Happy Valentine’s Day, Rulers! I have some bittersweet news to share with you. Next month, I’ll start reporting for POLITICO’s cybersecurity team. I’m so excited to join this team of talented journalists. Because of the new role, this will be my last regular edition of Women Rule. I’m so grateful for the opportunity to helm this newsletter over the last year. The intersection of gender, policy and politics is crucial for journalists to consider in all aspects of coverage. And I’m so happy I was able to be a part of that with my co-authors, Emma, Kat and Gigi, and our editor, Teresa. Anyways, this week I sat down with education advocates to discuss the Trump administration’s plans for the Education Department and how young women and girls enrolled in schools across the country could be affected by possibly shuttering the agency. Let’s get into it: Donald Trump plans to fulfill a campaign promise to totally revamp — and likely dismantle — the Education Department. The president is expected to issue an executive order later this month outlining plans to shutter the agency. Linda McMahon, Trump’s pick to lead the department, told a congressional panel Thursday that the president does not want to defund the agency — though he has taken steps to do so. Recently, the administration placed multiple department employees on leave and billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency launched a probe into the agency — a move that led the administration to terminate nearly $900 million in department contracts. With cuts already decimating the agency and the prospect of closure looking more likely, education leaders and advocates have expressed serious concerns over the consequences — particularly for data collection, combating discrimination and resources for students who are experiencing sexual misconduct in schools. Advocates are also worried that young women and girls in schools will bear the brunt of these cuts. According to Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association, the largest labor unions in the country, 90 percent of American students and 95 percent of students with disabilities are enrolled in public schools. “Eliminating the Department of Education is equivalent to giving up on our future. Strong public schools are essential to strong communities,” Pringle says in a statement. “I think the dismantling of the Department of Education is going to be incredibly harmful for kids across the country, and particularly for girls and girls of color, girls with disabilities, girls with intersectional identities,” says Nancy Duchesneau, a senior P-12 research associate for education equity advocacy group Education Trust. Duchesneau tells Women Rule that the department is an “essential piece of government” that holds school districts accountable “for making sure that they are not discriminatory.” Karen Truszkowski, a Title IX lawyer and director at advocacy group Stop Sexual Assault in Schools agrees: “The Department of Education prohibits discrimination. It enforces civil rights. It investigates violations and, without the Department of Ed, all of that is going to go away.” Duchesneau points to recent cuts to the department that ended funding for the Institute of Education Sciences — a key source of data on the performance and quality of schools in the U.S. That funding, she says, is essentially the arm of the Department of Education that provides grant funding for contractors to do an assortment of things, including research and collecting data from states and from districts. According to Duchesneau, when those funds are slashed, there’s no system in place to collect the data from districts and states to determine what sorts of disparity exists for girls. It also makes it harder to track disparities among racial groups, she says. She adds, “[Trump] is essentially removing all of the protections that we had in place for girls, and he’s making it so that there is really going to be no accountability for schools and for districts should discrimination occur.” Another major concern for advocates is the fate of Title IX, a federal law that bars schools from engaging in sex-based discrimination. Without Title IX, young girls will be victims, Truszkowski tells Women Rule. “And they’re going to have no recourse.” Other education advocates, like Moms for Liberty, argue the Trump administration has already made steps to protect girls in school since the president returned to office last month. “[Trump’s] policies so far … how they’re impacting young girls and young women in school is their safety [and] protecting their voices,” Moms for Liberty co-founder Tina Descovich says. Descovich adds that shuttering the department would eliminate the country’s “one size fits all” policy for school districts. “The things that the … The U.S. Department of Education does, they’re mostly a middleman,” she says. She continues, “I know from personally being on a school board how challenging it is to balance limited funds, and when you have to use them for things that are not a priority for your school district. The universal approach does not work, and … we know that there needs to be a more local approach to education for it to be successful.” But it remains to be seen if the Trump administration will send funding from the agency directly to the states. In 2023, Trump promised in a video on social media to shutter the agency early in his second administration and send “all education and education work and needs back to the states.” Truszkowski also tells Women Rule this uncertainty is especially distressing for education advocates and leaders. “They’ve never really said, ‘Hey, … we’re just going to funnel it all to the states and let the states figure out what they want to do with it instead.’ They haven’t really said if that’s their plan or not. We don’t really know what we’re operating with,” she says. If the federal government left the funding up to the states, Truszkowski says, “then there’s [going to] be a huge disparity from state to state about how students are treated.” In her hearing Thursday, McMahon reassured a congressional panel that the department could not be shut down without congressional action: “It is set up by the United States Congress, and we work with Congress.”
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