Washington (AP) – A little more than 23 years ago, Republican President George W. Bush sat at a desk at a high school in Hamilton, Ohio, and signed a law that would significantly expand the role of the educational department and change the American school. On Thursday, his Republican successor, President Donald Trump, signed a completely different document – this one executive order to reduce the department.
When right -wing activists demanded the agency for years, many Republicans paid the lip service for the matter, but still voted to finance them. Now Trump, who was encouraged and apologized to the Federal Government in his drastic modern formation, has pushed aside aside that were deterring his predecessors.
The announcement on Thursday follows other aggressive decisions, including the setting of the billionaire Elon Musk, in order to reduce the German bureaucracy at astonishing speed, or to check the scientific knowledge that is fundamental to combating climate change.
The reduction of the educational department was always at the top of Trump’s list. During his campaign, he spoke repeatedly, often with cheers from his followers, including the conservative group mothers for Liberty.
Despite the telegraphation of his goals, Trump’s executive order was a stunner, even for a president who lives on boldness. Margaret Schellings, educational secretary under Bush, said she was actually surprised that he had followed his campaign vow.
The speech about the elimination of the department for years has been a way for the Republicans to signal their compliance with the party orthodoxy, even if they agreed to send billions of dollars to support his mission. Much of this money ended up in schools in their own districts and, for example, financed additional teachers for poor schools. In 2023, 60 House Republicans voted against a law to close the department.
“It was always a bit of a wink and a nicken contract,” said Spellings. “Donald Trump called Bluff.”
Trump said in comments in the White House: “People have wanted to do this for many, many years for many, many decades. And I don’t know that no president has ever come. But I get to do it.”
He thought the executive order for photos, while he was in addition to education secretary Linda McMahon. He has joked that he has to find another job for your department as soon as your department is gone.
The Executive Ordinance should be in legal challenges and said members of the congress on both sides of the gang that the department of the department could not further develop without its consent. But Trump has already shrunk the impression of the department through the government’s efficiency of the government in order to remove about half of the staff.
The first speech of the elimination of the department came just a year after the foundation of President Ronald Reagan, who spoke out against the efforts to integrate schools. However, the calls to get rid of the modern department fell out of favor until the end of Reagan’s first term. When George W. Bush became president, it was seen as a vehicle to implement his political vision of a federal government that asked the states to precisely monitor the progress of the students and to hold the schools into account.
Calls to remove the department, which was resumed with the Tea Party, whose followers made it a symbol of bloated bureaucracy, the power that belonged to the local governments.
The recent advance of closing the department emerged from the Covid 19 pandemic, as the right-wing parents, who were enraged with what they saw as unnecessary school closures, to argue that the government was indoctrinating.
Tiffany Justice, co -founder of Moms for Liberty, was in the audience of the White House and was recognized by Trump in his comments. She said that the department allowed teacher unions to have excessive influence on schools, a problem that became more obvious while the schools were closed and the students learned through zoom.
“The American people woke up and recognized the fact that there were many people who made decisions that were not in the best interest of their children,” she said.
The former spokesman for the House spokesman Newt Gingrich, who, as a adolescent legislator for the law of 1979, voted to create the department, Trump’s step and argued that the agency had not fulfilled its original mission.
“It seemed a good idea at the time,” said Gingrich about the support of the democratic President Jimmy Carter, his Georgian, in a vote of 215-201.
Gingrich argued two generations later: “If you accept the scores and how much we spent education back then and now compare you, it is impossible to escape reality that it was a bitter failure.”
Despite all the discussions of presentation, the federal law of the Federal Government expressly prohibits the schools to inform the schools to teach their students. The daily operation of schools is largely treated by the state and local authorities.
And while Trump has spoken about the elimination of the department, he provides a muscular role for the federal government in schools and changes quickly and aggressively to punish schools that do not match the interpretation of civil rights laws by the administration.
At the beginning of his administration, he has already taken unprecedented measures to separate federal grants from the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University for dealing with pro-Palestinian protests.
The executive order to close the department also included a language to remove federal financing of schools that promote “diversity, justice and inclusion”, a term that enables everything that enables the success of the black Americans up to the enabling of transgender athletes.
Proponents and democratic strategists have warned that Trump’s efforts with the voters could backfire. According to the latest surveys, six out of ten registered voters are against the closure of the department.
The democratic survey of John Anzalone, who worked for several presidential campaigns, including Joe Biden’s victorious efforts to Trump, said that the president’s movements were a basic improvement that should backfire for Republicans with the broader voters.
First and foremost, he said: “Education is generally popular with voters”. Everything that enables the Democrats to position themselves better for these values works against Trump.
The states whose schools are most dependent on federal dollars include Mississippi, South Dakota, Montana, Alaska, Arkansas and North Carolina – all supported Trump. Any disturbance of federal financing will meet the hardest.
According to Spellings, it has long been a non -partisan consensus that “formation is the way to the American dream, and everyone should be granted, and the federal role was to improve competitive conditions.”
“If that is still true, we are currently finding out.”
__
Sharon Lurye and Linley Sanders contributed.
The educational cover of Associated Press receives financial support from several private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find the standards of AP for working with philanthropias, a list of supporters and financed coverage areas at Ap.org.
