The Supreme Court’s decision Monday allowing President Donald Trump’s administration to conduct mass layoffs at the Department of Education is renewing concerns that the gutting of the agency will further marginalize the nation’s most vulnerable young people — children of color, economically disadvantaged students, LGBTQ+ youth and those with disabilities.
The ruling freezes an order from a federal court that had temporarily prevented the president from carrying out over 1,300 Education Department layoffs and challenged his administration’s authority to reassign the department’s primary duties to external agencies. Congress created the department and, therefore, is the entity with the power to dismantle it.
The recent development from the Supreme Court, however, means that the Trump administration can proceed with layoffs that will shrink the Department of Education by nearly half its staff while a lawsuit opposing his call for personnel cuts is still pending in a lower court. The Education Department employed over 4,000 people at the start of the year, and permitting layoffs to begin will deliver a heavy blow to a number of its divisions, including the Office for Civil Rights, which investigates claims of discrimination at schools and is slated to lose seven of its 12 regional offices.
The Trump administration also intends to cut staff who oversee bilingual education programs; K–12 education funding; Individuals with Disabilities Education Act grants and compliance; and federal financial aid for students.
“This attack on education, K-12 and higher education, is about deliberately reinforcing racism and sexism, ableism, nativism, classism, so that people who are in marginalized communities or who just want a fair shot at the American Dream have those protections and opportunities stripped from them so that a few can hoard a lot,” said Andrea Abrams, executive director of the Defending American Values Coalition, which advocates for diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) and fair access to opportunity.
She predicts an erosion in protections for students with disabilities, English learners, low-income youth and those experiencing achievement gaps. She said it’s important to remember that these rollbacks are taking place as the Trump administration also attacks DEI in other government agencies and the military.
The administration is “trying to say that it’s illegal to do anything to defend people against discrimination and bigotry and unfairness,” Abrams said. “Saying that giving as many people as possible access to opportunity, that anything that deliberately tries to do that, is wrong — this is part of that. The attack on DEI and this attack on the Department of Education are the same thing.”
Adaku Onyeka-Crawford, director of the Opportunity to Learn Program at Advancement Project, a multiracial civil rights organization, told The 19th that the Supreme Court decision could have far-reaching effects on education, especially for children of color. Onyeka-Crawford served as senior counsel at the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights from 2022 until the end of former President Joe Biden’s tenure in the White House.
“The Department of Education was already short-staffed,” she said. “It was one of the smaller executive agencies, and what this means is that it’s reducing the functions of the Department of Education, whether that’s providing guidance to school districts about how to better equip their teachers with professional development or investigating allegations of discrimination or unfair discipline that impacts Black and Brown students.”
Without sufficient personnel at the agency, investigations will take longer to complete and opportunities may be denied to marginalized students, including rural youth, she said. In addition to slowing down discrimination investigations, the reduction in force at the Office for Civil Rights sends a message to school districts that discrimination based on race, sex or disability will be tolerated, according to Onyeka-Crawford.
“The Department of Education isn’t going to do anything to enforce our civil rights laws that our civil rights leaders fought for many decades ago,” she said. “That makes it more important that parents and students try to advocate at the local level to get their leaders to plug in the gap where the federal government should be.”
Melanie Willingham-Jaggers, executive director of GLSEN, which advocates for LGBTQ+ issues in K-12 education, has similar concerns regarding the Department of Education’s approach to federal civil rights laws under the Trump administration.
“The Court once again has proven to care more about one man’s misguided agenda than the needs of all individuals that they swore an oath to defend,” they said in a statement. “The move represents an expansion of presidential power, clearing a frightening path that leaves students to suffer from discrimination and other civil rights violations without the federal resources Congress intended.”
Willingham-Jaggers went on to say that not only will marginalized youth be unprotected but that schools will be significantly underfunded as well.
“Reducing civil rights enforcement in schools will leave an increasingly diverse student population with fewer remedies and diminished academic success,” she said.
Denise Forte, president and CEO of The Education Trust, which advances policies and practices to erase barriers in the nation’s education system, described the Supreme Court’s ruling in favor of the Trump administration as “the Great American Heist.”
“This is a continuation of this administration’s pursuit to privatize, defund, and destabilize our public education system,” Forte said in a statement Tuesday. “From the expansion of private school vouchers and attacks on diversity and school curriculum, to egregious funding cuts proposed by President Trump’s 2026 budget, the ongoing ICE raids, and the total elimination of funding for our earliest learners in Head Start programs, the politics of cruelty reign supreme.”
(Kayla Bartkowski/Getty Images)
Meanwhile, Education Secretary Linda McMahon celebrated the Supreme Court’s decision, saying she would initiate mass layoffs and restore excellence in the education system.
“We will carry out the reduction in force to promote efficiency and accountability and to ensure resources are directed where they matter most — to students, parents, and teachers,” she said in a statement. “As we return education to the states, this Administration will continue to perform all statutory duties while empowering families and teachers by reducing education bureaucracy.”
The Supreme Court, McMahon said, confirmed that the Constitution gives the president the power “to make decisions about staffing levels, administrative organization, and day-to-day operations of federal agencies.”
Onyeka-Crawford, on the other hand, criticized the court for using the shadow docket — its expedited process for handling urgent cases — to side with the Trump administration and ignore the lower courts that found the president’s effort to shrink the Department of Education via mass layoffs to be unconstitutional. The shadow docket has faced criticism because the court does not have to provide an explanation for its reasoning in these cases and careful deliberation is not required, raising concerns that it is used to quickly push through partisan policies.
“There was a lawsuit challenging those actions as illegal,” Onyeka-Crawford said of the Trump administration’s Education Department layoffs. “There’s a lot of things you have to do before a reduction-in-force, and they didn’t do any of it right. In addition to that, the justification they said for doing the RIF was because they want to shut down the Department of Education. Again, that is illegal. It takes an act of Congress to do that.”
Although the Supreme Court ruling may be a win for the Trump administration, Onyeka-Crawford said that Congress has multiple forms of recourse available, including appropriating the over $6 billion in education funding earmarked for after-school programs, English learners, teacher training, bullying prevention and other services the president has withheld from states. Congress, she said, can offer a friend-of-the-court brief in support of the 24 states and Washington, D.C., suing Trump for impounding funds that are usually disbursed July 1 of each year.
“The federal government cannot use our children’s classrooms to advance its assault on immigrant and working families,” New York’s Attorney Gen. Letitia James said in a statement on Monday about the withholding of funds. New York is one of the states suing. “This illegal and unjustified funding freeze will be devastating for students and families nationwide, especially for those who rely on these programs for childcare or to learn English. Congress allocated these funds, and the law requires that they be delivered.”
Like the states, Congress can take action against the administration for overstepping in various capacities — from impounding funds to gutting the Education Department, according to Onyeka-Crawford.
“They can hold congressional hearings,” she said. “They can hold the administration in contempt. There’s a lot that they can do through the Constitution, but they need to have the backbone to do it, and we as constituents should be pushing them to do that because, unfortunately, the Supreme Court has failed in its duties as a co-equal branch of government.”
Great Job Nadra Nittle & the Team @ The 19th Source link for sharing this story.
