Trump’s Education Plans and America’s Most Vulnerable Students

I have noticed that prominent supporters of President Trump have recently made disturbing statements about children with learning disabilities. In an interview with my colleague Ross Douthat earlier this year, the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen said:

Andreessen seems to be conflating two separate things. It is true that there is a small number of very wealthy parents who are spending tens of thousands of dollars out of pocket on private neuropsychological evaluations, but it’s unclear how many of those diagnoses are “fake,” and that process costs taxpayers nothing. Giving children more time on tests is also free — it does not necessarily require extra staffing, adjustments to classrooms or the implementation of expensive technology.

Separately, there are children who have all different kinds of real disabilities, from mild to severe, and those children are legally entitled to various kinds of educational support and funding from public schools because of the 50-year-old Individuals With Disabilities Education Act (IDEA).

This kind of sentiment is not just coming from the tech bro wing of the MAGAverse. Senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, while questioning Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in a hearing before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, said, “We have an attention deficit problem in this country. You know, attention deficit when you and I were growing up, our parents didn’t use a drug, they used a belt and whipped our butt, you know, and told us to sit down.” We can certainly have a debate about the best way to treat attention deficit issues, but suggesting in the year 2025 that beating children should be part of the repertoire is sick.

Behind both Tuberville and Andreessen’s statements I’m hearing a similar argument: Learning differences are exaggerated, and by providing support to students who have received what critics consider nonsense diagnoses, we’re coddling America’s children and bilking taxpayers.

Because one of the big things that the Department of Education does is enforce and partially fund IDEA, this kind of argument offers a predicate for getting rid of the Department of Education and even slashing funding for education overall. According to The Washington Post, President Trump is “preparing an executive order aimed at eventually closing the Education Department and, in the short term, dismantling it from within.” Trump has previously said that he wants to close the Department of Education, and it has been a longtime Republican goal.

To back up a bit: The vast majority of education funding comes from state and local governments. About 14 percent of funding for all public schools comes from the federal government, but how much each state relies on federal government money varies considerably — Alaska and North Dakota receive the most funding per pupil from the federal government and Utah and Kansas the least, according to the Education Data Initiative.