Be like Dorothy
What the f*** is going on? I mean this in a wonky sense: there’s a gap between appearance and reality in the education policy dialectic that’s giving me and everyone else heartburn. What’s real and what isn’t?
I’ve been thinking a lot about hyper-normalization, a term first used by Alexei Yurchak to describe the sense of false fine-ness in the Soviet Union in the lead up to its collapse. In that case, spectacle becomes reality even though it’s not real. Everyone treats it as real.
Right now we’re sort of seeing that I think in education policy, but in confused reverse. Instead of a false fine-ness, we’re seeing what might be a sort of nonfalse not-fine-ness. Bare with me, this post is a little long (stuff kept happening and I kept adding to it).
Dear Colleague
For instance, on Valentine’s Day, the Department of Education issued a “dear colleague letter” (DCL) detailing the new administration’s position on nondiscrimination protections from civil rights legislation.
It claims that the Supreme Court’s recent ruling regarding race-based admissions in higher education (the SFFA case) means that any program in the country’s education system that considers race in any way is discriminatory.
It’s the codification of reverse racism, consistent with the executive order on K-12 indoctrination: anything that has “discriminatory equity ideology” (trying to address or repair past injustice on behalf of certain groups that threatens the status or benefits of other groups, making white people feel bad) is suspect.
If educational institutions that receive federal money don’t address this discriminatory equity ideology within 14 days of the DCL, they’ll be subject to compliance reviews.
Okay, scary. The federal government can and will investigate you for compliance issues, which is bad for everyone. The threat is real. But is it?
As an Education Civil Rights blog post analyzing this situation puts it, the threat’s reality is up for debate. First off, because the DCL’s interpretation of the SFFA case might not hold up in court.
But let’s say it does hold up in court. Even then, the process for doing a compliance review is extensive, at least it has been in the past. ECR’s summary of the process is helpful:
The catch? ED and OCR do not have an easy way to carry out their threat. Unlike the Department of Government Efficiency, which is currently being used by President Trump to cut jobs and funding from government programs quickly, the process by which OCR cuts funding for a particular educational institution or state education agency is not quick. OCR must initiate a compliance review or other investigation, actually investigate the complaint, including allowing the educational institution to submit data and a legal response to the allegations, and make a finding that the institution or agency has violated the law. Even then, OCR offers the institution or agency the opportunity to voluntarily enter into a resolution agreement that spells out the corrective actions needed before threatening federal funding.
Even after all that, if an institution does not agree to enter into a resolution agreement, it has the right to due process before any enforcement action to strip federal funding is taken. In administrative proceedings, the institution has the right to a full hearing before the Education Department’s Office of Hearings and Appeals before any action to suspend, terminate, or withhold federal funding is effectuated. If OCR refers the matter to the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, the institution has the right to challenge OCR’s interpretation of the law in federal court.
Right. That’s helpful. We should probably get familiar with the DOE’s Office of Hearings and Appeals and its protocols, etc.
But even if the district loses the ability to appeal or loses the appeal itself, ECR makes the point that the personnel needed to complete the compliance review is currently being fired by the Musk DOGE project. If the federal government doesn’t have the human resources to make good on its threats, can it enforce them?
This is why I want to know what the f*** is going on. The administration is threatening to take away funding, but it’s taking away its own ability to follow through with that threat.
See who in court?
Take the case of two educational institutions in Maine: the University of Maine and School Administrative District 51.
After it was reported that UM was permitting transwomen to play in women’s basketball, the Department of Agriculture send a strongly-worded email to the university saying it was out of compliance with Trump’s executive orders about trans and sports. As a land grant university, they get money from the USDA.
Also, a Republican scumbag took pictures of a transgirl running in a high school girl’s track and field event in Maine, then posted them on Facebook, causing the incident to go viral. Then the Office of Civil Rights in the DOE opened an investigation of the school district.
Okay. But a university spokesperson responded to this letter by saying there isn’t actually any mention of wrongdoing in the letter, and that the university will comply with any and all investigations relating to state and federal laws.
Then, at a conference of governors on Friday, there was the following exchange between the Governor of Maine Jane Mills and Trump:
Trump told the governors that the NCAA had complied with his executive order prohibiting men from participating in women’s sports and then asked if the governor of Maine was in attendance.
