Opinion: When States Take Over Education, It Puts Black Children Last in Line, Every Time

President Donald Trump says he is returning education to the states by closing the U.S. Department of Education. What he really means is that he is returning to a time when education was a privilege for some and an afterthought for others.

When he declared in March 2025 that he wanted the Education Department “closed immediately,” it wasn’t just a sound bite. It was a promise. A promise to dismantle the one system meant to protect the children this country has always underserved: Black children. The ink on the Emancipation Proclamation might be old, but the mindset that fought it never really went away. It just put on another suit.

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After emancipation, freed Black families built schools with their own hands. They hired teachers, scraped together funds and insisted that their children would learn to read even if they had to do so in secret. The backlash was swift and violent. White mobs burned schools, terrorized teachers, and state lawmakers passed inequitable budgets that kept Black students in crumbling classrooms with hand-me-down, tattered books.

By 1980, after decades of states proving they couldn’t or wouldn’t do right by Black and poor students, the federal government stepped in. President Jimmy Carter created the Education Department to make sure that every child, no matter where they lived or what color they were, had a fair shot at learning.

I think of my grandson, an autistic Black boy with an individualized education plan who depends on the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act and other federal programs. Without these protections and funding that come from the federal level, the system will fail children like him. States don’t have an excellent track record of protecting students with disabilities, especially Black boys. When we remove federal oversight, we aren’t saving money. We’re sacrificing children.

As a former public school teacher, I’ve seen firsthand what happens when education depends on ZIP codes rather than fairness: Wealthy, mostly white districts keep thriving. Meanwhile, schools that serve Black and brown kids are stuck under leaking ceilings, flipping through worn-out books older than their teachers.

And yet here we are in 2025, watching the federal government try to hand over the keys to the states. Thousands of education workers are out of work, civil rights offices are closed, and the Trump administration appointees have completely gutted oversight.

They’ve shut down seven of the 12 regional offices for the department’s Office for Civil Rights and attempted to lay off employees, only to try to bring back some of those workers. All this chaos means fewer investigations into discrimination, fewer checks on racist discipline policies and fewer protections for Black children who are already suspended and expelled at rates two to three times higher than their white peers.

Now we are supposed to trust states to do the right thing? The same states shouting “local control” are banning DEI programs, censoring Black history and whitewashing textbooks. Florida banned AP African American Studies. Texas once approved a curriculum that called enslaved people “workers.” Local control isn’t reform. It’s cultural erasure disguised as policy.

Black children are the first to feel the sting. To this day, our kids attend schools with fewer resources, larger class sizes and outdated materials. Federal programs like Title I and IDEA keep those schools alive. Without them, special education funding dries up, class sizes balloon and talented teachers walk away. Take them away, and you widen that gap on purpose.

When you strip education from federal protection, you don’t get freedom, you get chaos. You get 50 different versions of what a child is worth, determined by 50 governors with 50 different agendas. We’ve seen this movie before.