and 70s (like Black History, Ethnic Studies, Women’s Studies, and more). For the needs of the capitalist system, these departments and degrees were unnecessary, as they hardly impact the supply of workers essential to the system. And worse, they can even include material that challenges the dominant ideology of U.S. and global capitalism. These subjects may have been a necessary concession to the movements of the 1960s and 70s, but today, the Trump administration clearly sees these departments as expendable.
There is certainly nothing new in the general strategy of promoting those departments and degrees that are most advantageous to the economic needs of U.S. capitalism, while diminishing those that don’t. But today the opportunity for this restructuring has ripened due to an oversupply of college graduates.
From 1980 to 2024 the college educated workforce grew from 20% of the population to its peak of about 40% of the population. But recent studies have shown that about 50% of college graduates cannot find work in a field that matches or requires their degree. And this is most true in the humanities, while for STEM graduates, the number is still about 30%. And the unemployment rate for people of ages 22 to 27 with a college degree has reached its highest level in over a decade.
Underlying the methodology around educational policy is the general function of education within capitalism — what is known as social reproduction. The primary aim of education under capitalism is not to produce an enlightened population, but to prepare the next generation of the necessary workforce. For the masses, this typically means being trained in discipline and docility — the sort of obedient behavior expected of K-12 students: sit down, be quiet, be on time, and follow directions. This is education as socialization: the process of normalizing the kind of behavior a boss can expect of a worker. Education is also the place to normalize the dominant views of society through the centralization of curriculum, where a narrative of U.S. history and world history can be controlled and disseminated. Higher education, on the other hand, primarily serves to train the workforce that requires an education beyond high school.
Of course, social movements have pushed back against this narrow, core function, creating the space for education to be more than just indoctrination and behavior modification. But the core function of social reproduction remains. And educational funding and government policies have continuously chipped away at the gains of prior social movements in order to strip education back down to its core function. This has been a constant back and forth within public education over the last several decades.
In the 1980s, the Reagan administration led the charge against public schools. Not only did Reagan introduce school voucher programs, he even floated the idea of getting rid of the Department of Education. Reagan appointed a National Commission on Education, which issued its report, “A Nation at Risk,” in 1983. Its message was that the U.S. education system was failing and needed to be restructured, the goal of which was to slash education budgets and refocus education on degrees and skills that would better align with the changing business interests. In the words of “A Nation at Risk”: “The educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a nation.”
In the 1990s and 2000s, the strategy only introduced by Reagan was accelerated and expanded under the administrations of President Clinton, Bush and Obama. The primary idea was to link school funding to standardized testing in order to better control the curriculum and cut costs. Under Clinton, this began with the Improving America’s Schools Act of 1994, which was then massively expanded under the bipartisan No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 of the Bush administration. That law mandated more standardized testing and punitive measures for schools that failed to improve test scores. The Democratic Party under Obama expanded No Child Left Behind much further with the Race to the Top Program of 2009. This program dangled large sums of money in front of states to encourage them to test more, open more charter schools, make it easier to fire teachers, to integrate more technology into teaching, and use data to measure success.
In K-12 education, these initiatives brought us the so-called education reform movement. This movement was openly funded by many of the biggest capitalists and corporate foundations (Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Pearson, the Walton family, the Bradley Foundation, Eli Broad, formerly Steve Jobs, and others, many from the emerging tech sector). They claimed there was a crisis in education, and blamed poor student performance on standardized tests on education workers and their unions, wasteful spending, and the personal habits of working-class families. They prescribed so-called reforms like charter schools, mass layoffs and funding cuts for schools with low test scores, and increasingly draconian testing regimens that promoted rote learning.
One of their key goals was to undermine teachers and their unions, and to do so they worked hard to discredit teachers and their unions, making them out to be villains in the eyes of the public. They also pushed states and municipalities to invest millions in charter schools, where teachers are not unionized and therefore subject to longer workdays and more oppressive daily duties. Since they don’t have the protections of tenure or a union, teachers in charter schools are also less likely to speak out against policies that hurt them or their students. And needless to say, non-unionized teachers can be paid less, and often do not have a pension, allowing states and municipalities to save millions. As the so-called education reform movement proceeded, the number of public school teachers in a union rapidly decreased from about 85% in 1990 to 68% by 2020.
They also pushed the use of technology and STEM education (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics). This push for STEM in K-12 was aimed at increasing the number of college students with bachelor and graduate degrees in STEM-related fields. By 2015, the STEM shortage had turned into the desired STEM surplus, and this was reflected both in lower labor costs in STEM related jobs and in higher rates of unemployment among STEM graduates. That trend has only continued since.
For years, there has been an increasing oversupply of highly educated workers. In 2024, less than 20 percent of job postings required a four-year degree, and a majority (52%) did not include any educational requirements at all. But the push for more college graduates, especially in the STEM field, continued in order to increase the labor surplus and lower wages in the STEM industry. For the most part it worked, as seen by the persistently high layoffs in the tech industry since 2022. And today, the rapid introduction of AI into many industries is already accelerating this overall surplus of college graduates.
