Commentary: An America without a Department of Education leaves children behind
In the 1880s, my great grandfather founded a school in their rural community because the state of Alabama did not provide a good education to Black children.
As explained in his autobiography, he wanted to teach the children whose parents and grandparents had been enslaved on the plantations nearby “to be of better service to themselves, to their employers, and to the community in which they lived.” In the 1930s, my father and his sisters attended that school because the state of Tennessee did not provide a good education to Black children. Like his father and his grandfather, Dad became an educator himself, ultimately teaching the next generation of educators at Virginia State University.
In the 1950s, my mother moved away from her hometown because the state of Mississippi did not provide a good education for Black children. The only school that did was run by the local Catholic church, but only through eighth grade. The third youngest of 14 children, she wanted more than the domestic and laborer jobs available to her grandparents, parents, brothers and sisters.
So she moved to go to high school, ultimately becoming an educator herself running The TRIO programs at Virginia State University. These federally funded programs run by the federal Department of Education work to ensure children like her had the support they needed to go to and graduate college.
My parents understood how important a good education is to individual opportunity and a thriving, healthy economy, community and democracy. Like my grandparents and great grandparents before them, they dedicated their lives to ensure not only that their children had a good education, but every child did. As a child, Dad once told me that while he and my mother could not leave me an inheritance, they would ensure my sisters and I had a good education so that we could thrive.
Not every child is so lucky.
The legacy of 300 years of slavery and Jim Crow, Massive Resistance and chronic underfunding has created too many obstacles to the ability of states and local governments to give every child an opportunity for a good education. For the past 20 years — first as a state legislator and now in Congress — I have worked to ensure every child in Virginia can have a good education. As a mother to two children in public schools, I see every day that even with bipartisan and herculean effort, there are still gaps in Virginia and across the country.
The Department of Education was created to fill those gaps.
The DOE protects student’s civil rights — particularly those with disabilities who oftentimes need special accommodations to learn. It provides support to attract, train and retain the best and brightest teachers, school administrators and support personnel like counselors, nurses and mental and behavioral health specialists — especially in hard-to-staff rural or urban schools.
It measures and tracks academic progress across the country and helps those school divisions that lag behind address areas of concern. It manages student loan and grant programs that ensure children without the financial means to go to college can do so without incurring more debt than they can ever pay off.
The Trump administration's illegal actions to dismantle the Department of Education will ensure those gaps remain. The administration claims it is returning control of the public education system back to the states and localities. They have always had that control. But they have not always had the will or the ability to ensure every child can get a good education.
Here in Virginia, state and local officials and educators fear that local agencies and the Virginia Department of Education do not have the funding or staff to handle the workload — especially in areas like special education. Block grant funding that the Trump administration promises comes with little accountability, making it unclear whether the funds will actually reach the students and schools that need them most: children with disabilities, in rural and low-income communities.
Education lays the foundation for a strong future. Today’s students are the entrepreneurs, civic leaders, teachers, doctors, lawyers and engineers of tomorrow.
We owe it to our parents, grandparents and great grandparents to protect and build upon the progress they made. We owe it to our children and theirs to fight efforts to roll back that progress now.