John Roberts’ Imperial Court Is Helping Its President Gut Public Schools

The Billionaires Check Another Box Off Their Wish List

Yet another ruling in the shadows…

This month, the U.S. Supreme Court issued yet another ruling overturning a lower court in order to aid Donald Trump’s agenda to crush the U.S. Department of Education (DoED). The Court, helmed by Chief Justice John Roberts, has again actively intervened to block federal court rulings that enjoined radical actions by the Trump administration, and again it did so in the shadows, without hearing oral arguments and having full briefings.

Chief Justice John Roberts issued this partisan decree over the objections of Justice Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson. The Republican majority did not even deign to write an opinion trying to justify their decision to allow Trump’s appointee to the DoED, Linda McMahon, to fire more than 1,400 civil servants. The lower court had ordered that these employees be reinstated after finding that the administration’s “true intention is to effectively dismantle the Department,” even though only Congress has the power to eliminate a federal agency created by statute, signed into law by a president.

In the most recent fiscal year, the DoED’s budget was $268.4 billion, which sounds like a lot but actually accounts for less than 4% of the entire federal budget. Its spending to support public schools across the country is not what is driving the deficit. As the dissenting justices point out, “As Congress mandated, the Department plays a vital role in this Nation’s education system, safeguarding equal access to learning and channeling billions of dollars to schools and students across the country each year.”

And, as they note, the Constitution gives the president a key role in our system of government: to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” Of course, that command – that fundamental responsibility in a democratic republic – is precisely what John Roberts schemed to destroy when he orchestrated the edict last year giving Donald Trump immunity from criminal prosecution and paved the way for Trump’s return to power with king-like attributes that Roberts is busily enhancing.

How did we get here?

First of all, as Senator Whitehouse has documented, the U.S. Supreme Court was targeted for capture by billionaire interests, a capture that was orchestrated by Leonard Leo. One of the key long-standing funders of this takeover mission is Charles Koch, one of the richest men in the world and the head of Koch Industries, the second largest privately controlled company in America.

Koch is not just any random billionaire among the 800+ that now live in the U.S. Since the 1960s, Koch has been hostile to the idea of public schools. Back then, he was closely tied to a fellow leader of the right-wing extremist John Birch Society, Bob Love, who helped launch a private primary and secondary school in Wichita to avoid the mandate to implement the racial integration mandated by Brown v. Board of Education. As a proto-billionaire heir to his father’s industrial oil cracking business, Koch supported the creation of totally “independent schools” that would not be bound by federal or state law.

The first non-profit group Koch helped create was the “Center for Independent Education,” which in the 1970s railed against laws requiring children to attend public schools. And just how radical were Koch’s views and his hostility to public schools? One of the books Koch helped fund depicted a child as an accused criminal forced to serve a “sentence” in school with the title “The Twelve Year Sentence, Radical Views of Compulsory Schooling.” Meanwhile, Koch helped co-author a piece assailing public funding of university education, asking why businesses should subsidize the training of other people’s workers. Koch supported students taking on debt to fund their education, rather than taxes.

With Charles Koch and his family as the biggest funders of the Libertarian Party, its platform specifically called for defunding public schools.

Since the 1980s, Koch-funded groups have continued to assail public schools in innumerable ways, an effort that was ultimately rebranded as “school choice.” That agenda has been advanced by Milton Friedman’s foundation, now called Ed Choice, which has sought to divert money away from public schools and into private schools and charters. (It was Friedman, by the way, who in 1955 articulated a so-called libertarian justification for assailing public schools post-Brown by claiming there should not be “government schools” at all, just whatever level of segregation is desired by the free market.)

The U.S. Department of Education has been forced into implementing that diversion too, sending several billion dollars to fund charter schools over the past few decades, in addition to supporting vouchers. Much of that effort has been promoted by the billionaires made by the Wal-Mart fortune (some of the Walton family heirs) and the AmWay fortune (Betsy and Dick DeVos), along with other millionaires and billionaires hostile to public schools.

They’re not done yet

But that has not been good enough for the radicals attacking public schools. You can see it in the grandstanding of Republicans auditioning for billionaire backing of their bids to become president. In the lead up to the 2012 presidential campaign, Rick Perry famously forgot all the agencies he was pledging to close – ”oops,” he said – but he remembered to name the Department of Education. Koch has also held events featuring potential presidential candidates seeking to kiss his ring and gain the support of his fellow right-wing billionaires. Even though Trump never got Koch’s endorsement, Koch’s agenda has been advanced by Trump, including the billionaire tax cuts in what I call the Big Billionaire Bailout bill that Trump just signed.

Trump promised to kill the Department of Education and cast McMahon as the face of the effort. She has no experience in the field of public education, just entertainment through the “pro-wrestling” stagemanship that has become the source of her fortune. And, now with the help of a partisan Supreme Court, together they are decimating this vital agency.

Back in 2005, when I was attending Grover Norquist’s “Wednesday Group” meetings, when I was leading the national left-right coalition to reform the Patriot Act, I was stunned to hear some of the key players there joking about killing the Department of Education. I could not believe that they were talking about killing public schools by 2025 as part of their long-term vision for America. I cannot believe that just twenty years later, they and their benefactors have actually succeeded in decimating this agency that has helped educate more than one billion Americans.

But here we are.

America’s public schools need more support, not less, to help children thrive in learning language, history, math, science, music, art, industry, and athletics. But instead, we are witnessing partisans in all three branches of the federal government attack one of the most important institutions supporting the health of our democracy. It’s a travesty, a judicial travesty, a moral travesty, and a devastating wound to America.

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What I’m Reading:

• Maurice Cunningham, Dark Money and the Politics of Privatization

  • Mo is brilliant and a national treasure who writes and speaks with such clarity on the importance of public schools and who is undermining them.

• I am pre-ordering Randi Weingarten’s new book: Why Fascists Fear Teachers, Public Education and the Future of Democracy

  • Randi leads the American Federation of Teachers and she is a powerful voice in the battle for great public schools and for our democracy.

• I’m also reading the keynote address by Becky Pringle, the leader of the National Education Association, from earlier this month.

  • Her passionate speech, “On Freedom,” describes in song and prose the vital importance of building power to secure freedom in America.

• And, of course, the U.S. Constitution.

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