Recently, many of us opened our email app and saw a message from the school board about a national walk-in on March 19 in our school district. Many of us also probably ask ourselves the following question: Why is it happening?
Well to start off, we should define what a teacher walk-in is. A walk-in is a type of a peaceful protest that involves a group walking into a building for a cause, and in this case, the goal is to protest what President Trump is trying to do to the Department of Education.
President Trump has repeatedly mentioned in many of his speeches that he has plans to shut down the department of education. For example, in a 2023 video, he says, “One other thing I’ll be doing very early in the administration is closing up the Department of Education in Washington D.C. and sending all education and education work and needs back to the states” (NPR). Since his term began this year, “staffing at the Education Department has been cut in half, and he has been mulling an executive order to close the agency” say AP reporters Annie Ma and Collin Binkley.
The reason for the closure is the belief that by closing the Department of Education, the government will have better use of the finances that are used to support it. Of course there are many others. This action supports Republican ideology, as Trump promised to “cut federal funding for any school pushing critical race theory, radical gender ideology, and other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content on our children” (NPR) when he ran for president.
However, many argue against it. “The Education Department also plays an important regulatory role in services for students, ranging from those with disabilities to low-income and homeless kids” (AP) say Ma and Binkley. Removing the Department of Education would mean that these protections will be left unregulated, as it will be up to the states to decide.
Many argue that it will cause all of the funding necessary to support the schools to disappear, too. Many of them Republicans. Jon Valant, the director of the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution, tells NPR that “If you look at the states that rely the most on Title I funding as a share of their per-pupil education spending, it’s actually a bunch of red, rural states that get the largest share”. Upholding Trump’s goal, for many in his own party, puts Republican lawmakers at a disadvantage.
Amidst the panic, those who are worried of this becoming an actual act of the government, fail to consider the difficulty of following through with it. For it to be disbanded, President Trump will have to have both the Senate and the House of Representatives. It is possible, as members of the Republican party are an overwhelming majority in both.
He has a problem however, as Valant says, “even with full Republican control of both chambers, the idea would be unlikely to gain traction” (NPR). As it was mentioned before, not all Republicans support this idea, so the possibility of it happening can continue to hang over our heads.