“Are you not going to comply with it?” Trump asked Mills.
“I’m complying with state and federal law,” Mills shot back.
“Well, we are the federal law,” Trump said. “You’d better do it. You’d better do it, because you’re not going to get any federal funding at all if you don’t.”
“See you in court,” Mills replied.
So the federal government is opening an investigation into a major university system and a school district in Maine, the governor is challenging them in the courts and—here’s the kicker—that same federal government just fired 60 DOE workers while dozens put on administrative leave, just in the last week. It’s not clear who exactly these people are that were fired. But we have to wonder: Even if there’s an investigation, and then a court case, who’s going to do the investigating and lawyering?
Dereg paradox
It’s what I’m coming to think of as the deregulation paradox: the logical conclusion of deregulation as a policy paradigm is deregulating the very tools you need to deregulate.
It reminds me of the Wizard of Oz, where the wizard projects a big scary image of himself to intimidate everyone, but he’s actually just a dude behind a curtain.
This also makes me think of the line from Top Gun: the administration is writing checks its body can’t cash. That is, it’s letting its spectacle write checks its apparatus can’t cash.
But speaking of cash, the flood of “cuts” coming to federal education spending are intimidating indeed, even though there’s some opacity and spectacle there as well.
Cancelled or paid out?
The Hechinger Report has a good wrap up of the DOGE attack on the DOE, namely its announced $886 million of grant projects. These cuts are real, grant projects drying up and funding streams for programs across the country are ending suddenly. Apparently, 59 of 86 contracts have indeed been cancelled, like this one:
Among the cancellations was an 11-year study of youths with disabilities, which…was halfway finished. It was supposed to identify which programs were effective in improving employment and educational outcomes for these students after high school. More than 1,000 youths with disabilities were supposed to receive special instruction and support in 2025 and 2026 through this study, which has now been terminated.
Okay, yes, this is bad. But they also note that there’s some opacity here too:
Multiyear contracts are paid out over time and in many cases, much of the money has already been disbursed. When I looked up the contract numbers online, they were sometimes much smaller than what the unverified DOGE spreadsheet listed. For example, one contract listed for $19 million was actually $14 million. Six years of the seven-year contract have already elapsed and most of the contract amount has presumably been paid out.
So the listed amount of projects DOGE says it’s cutting isn’t always the actual amount that’s being cut. If the money’s gone out the door, there’s nothing to terminate. Plus, the actual costs of a program aren’t the same as the listed costs. Mark Lieberman did some good reporting on what these funding cuts look like on that ground, like this one awful anecdote:
The school district in Little Rock, Ark., last May ordered 25 electric school buses that were set to transport students with disabilities to and from school beginning this coming fall. The district worked with a contractor late last year to destroy 25 of its diesel buses in order to follow the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency rules for the district’s $8.6 million rebate on the purchase of new electric buses.
Being short 25 school buses for the second half of the school year was already going to be a challenge, said Linda Young, the district’s director of grants. Now the district faces the possibility that it trashed 25 diesel buses for nothing, and won’t get any federal help replacing them.
Ugh.
“Trump policies can get fucked”
But what’s the reality elswhere and structurally? There’s been a pretty thorough pushback at the state and district levels against the executive orders. If state departments of education and school district leadership say this is bullshit, they have a lot of leverage. Be like this district:
I’ve been thinking a lot about “complying in advance.” When Dorothy confronts the Wizard of Oz, and he makes his big noise, she’s afraid, yes, but part of her heroism lies in the fact that she’s not cowed. She doesn’t just run away. She continues to face the Wizard. In Top Gun too, the pilot is calling the other pilot’s bluff: don’t let your mouth write checks your body can’t cash.
I think we should be like Dorothy and the pilot here: stand up to this spectacle. As education lawyer Joshua Weishart says, “States can't just ignore but must resist” the Dear Colleague letter. That’s what Mills is doing, and there’s good reason to think that standing up to this big, scary mirage can work.
While we should remember that it’s a life or death issue—like for the 11 year old girl who killed herself after being bullied with threats of deportation at school—we have to remember the forces at work here aren’t immutable. The title of Yurchak’s book on hyper-normalization was called “Everything was forever, until it was no more.” Maybe our moment could be described as “everything was scary, until it wasn’t.”