Comprehensive Impacts of Trump’s First Year: Education
By: Dr. Amy Bacharach
Tags: Politics, Education, Higher Education, Government, Trump

2017 was a surreal year. Just when we think things can’t get any worse, lo and behold, a new tweet comes out. Or a new policy is introduced. Or a new world leader is so offended that we get closer to doomsday. Trump’s election has normalized and publicized the proverbial anonymous yahoo comments, and it’s hard to imagine that he still has a small but loud base of support and that people chose this narcissistic, sexist, racist sociopath consciously. He has exemplified our slow, subtle transformation from intelligent citizens to mindless consumers to salivating spectators who have a constant need for entertainment and outrage.

I always said that when voting for president, what we’re really voting for was the Supreme Court. I am going on record to say that I was wrong. Dead wrong. Trump has proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that there are so many ways a president can be harmful other than by Supreme Court appointments. To be sure, judicial appointments are one major way that Trump is detrimental to the country, and it will take at least a generation to recover from those appointments alone. But this document shows that a president can do deep and lasting damage in many ways.

Although I vacillate between disgust and defeat and anger, I am trying very hard to channel all of those feelings into fighting against our spiral toward Idiocracy. The only way to do this is for everyone who is eligible to actually get out and vote in every single election. This November’s midterm elections will tell us if Americans are really ready for progress or if they’re apathetic enough to continue our moral, ethical, and constitutional decline.

There have been several year-end round-ups about Trump’s first year. Many of them are laughably revisionist. But there were some informative ones. Axios created a great chart of search trends for some of the biggest news events of the first year, showing how we’ve all jumped from one four-alarm news fire to another. Rolling Stone summarized the damage of Trump’s first year. And Roger Cohen with the New York Times editorialized our frightening reality in If This is America.

This piece is meant to be a comprehensive assessment of the impacts of Trump’s first year as President of the United States of America (let that sink in). There are many things that happened during the campaign that are not included. Included are impacts from January 20, 2017, to January 31, 2018 (in some cases, February 1). There are sure to be things missing, but I have done my best to record these impacts. The impacts are listed under 19 different categories:

1. Cabinet Appointments;

2. Science & Environment;

3. Women & Families;

4. LBGT;

5. Judicial/Constitutional;

6. Ethics;

7. Targeting free press/free speech/Privacy;

8. Health & Safety;

9. Consumer Protections;

10. Education;

11. Transportation/Infrastructure/Housing;

12. Immigration;

13. Social Contract;

14. Business/Economy/Budget;

15. Military/Defense/Police;

16. World;

17. General Governance;

18. Character; and

19. Some good news. Because there is always some good news.

Of course, some of the impacts may fit under multiple categories. For example, does Trump’s encouragement of police to treat suspects violently fall under Health and Safety or Law Enforcement? Or maybe Ethics or Character? There are many such conundrums, and I have tried to categorize each example appropriately. Some may disagree on the categorization. And that’s OK. As a researcher, I’m still pondering good ways to visualize all of this data, but in the meantime, it’s listed here. Fair warning: This is long. The items may not necessarily be in chronological order.

Since this will take me months to write, I will publish each section as I complete it. This tenth article is on Trump’s impacts on education.

I want to acknowledge Amy Siskind’s weekly list of subtle changes that experts in authoritarianism say to watch out for. Amy’s in-depth listings were invaluable, and a must-read itself.

Buckle your seatbelts.

Education

Photo by David Pennington on Unsplash

As mentioned in the article on appointments, Trump chose Betsy DeVos to head the Education Department. DeVos is best known as an anti-public school zealot who is uniquely unqualified and knows nothing about our public education system. She has also made millions of dollars on for-profit education and student loan collection companies. In a status report six months after DeVos’s appointment, Anya Kamenetz reported on DeVos’s negative impacts on the country’s students related to “school choice,” for-profit colleges and student loans, campus sexual assaults, and transgender students’ rights. And Ella Nilsen and Carly Sitrin wrote about how DeVos is quietly erasing President Obama’s education legacy by dropping protections for transgender students and sexual assault victims, changing the goals of the Office of Civil Rights, cutting professional development funding for teachers, dumping regulations related to school lunch nutrition, and creating a friendlier environment for for-profit colleges and student loan collectors. Here are some impacts of the Trump administration that we’re seeing in the area of education:

· Advocating charter schools, private religious schools, and homeschooling under the guise of “choice,” Trump declared a National School Choice Week proclamation. Turns out, “school choice” really means taxpayer-funded private religious school to the tune of tens of millions of dollars. Among the lies found in the “teaching” of voucher schools are textbooks claiming that evolution is destruction of faith, that Jews plotted to kill Jesus, and that slavery is really black immigration.

