President Trump has said the U.S. Department of Education should be “shut down immediately.”  While doing so, he’s made false claims about the U.S. position in global education rankings and the recent NAEP test scores to make us look worse than we are.

As Trump has already shown, he is not in the habit of telling the truth, so there is no reason to think he cares about educating our nation’s students. In fact, he has a history of doing the opposite.

After first winning office in 2016, Trump settled lawsuits against his unaccredited “Trump University,” which, according to prosecutors and former students, was a “scam,” a “fraud,” and a “bait and switch” operation. The $25 million payout was upheld by a federal court in 2018.

Now, Trump is trying to scam every student and family in America. We shouldn’t let him.

President Trump can’t shutter the U.S. Department of Education on his own. Only Congress can do that. And he knows this. Nevertheless, Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) crew are taking a chainsaw to the Department of Education without thought, hesitation, or any actual analysis of the Department or its effectiveness.

The cuts the administration is making and proposing aren’t going to improve education in America, because improving education is not their goal.

• If Trump and Musk truly cared about increasing efficiency and eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse in federal education spending, they wouldn’t fire the Inspector General whose job it is to root out any waste, fraud, and abuse.
• If Trump and Musk cared about helping kids learn more, they wouldn’t cancel nearly all research and evaluation projects at the federal Institute of Education Sciences.
• If Trump and Musk cared about making college and job training more affordable, they wouldn’t let Congressional Republicans eliminate tax credits for college tuition, add a new tax on scholarships, and make student loans more expensive and less accessible.
• And if Trump and Musk cared about equality and fairness, they wouldn’t freeze civil rights investigations while issuing threats that try to equate “diversity” with “discrimination.”

Yet, they’re doing all these things. So, if improving education is not their goal, what is it?

It’s possible that Trump and Musk’s motivations to eliminate the federal role in public education are the same motivations for their attacks across the federal government: divert public money to private interests, appeal to the religious right, and further segregate Americans across lines of race and wealth.

Currently, all children have the right to a public K-12 education. The call for “school choice” is about trying to take tax money from public schools serving all students and send it to private schools — including religious schools — that are based on principles of exclusion. If they’re successful, students of color, students with disabilities, and others could be rejected for any reason — or no reason at all other than pure discrimination.

The commitment to getting the “woke indoctrination” out of schools seems to be about two things. First, censoring facts out of our classrooms so students can’t learn the power of asking questions, chasing the truth, and pushing for change. And second, attacking “DEI” (diversity, equity, and inclusion) is a sheisty way for them to shut down opportunities among non-white students they don’t want to get an education.

The condemnation of college probably is about re-tracking students of color or those from low-income backgrounds into lower-skilled, lower-paying jobs while catapulting others into positions of extreme wealth and power. It’s also about preventing Americans from deepening their learning about subjects, from war and peace to wealth inequality, that could undermine the right-wing political agenda. And it’s about opening the floodgates of federal dollars to predatory, for-profit colleges and non-college training providers.

This is not to say our education system doesn’t need to get better. It absolutely does. Our nation’s kids’ test scores are indeed too low. The price of continued education beyond high school is altogether too high. Too many schools and communities remain segregated, and disparities in opportunities and outcomes by race and income are troublingly persistent, from pre-school through postgraduate education. In too many places, our collective return on investment in education — the investment of time, talent, and treasure — is not paying off as it should. And in too many places, the public investments in education are inadequate and unfair.

These realities present a risk not only to students and families trying to climb the economic ladder, but also to the nation itself. Employers can’t find enough skilled workers for the jobs of today or tomorrow. Longtime business owners and tradespeople can’t find apprentices to carry on their legacies. With all DOGE’s cuts to critical research, the next discoveries in science, medicine, and technology are even further away. All this just furthers the gap between the haves and the have-nots — but this is precisely their point.

These are risks we should address as a nation, and in our communities, without delay. But that’s not what Trump and Musk are doing. That’s not what Congressional Republicans are doing with their proposed budget cuts. They are pretending to care about education and “efficiency” as they take actions that will improve neither.

We can’t fall for their lies. If we don’t soon wake up to what these fraudsters are doing, at some point it might become too late. Please call your congresspeople and tell them to double down on public education, not dismantle it.