The educational restructuring driven by this economic backdrop is in no way limited to the Trump administration. In several states across the country, even before Trump’s second term, there have been severe cuts to and reorganization of all levels of education. There have been increasing closures of private colleges nationwide, which is only expected to increase — driven primarily by declining enrollment due to the dwindling employment benefits of a college degree. Many states have already made cuts to education funding and anticipate even larger cuts due to the declining federal funding imposed by the Trump administration.
Chris Rufo, one of the education reform activists influencing Trump’s education policy, has stated that he would like to see the number of students attending four year colleges cut by more than half. Whether Rufo’s target is realized or not, what is clear is that there is a broad consensus among the representatives of the ruling class that the educational system has plenty of room for downsizing in myriad ways, including school closures and the elimination of many departments.
Education for indoctrination and political repression
The Trump administration is also attempting to use the weight of the federal government to control education curriculum and suppress dissent, especially among college students. They are trying to exert control over universities by threatening to cut their funding and even limit their potential students. Trump and his allies have focused their attacks on elite universities, painting them as hotbeds of antisemitism and anti-American indoctrination. They have frozen billions in funding for research and tried to prevent universities from enrolling international students in order to pressure university administrations to cave to their agenda.
Part of that agenda includes preventing on-campus protests and dissent. They have pressured universities to outlaw protest against Israel’s genocide, going after students, professors, administrators, whole departments, and student clubs that have spoken out in opposition. This repression is in no way limited to critiques of Israel and is being extended to any dissent against the administration.
For years, right-wing politicians have demonized higher education for being antithetical to their views, claiming that their far-right ideology is being marginalized on college campuses while so-called radical ideas are being promoted. What Trump and his far-right supporters want is to remove all of this so-called radicalism and force departments to include professors and curriculum that promote their right-wing, often Christian nationalist agenda. And at the same time, they seek to prioritize those departments and degrees that they think will be more useful to the economy and U.S. dominance.
Their targets extend from the university all the way to K-12 education.
They believe that schools should promote a Christian nationalist worldview, what they consider traditional values and patriotism, and teach a hatred for anything that critiques those views. They are trying to divert public education funding directly or through vouchers to go to private schools or home schooling that promote Christian nationalism. States like Texas, Ohio, Indiana, Florida and Oklahoma have already taken significant steps in this direction. For those who support these initiatives, religious beliefs play a role in their choosing what types of knowledge their children are exposed to and choosing their schooling based on what aligns with their so-called values.
These policies also are supported by layers of the big business community. Just as billionaire tech titans have financed the corporate education reform movement, more traditionalist conservative billionaires have financed the push to expand Christian and so-called patriotic education.
This grouping of billionaires includes the Walton family, the Coors family, Charles Koch, the DeVos family, the Uihlein family, Barre Seid, Tim Dunn, Farris Wilks, Harlan Crow, and others. They have financed groups like Moms for Liberty, Defend Texas Liberty, the Federalist Society, the Marble Freedom Trust, and others, all of which promote so-called religious values, Western classical teachings, and patriotism in the legal and educational spheres. Through their financing of right-wing think tanks like the Manhattan Institute, they have funded propagandists like Chris Rufo as he and others attack professors and public education, and shape the ideology used by the Trump administration. They have founded and funded colleges like Hillsdale College in Michigan, which emphasizes the “classical, western tradition.” They have taken over and hollowed out schools like New College of Florida, pushing out professors, taking hiring away from the faculty, and getting rid of some of the colleges more popular majors and programs. They have pushed “patriotic” curriculum in states like Florida, gotten anti-trans and anti-DEI laws passed, and forced religious teachings onto the walls and into curriculum in public schools in Oklahoma, Louisiana and other states. They have financed so-called parental rights groups that take aim at so-called “woke” teachers and schools and try to limit their children’s exposure to knowledge they don’t like. Under these well-financed attacks, what is taking shape is nothing less than a new McCarthyism — an open attempt to crush the teaching of any factual knowledge about real history and society as they try to outlaw any form of dissent.
They know that their blatant defense of billionaires and corporations and military aggression, while they slash social services for the poor and working class is not popular. And they are relying on this suppression of dissent to try to silence people into submission. Their attack on education fits into this overall strategy of suppressing that dissent.
In the Trump administration, we see the role of education as social reproduction exposed through using education both to serve the business interests of capital and to function as a tool for patriotic indoctrination. And with Trump, factions in the ruling class see a vessel to reshape education into exactly the tool for profits and ideological hegemony that they want.
A general assault on our lives
This attack on education is not happening on its own. It is part of a much broader attack on the working class and all oppressed and marginalized groups designed to slash all services and programs that don’t directly support the accumulation of profit or military and state power.
We shouldn’t be surprised by these naked attacks on our basic educational needs. These are the culmination of decades of capitalist attempts to restructure education in the U.S. to better meet their needs, alongside a growing Christian nationalist right. In Trump and his administration, the capitalist class has the wrecking ball that they want. Trump’s lies and aggression are the ugly new face of the move to destroy public schooling and real education. But the goals remain the same — controlling education as a propaganda tool for their vision of U.S. power, and using it as a vehicle for creating the workers capitalists need to carry out their never-ending pursuit of profit.
What they are able to get away with will be determined by the scale of the movement that grows to resist their attacks.