· The administration also rolled back President Obama’s school nutrition standards, reducing whole-grain requirements, allowing higher levels of sodium entrees, and restoring higher-fat and sweetened milk to school cafeterias, thus increasing the risk of obesity and diabetes among children across the country.

· The Trump administration opted out of a new standardized test that 28 other countries are implementing to test whether kids can spot and avoid fake news, assessing students’ ability to tell when data is being presented in a misleading way and the difference between fact and opinion.

· The top federal student aid official resigned from the Department of Education due to having a conscience. DeVos replaced him with a student loan company CEO who profits from student loans. But that’s not all. The new chief of student loan enforcement comes from a for-profit college.

· These are not the only shocking appointments. DeVos appointed Candice Jackson as acting head of the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, which enforces Title IX and civil rights law in educational institutions. Jackson has argued against feminism and affirmative action, and has suggested that women are “fake victims.”

· The effects of these appointments were fast. The Department of Education moved to limit the scope of civil rights investigations in schools, which means that investigations into discrimination complaints could become shorter and more narrow. In addition, the Department of Education will negotiate agreements with schools without releasing any investigation findings to the students or parents involved in the complaints. The new rules leave parents out of the process completely, leaving parents with no ability to advocate for their children.

· In higher education, Trump and DeVos removed guidance from President Obama regarding investigating sexual assaults on campus. Colleges and universities can now decide themselves what standard of evidence they want to use instead of using the “preponderance of evidence” standard to decide whether someone is guilty of sexual assault. President of the University of California system Janet Napolitano said that this change would “weaken sexual violence protections, prompt confusion among campuses about how best to respond to reports of sexual violence and sexual harassment, and unravel the progress that so many schools have made.” And president of the National Women’s Law Center Fatima Goss Graves noted that this change will “discourage students from reporting assaults, create uncertainty for schools on how to follow the law and make campuses less safe.”

· DeVos also decided to meet with men’s rights activist groups to talk about campus rape rules. These groups are known to be anti-women and to fight against the Violence Against Women Act and rights of victims and survivors of sexual assault. Among other things, these groups have suggested that rape and domestic violence are simply overreported and that the “radical feminist” legal system is what poses a real threat to men everywhere. One of the groups DeVos is prioritizing even suggested that women initiate violence themselves.

· Women aren’t the only students in danger. Trump and DeVos also rescinded guidelines to protect the rights of transgender students. President Obama had said that students’ gender identities were protected under Title IX requirements, which forbid federally funded schools from discriminating on the basis of sex. Trump and DeVos decided that it was up to local and state governments — or Congress — to adopt policies or laws to address discrimination, bullying, and harassment. Or not to. A subsequent guidance document instructed the Office of Civil Rights to investigate discrimination complaints the same way they were before President Obama’s guidance.

· DeVos rolled back two regulations made under President Obama that held unethical for-profit colleges accountable and provided financial relief to students who were defrauded by them. This is in spite of the evidence that showed how the regulations were working better than expected to protect students and taxpayers from unethical and predatory for-profit colleges. She has been sued by more than a dozen states for this act. During the Department of Education hearing on this matter, DeVos blocked attendees from streaming the meeting, even though it is supposed to be a public process.

· Trump and DVos also stopped cancelling student loans for those who were defrauded by for-profit colleges that ended up closing. At least 25,000 people were frozen out of the system by July 2017.

· Under Trump and DeVos, the Department of Education also wants to phase out public service loan forgiveness, as well as other debt forgiveness programs.

· Trump is actually trying to revamp the entire Higher Education Act of 1965. The bill “eliminates every key consumer protection established by the Obama administration.” In addition to ending public service loan forgiveness, this revamp will cap student loans and income-based repayment options, changes funding for historically black colleges, and changes definitions of “success” so that for-profit colleges are less scrutinized. The Wall Street Journal noted that the only winner in Trump’s revamp are for-profit colleges.

· Trump tried to eliminate nontaxable tuition waivers for graduate students who work as teaching or research assistants, which would have added at least $2,000 to students’ tax bills. As Ethan Siegel noted, this would have destroyed graduate education. Thankfully, this part of the tax plan did not come to fruition.

The next article will cover the impacts of Trump’s first year on transportation, infrastructure, and housing.