The Freedom From Religion Foundation assails the Trump administration’s latest assault on public education.

In an attempt to further dismantle our educational system, the Trump administration has announced plans to transfer oversight of special education and the Office for Civil Rights out of the Department of Education. This is not an inconsequential reorganization, but a deliberate dismantling of the civil rights infrastructure designed to protect every student in America’s public schools.

For decades, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights has acted as a check on discrimination in education. It is tasked with enforcing vital laws such as Title VI, Title IX and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. These laws exist precisely because Congress recognized that vulnerable students get ostracized and left behind without federal oversight. The Trump administration had vowed to cut 90 percent of the office’s staff, but a federal court struck down that plan and required the reinstatement of all previously fired Department of Education employees. As a result, the administration has shifted its focus to impeding agencies within the department, leaving them without power to protect students.

This dismantling is not happening in a vacuum. It coincides perfectly with an aggressive push to undermine public education and reroute funding to private, often religious schools. One way the Trump administration seeks to accomplish that goal is through promoting private school voucher schemes. In peddling vouchers as “school choice,” the Trump administration has rebranded the defunding of public education as parental empowerment.

The dire consequences of voucher programs cannot be overstated. In addition to siphoning funds dedicated to public schools, private schools are permitted to discriminate on the basis of religion, exclude students with disabilities, and reject families who don’t share their faith. The Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights has traditionally enforced the anti-discrimination laws that private schools must follow.

The Trump Administration has vowed to “return education to the states.” However, states do not enforce federal civil rights law; this is the federal government’s job. Stripping the Office for Civil Rights of its enforcement authority does not empower local communities; it abandons the students those laws were written to protect, including students of color, students with disabilities and students whose religious identity makes them targets in schools that receive public money but answer to no public authority.

FFRF has long warned that the systematic defunding of public education and the simultaneous expansion of taxpayer-funded religious schooling represent twin threats to public, secular education. Vouchers are at the forefront of eroding the wall of separation between state and church. By methodically dismantling the Department of Education, the Trump administration is accelerating that erosion.

“The latest effort by the Trump administration to dismantle our nation’s public education system is simply abhorrent,” says FFRF Co-President Annie Laurie Gaylor. “Stripping civil rights protections from millions of students while calling for public dollars to be funneled to religious schools is nothing more than the systematic dismantling of constitutional protections.”

Public schools are secular, open and accountable to all. FFRF will not stand by while that is broken.

The Freedom From Religion Foundation is a U.S.-based nonprofit dedicated to defending the constitutional principle of separation between state and church and educating the public on matters relating to nontheism. With about 41,000 members, FFRF is the largest association of freethinkers (atheists, agnostics and humanists) in North America. For more information, visit ffrf.org.

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