It is Even Dumbest Than You Think: What the Trump Admin-istration is Doing to Scientific Education

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Introduction

Since the Sixties, U.S. presidents have used their executive, administrative, and polit-ical powers to pursue policy goals in elementary and secondary education. Even though states retain primary responsibility for governing K-12 schools, American presidents have ‘galvanized’ the nation’s attention to issues of equity and accounta-bility in public schools. With support from a liberal majority in Congress, Lyndon Johnson proclaimed the Great Society program and signed the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) in front of the one-room school house where he at-tended as a child. Jimmy Carter elevated the governmental status of the U.S. Office of Education with the establishment of the U.S. Department of Education and ap-pointed the nation’s first secretary of education. Ronald Reagan appointed a national commission that crafted the seminal report, A Nation at Risk that connected student performance to global competitiveness. In convening the first national summit on ed-ucation, George H.W. Bush and the nation’s governors launched Goals 2000. Bill Clinton promoted federal expansion in Head Start, Title I, charter schools, and post-secondary opportunities, among other initiatives.

George W. Bush and Barack Obama made tremendous efforts to implement the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, with an explicit focus on holding schools account-able for performance among student subgroups (Wong, 2007; McGuinn, 2016). Obama further used Race to the Top grants and federal waivers to engage states to adopt systemic initiatives such as the Common Core State Standards and direct inter-vention strategies to turn around «low-performing schools» (McGuinn and Manna-dal-Cielo, 2013). Like his predecessors, Donald Trump has had an opportunity to use his executive, administrative, and political power to shape education policy. This arti-cle addresses several questions about the Trump administration’s actions regarding education policy. In particular, what were the K-12 policy strategies pursued during the first three years of the Trump presidency? Additionally, how did the Trump ad-ministration use its executive, administrative, and political power to further the presi-dent’s policy goals in K-12, particularly regarding implementation of the Every Stu-dent Succeeds Act (ESSA)?

In this article, particular emphasis is placed on Trump’s reliance on executive and administrative tools to promote state policy authority, diminish federal direction on civil rights issues, and expand private and public school choice. Following the strong bipartisan passage of ESSA in 2015, Trump did not see many opportunities to score key political wins through passage of congressional statutes regarding K-12 educa-tion, thereby leading the administration to focus less on legislative initiatives and more on executive and administrative actions. Trump’s reliance on administrative ac-tion may also have been a product of limited congressional support for some of the president’s policy priorities as well as a lack of support for his budgetary request to reduce funding for the U.S. Department of Education and many K-12 programs.

This article also examines the administration’s role in implementing ESSA, as this key federal legislation in K-12 policy entered its third year of implementation. The administration clearly took a deferential approach as states sought federal officials’ approval for their ESSA plans. This deferential approach suggests that the Trump presidency has shifted federal involvement away from a concern with promoting eq-uity and oversight in K-12 education policy.

1. Rolling Back the Federal Role in Equity

Historically, equity has been a key justification for federal involvement in K-12 edu-cation. Since the civil rights movement and the Great Society program of the Sixties, federal education programs have played an instrumental role in promoting equal edu-cational opportunities for all students. Title I of the 1965 ESEA was a key part of President Johnson’s War on Poverty. More recently, in implementing NCLB, Presi-dents Bush and Obama focused on the achievement gap experienced by low-income and racial and ethnic student groups.

Throughout his two terms, President Obama used administrative actions to elevate the nation’s attention to racial/ethnic, income, gender, and sexual orientation inequity in K-12 schools. Among other actions taken during the Obama years, the Office for Civil Rights in the U.S. Department of Education conducted extensive monitoring of civil rights violations related to gender discrimination (Title IX), the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBTQ) students, as well as students with disabili-ties and other needs.

Led by Attorney General Eric Holder and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan in the Obama administration, an interagency task force leveraged federal resources and political will to address complex challenges that African American children and youth faced, including violence, an achievement gap, chronic absenteeism, and teacher quality. A prominent example of Obama’s commitment to educational equity was his effort to improve schools for Native Americans on reservations. Obama high-lighted education as a key pillar in revitalizing Native American communities. As Secretary Duncan explained:

The President and I believe the future of Indian Country rests on ensuring that [Native American] children receive a high-quality education. Improving aca-demic outcomes for Native American children has never been more important. Unfortunately, too many Native American children are not receiving an edu-cation that prepares them for college and career success, too few of them are going to college, and far too many of them drop out of high school. We need to do better! (Duncan’s speech at the Annual Meeting of the American Teach-ers Association, quoted in Lakesworthy, 2016, 7).

President Obama instructed Secretary Duncan and Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell to formulate a comprehensive plan to support tribal self-governance over schools on the reservations, promote early access to integrated services, improve school leadership, and strengthen teacher recruitment and retention in Native Ameri-can communities.

The Trump administration was ready to redefine the federal–state relationship on equity and had an opportunity to do so in the current political and policy climate. The 2015 ESSA rebalanced the federal–state relationship by granting states much more control over school accountability for student subgroups and improvement strategies when compared to the 2001 NCLB. Moreover, during the first several months of the Trump presidency, the Republican-controlled Congress used the Congressional Re-view Act to further reduce federal authority under ESSA by repealing Accountability State Plan regulations published by the Obama administration and thereby granting broader power to states, as discussed in more detail later in this article.

