The fiercest critics and most ardent supporters of President Obama\u2019s Education Department \u2014 which has arguably wielded more influence and sparked more controversy than any of its predecessors \u2014 generally agree that the agency\u2019s efforts were rooted in the faith that government has a critical role to play in improving people\u2019s lives.
Now the agency is poised for a radical shift with Donald Trump\u2019s arrival in Washington, as the businessman-turned-president-elect has often spoken about government as a bumbling failure and an impediment to success.
Education Secretary John B. King Jr. \u2014 who says public schools saved his life after he was orphaned young \u2014 is preparing to move out of his seventh-floor office suite at the department\u2019s D. C. headquarters. His designated successor, Betsy DeVos \u2014 a billionaire political power broker who has said public schools are a dysfunctional monopoly, and who believes in private-school vouchers and the power of the free market \u2014 is preparing to move in, her confirmation hearing set for Tuesday.
\u201cGovernment can be a tremendous force for good,\u201d King said in an interview at his office recently.
\u201cGovernment really sucks,\u201d DeVos, Trump\u2019s nominee for education secretary, said last year at the South by Southwest educational technology conference in Austin. \u201cAnd it doesn\u2019t matter which party is in power.\u201d
[ \u2018Government really sucks\u2019 and five other principles promoted by DeVos ]
It is this ideological divide as much as any other that is at the root of what Trump has promised will be a very different approach to the nation\u2019s public schools. He has said he will shrink federal oversight and interference and wants to spend billions of dollars to encourage vouchers \u2014 which the Obama administration has vigorously opposed \u2014 and charter schools.
Obama administration allies worry that Trump\u2019s approach will overturn much of the work from the past eight years, from its reinvigoration of the civil rights division responsible for investigating complaints of discrimination to its crackdown on for-profit colleges accused of defrauding students.
But King, a former U. S. history teacher who once wrote lessons about democracy and is now viscerally experiencing it, steadfastly refuses to speculate about what the next administration might do. Following Obama\u2019s lead, he speaks only obliquely about the disappointment of election results that endanger his legacy, using Obama\u2019s language about history never moving in a straight line toward justice but zigging and zagging along the way.
And he says he believes the administration\u2019s work has created momentum \u2014 to expand public preschool offerings, to prevent and appropriately handle campus sexual assault \u2014 that will continue in schools, cities and states regardless of what happens in Washington.
\u201cThe next administration and Congress may do some things differently,\u201d King said. \u201cBut in some ways, the culture has been fundamentally changed.\u201d
[ Trump could reverse Obama actions on sexual assault, transgender student accommodations ]
The battle over the role of the federal government has been a central tension in U. S. public education for decades, from the desegregation of the Jim Crow South to battles over prayer in classrooms.
Republican President George W. Bush was a proponent of a strong federal role in schools through the testing and school improvement mandates of the No Child Left Behind law, which he said was necessary to address the \u201csoft bigotry of low expectations.\u201d
Not since President Ronald Reagan \u2014 who said he wanted to do away with the Education Department \u2014 has the executive branch been so openly skeptical of the federal role in education. And while Reagan had to deal with a Democratic Congress, no such partisan roadblock stands in the way of Trump, who also has professed an interest in dismantling the department.
Many of the items that King ticks off as recent accomplishments \u2014 vigorous civil rights enforcement, new rules for teacher preparation programs and school accountability, and a crackdown against for-profit colleges accused of defrauding their students \u2014 already appear to be in opponents\u2019 sights.
Congressional Republicans have put two sets of Education Department regulations on their list of rules to undo in 2017, and Trump surrogates have been intensely critical of the agency\u2019s Office for Civil Rights, which has fielded tens of thousands of discrimination complaints and has made headlines for pressing schools to accommodate transgender students and deal with campus sexual assault.
The fate of the civil rights division \u2014 whose efforts are as reversible as they are dramatic \u2014 is a top concern for many advocates for children who are minorities, immigrants, LGBT or come from poor families.
\u201cWe\u2019ve got some tough times ahead, but we are up to it,\u201d Marian Wright Edelman, founder of the Children\u2019s Defense Fund and an education civil rights icon, told advocates and career Education Department employees at the department\u2019s headquarters. \u201cYou might as well hunker down, do your crying at nights and on the weekends. We are not going backwards.\u201d
Many conservatives welcome Trump\u2019s promise to scale back federal intervention after spending the past eight years pushing back against what they said was Obama\u2019s overreach into public schools. His efforts produced little in the way of improvements for children, they argue, pointing to stalled and in some cases sliding student achievement on national math and reading exams. High school graduation rates rose to record highs under Obama, but critics say that\u2019s a squishy measure of improvement, since states set their own graduation requirements and they can change over time.
King\u2019s predecessor, Arne Duncan, used billions of dollars in stimulus funding and the promise of relief from the most onerous provisions of the widely hated No Child Left Behind law to nudge states into adopting his preferred policies, including new teacher evaluations, new Common Core State Standards and new standardized tests.
Those efforts sparked a backlash not only from conservatives but also from teachers unions and parents, ultimately helping to persuade Congress to replace No Child Left Behind with a new law, the Every Student Succeeds Act, that set significant limits on the Education Department\u2019s power.
King allowed that, with the benefit of hindsight, there are things that he would have done differently. But he said that the fight over federal authority is mostly an inside-the-Beltway debate \u201cdivorced from the substantive question of what\u2019s the work that we should be doing as adults on behalf of kids.\u201d
The Obama administration has been correct on those substantive questions, he said. And many Republicans agree with the need for stronger teacher evaluations and standards. It\u2019s just that Republicans say that states should and will make those changes on their own, while the Obama administration says the federal government needs to be vigilant.
\u201cStates\u2019 rights and civil rights have not generally traveled together in the history of the United States,\u201d King said. \u201cThat\u2019s not a partisan point, that\u2019s a fact.\u201d
To some on the left, this is the sad irony of the Obama administration\u2019s legacy on education: In trying so hard to push states to do what they viewed as right, Obama officials undercut the federal government\u2019s ability to do its most important work \u2014 protecting the rights of the most disadvantaged kids.
\u201cIf you say, as I do, that the federal government is a major source for equity in education,\u201d said Richard Kahlenberg of the Century Foundation, the Education Department\u2019s undermining of the federal role \u201cis kind of a tragic legacy.\u201d<\/p>\n

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