Included among the numerous education-related executive orders issued by the Trump administration is a recent statement to reverse an Obama-era program to address racially disproportionate school discipline practices, a program the administration claimed was filled with “unlawful ‘equity’ ideology.”Footnote ¹ Far from radical, the Obama programFootnote ² in effect addressed concerns among civil rights organizations, who since the 1970s have demanded federal civil rights enforcement to investigate schools they alleged used school discipline to disproportionally punish Black children and perpetuate “second generation segregation.”Footnote ³ More than reversing Obama-era policies, when examined in the context of the long civil rights era, Trump’s education orders tell a longer story about the changing ideological function of federal education programs and the shifting and narrowing targets of civil rights since the 1970s.

The civil rights era made way for the biggest breakthroughs in redistributing educational resources and opportunities. The 1954 Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education outlawed segregation, and in the decade that followed, the Civil Rights Act (1964) and other federal legislation empowered federal offices to collect data and monitor civil rights violations. When paired with the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (1965), or ESEA, Title VI of the Civil Rights Act gave legislative teeth to enforce desegregation and to cut off funds to local school authorities that violated civil rights law.Footnote ⁴ By 1967, and on the hundredth anniversary of the Office of Education, President Lyndon Johnson summarized the office’s charge in meeting the “national goal” of achieving his vast education reforms: “Every child shall have the chance to get as much education as he or she can absorb—no matter how poor they are, no matter what color they are, no matter where they live.”Footnote ⁵

The education reforms of the civil rights era did more than extend opportunity for opportunity’s sake. Within the context of ideological battles abroad and increased domestic and racial strife, the improvement of education served as a social stabilizing force. Thurgood Marshall, the lawyer leading the NAACP’s fight against the nation’s “separate but equal” doctrine, summarized the position that the desegregation issue had “assumed its most urgent significance” in “the worldwide struggle to stop communist totalitarianism.”Footnote ⁶ Indeed, by the end of World War II ongoing racial discrimination in the United States jeopardized American foreign policy and threatened its ideological stance against fascism and totalitarianism abroad.Footnote ⁷ In response, federal officials including President Truman’s Committee on Civil Rights, made explicit connections between racial discrimination and the struggle for freedom and tyranny. Through their influence of US foreign aid programs, including the Peace Corps and the recently gutted USAID, education initiatives also served as an extension of Cold War strategy and soft power abroad.Footnote ⁸

On the domestic front, unemployment, racial unrest, and threats related to juvenile delinquency in cities helped justify new federal education initiatives. The Office of Education, the Department of Labor, and the new Office of Economic Opportunity joined forces in fighting an educational war against poverty.Footnote ⁹ Anti-poverty education reforms like Head Start, Title I of the ESEA, and Job Corps, among others, could calm the emerging “social dynamite” of unemployed and poorly educated youth living in US cities. For Historian Elizabeth Hinton, the “War on Poverty is best understood … as a manifestation of fear about urban disorder and about the behavior of young people, particularly young African Americans.”Footnote ¹⁰ After urban uprisings in cities like Watts, Newark, and Detroit, officials in the Office of Education declared the “urgent need for the schools to become more closely identified with the community and with community needs and interests.”Footnote ¹¹ And in Detroit, school officials responded to unrest by using federal funds for community initiatives, hiring teacher aides “indigenous to the community,” and initiating courses in Negro history.Footnote ¹² In effect, programs now cast as “unlawful ‘equity’ ideology” were used to pacify urban disorder.

In the period since, the civil rights goals have shifted and narrowed. On one end, Black demands for desegregation made way for Black empowerment and community control. On the other, policies and discourse about civil rights narrowed as the Right supplanted opportunity with an accountability agenda and school discipline initiatives that stress individual student responsibility.Footnote ¹³ School desegregation—once the ultimate goal for educational equality—underwent decades of conservative attacks as the Nixon and Reagan administrations sought to prohibit busing, limit and undermine civil rights enforcement, and pursue alternative approaches to reforming urban schools—including promoting Black leadership.Footnote ¹⁴ The Reagan administration, for instance, saw “restoring good old-fashioned discipline” under the leadership of strict Black leaders—rather than busing or increasing school funding—as the best way to improve schools.Footnote ¹⁵

Trump’s promotion of “common sense school discipline policies” and his repurposing of Title VI to eliminate diversity, equity, and inclusion programs are indicative of the changing and narrowed civil rights landscape. Gutting programs birthed out of the civil rights era, such as Job Corps, and slashing personnel in the Office of Head Start raise questions about the ideological goals of Trump-era education reforms. If such programs were designed to confront social unrest and challenge tyranny and totalitarianism, the Trump administration’s executive orders indicate that such cuts and the repurposing of civil rights policies, far from rejecting totalitarianism, may be in service of it.