Tab. 1. NEET rates for different age cohorts: England 2012-2014. Source: Department for Education (2014)

Seen over the longer term, the proportion of NEETs among 16-18 year olds has fluc-tuated between 8 and 10% from the mid-1990s. From 2008, nevertheless there has been a decline, which, again, may be partly explained by the raising of the age of compulsory education (Department for Education, 2014b). Table 3 below shows trends in the proportion of NEETs among 19-24 year olds from the third quarter of 2009 to the third quarter of 2014. Although there are notable fluctuations, a clear curvilinear trend can be detected: the proportion of NEETs first rises to 22% in the third quarter of 2011 and then declines (with ups and downs) to 17,6% in the third quarter of 2014. Thus, the number of NEETs has gone down both among adolescents and young adults. Moreover, they have sunk below pre-crisis levels, given that the proportion of NEETS among 19-24 year olds stood at 18% in the third quarter of 2008 (Department for Education, 2013). Thus, the economic crisis appears not to have produced a lost generation as was feared by many. On the other hand, people who were 19 and older in 2009 are 25+ in 2015, meaning that they no longer fall in the 16-24 NEETs category and have thus dropped out of sight for policy makers. It could well be that the crisis has had lasting effects on this generation.

2. The Evolution of State Education Agencies

2.1. History

The historical evolution of SEAs provides important context for understanding the ways in which their role has shifted over the past two decades and is likely to shift further in coming years. Until recently, SEAs were not deeply involved in K-12 edu-cation policymaking or school district oversight, and school districts and local school boards were the dominant decision makers for elementary and secondary schools. Beginning with the federal National Defense Education Act (NDEA) of 1958 and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965, however, national poli-cymakers used the grant-in-aid system to push states to pursue federal goals in public education. In order to claim their share of a growing pot of federal education funds, states had to agree to comply with a wide array of federal policy mandates, and over time the relationship between state education agencies and local school districts be-gan to change .

2.2. What lies behind cartoons?

Within geopolitics and related disciplines such as international relations and critical security studies, there is growing recognition that visual cultures need to be better understood, precisely because of ongoing mass-mediated violence and terror (Power and Crampton, 2005). In the words of Mitchell (1994, 2-3) «what we need is a cri-tique of visual culture that is alert to the power of images for good and evil and that is capable of discriminating the variety and historical specificity of their uses».

Following the attacks on the United States in September 2001, political leaders, journalists and commentators, as well as Hollywood producers, were swift to narrate and visually represent the new dangers facing the USA. President Bush initially called for a ‘crusade’ against international terrorism, and at the same time conjured up the image of the United States as a ‘cowboy nation’ determined to capture ‘terror-ist mastermind’ Osama Bin Laden ‘dead or alive’. The Manichean logic used by Bush and his administration allowed the ‘gun-fighting’ nation to declare a new doctrine of «pre-emption and long-term war» (Slotkin, 1992). What President Bush seemed less eager to do, however, was to reflect on the more problematic aspects of this allusion to the ‘West’ and longstanding colonial violence against Native American communi-ties.

The analysis illustrates the different motivations and the complexity of the jour-neys that led to leaving school early. Behind the truncated educational journeys of ESL there were a range of personal factors which intersect with other social condi-tions. Amongst the personal factors, lack of motivation and not knowing what to do were prominent causes of dropping out. Michael, now 22 years old, left school at 16. He then started a music technology course at college but gave up without gaining any qualification. Since then, he had a couple of jobs and he has been claiming unem-ployment benefits on and off. He is currently out of work as he was made redundant from the last job.

Leaving school prematurely is first a tragedy for the individuals concerned. Reviewing the literature on the effects of ESL, we arrive at the following list of consequences:

Lowered inhibitions, leading to poor social judgment.

Trouble concentrating.

Loss of coordination.

Loss of critical judgement.

Dulled perception, especially vision.

Mood swings.

Reduced core body temperature.

Raised blood pressure.

Passing out.

Puking.

To this list we may add low self-esteem (Prause and Dooley, 1997). In this way, Butler’s notion of performativity in the construction of gender is likely to be centred on the idea of repetitiveness of these acts, which are continuously forming gender identity that could not exist prior to these gendered acts, but rather while are being performed. Moreover, this performativity conception puts forth or implies that gender is not fixed, but fluid, or as Groening (1999) describes «free-floating», so changeable since it is a social fabrication that varies amongst cultures and through time. The similarities in the music are also matched with coincidences in the story line.

The Simpsons, as well as in The Jetsons and The Flintstones, the initial sequence is built around the daily commute, either to or from work. A built-in self-referenciality can be found in both The Flinstones and The Simpsons, where the sequence ends when the characters rush in to sit in front of the TV to watch their favourite show. In The Jetsons, different musical themes, or variations of the original theme, correspond to each of the five different characters. Significantly, Jane Jetson is portrayed with the childish tune Chopsticks, in contrast to the cool, syncopated theme corresponding to the central character of the show, George. In the initial sequence she is also shown asking for money to go shopping, which implies that George is the provider, she the spender. These musical features, plus the visual cues, are an indication perhaps of her unsophisticated intellectual life in comparison with –and her submissive role in relation to – her husband. Wilma Flinstone is portrayed in equivalent derogatory terms: her main role apparently consists in having Fred’s fix ready so that he can drink it right away after arriving from work and on his way to the couch; all the validation she needs, in exchange for her subservient role, is that Fred kisses her on the cheek. Therefore, gender appears as a social manifestation, which follows from physical sex differences through a range of repeated acts. Groening (1999) comments that this operates structural discrimination through individuals’ daily life practices, and then originates or constructs their attitudes, which seems to create a gender hierarchy. Thus, a sort of inequality between the sexes has come to the fore; especially that every culture views man and woman through what psychologist Sandra Bem (1999) calls «the lenses of gender».

Acknowledgements
Financial support for this study was provided by the ZYX Research Grant. We would like to thank Dr. Emily Clark for her insightful feedback on the manuscript and Dr. John Doe for his invaluable assistance with the statistical analysis.

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