I do know one thing about standing as much as the authoritarian impulses of the MAGA motion. I resigned as Kentucky’s commissioner of schooling in late 2023 somewhat than implement the GOP-dominated state legislature’s shameful regulation aimed toward erasing and marginalizing LGBTQ+ college students.
The Trump administration has escalated these assaults from hostile rhetoric directed towards college students and Okay-12 and better schooling to placing insurance policies in place that aren’t simply disruptive, however outright dangerous — particularly to essentially the most weak college students.
Throughout the nation, schooling leaders are being pressured to make some robust choices — to decide on between defending core values, similar to fairness and historic reality, or yielding to political coercion in hopes of avoiding battle. There isn’t a technique that doesn’t contain battle and trade-offs. Each schooling chief operates in their very own political context with distinctive authorized and cultural constraints.
However make no mistake: Inaction shouldn’t be impartial. Even the choice to do nothing is a alternative, one which has penalties.
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Among the many Trump administration’s more moderen calls for is that state schooling chiefs dismantle range, fairness and inclusion (DEI) initiatives or lose federal funding. Insisting that they pledge to take action is extra than simply an egregious federal overreach into state and native management. It’s a direct menace to the values round entry, alternative and reality that our colleges are supposed to uphold. And it’s not the one menace.
Different MAGA-aligned efforts embody dismantling the U.S. Division of Schooling, stripping protections from college students with disabilities, criminalizing assist for LGBTQ+ youth and censoring educational content material deemed “anti-American” — together with teachings on race, gender and historic injustice.
Within the face of this, educators haven’t any simple path ahead. However we do have decisions. And what we select now will form the way forward for our establishments and our nation for years to return.
Essentially the most passive alternative is disengagement: turning away from nationwide politics to take care of the mechanics of schooling, specializing in instruction, operations, pupil occasions.
Getting schooling leaders and their college students to disengage has been an implicit objective of the MAGA schooling motion.
In turbulent instances, the schooling chief’s intuition to protect college students, households and employees from exterior chaos is comprehensible. Disengagement can protect short-term stability and provide a short lived sense of peace for leaders, college students and academic communities underneath stress.
Whereas current protests counsel some awakening, the administration’s day by day stream of democratic affronts is having a numbing impact. Many People are fatigued and tuning out. The same dynamic has lengthy existed in Putin’s Russia, the place residents retreated from public life, prioritizing non-public considerations as authoritarianism solidified round them.
A second possibility is vigilance — a wait-and-see method. Lots of the administration’s proclamations seem to contradict federal or state regulation or primary constitutional protections.
Many exasperated People, together with educators, hope the courts will maintain and intervene. Maybe future elections will appropriate the course. Or maybe the administration gained’t be capable of comply with by way of and execute a number of the threats they’re making. Vigilance permits leaders to preserve sources and keep away from untimely battles whereas assessing what’s going to really be enforced.
However like disengagement, vigilance is reactive and passive. It could actually depart weak college students unprotected, and it sends a muted sign to communities searching for management. By ready for the fitting second and challenge on which to interact and problem authoritarianism, we danger ready till it’s too late to cease it.
Associated: Monitoring Trump: His actions to dismantle the Schooling Division and extra
A 3rd possibility is capitulation — compliance, whether or not out of worry or pragmatism. We’ve seen this clearly in current choices by Columbia College and several other outstanding regulation companies, which caved to Trump administration stress to get rid of DEI insurance policies or face monetary retaliation and Kafkaesque bureaucratic oversight.
For college leaders, the temptation to capitulate is actual, particularly when federal {dollars} fund important packages for at-risk college students. Capitulation might imply gutting DEI places of work to keep away from scrutiny or rewriting curriculum to suit a government-approved narrative. However in any type, it’s a retreat from our skilled and moral obligations.
Generally, capitulation occurs with out even being requested. Historian Timothy Snyder calls this “anticipatory obedience” — the impulse to give up freedom preemptively within the hope of avoiding punishment.
The appeasement that comes from capitulation doesn’t stop hurt — it invitations extra. Like giving in to any type of extortion, we simply present our tormentors that they’ve an efficient software for management and manipulation.
The ultimate possibility is resistance.
Resistance can take many varieties: refusing to adjust to unconstitutional directives, issuing public statements defending inclusion, organizing your neighborhood to guard weak college students.
For me — and for a lot of different public servants — resistance shouldn’t be a political gesture. It’s a ethical obligation.
Authoritarian regimes rely on the quiet cooperation of public servants. When schooling leaders keep silent whereas the federal government targets marginalized college students or makes an attempt to erase historic truths, we develop into complicit.
Resistance carries danger. College districts and campuses might lose funding. Leaders who get up ought to count on to face assaults — political, skilled, even bodily — from MAGA-aligned extremists, the far-right media or Trump administration sycophants. As authoritarianism advances, the prices of dissent develop into extra actual and extra private.
I’ve been impressed by the principled braveness of upper schooling leaders similar to Princeton’s Christopher Eisgruber and Harvard’s Alan Garber, who’ve stood agency within the face of Trump’s calls for and are clear-eyed in regards to the penalties which will comply with, and by state Okay-12 schooling chiefs who’re refusing to pledge to Schooling Secretary McMahon that they’ll finish DEI-related packages in native colleges.
As schooling leaders take into account their choices in responding to the Trump administration’s more and more authoritarian actions, we should additionally ask: What’s the price of not resisting? What occurs when educators cease defending college students and begin enabling oppression?
Authoritarianism thrives when folks bend. It crumbles once they maintain agency. For our republic to outlive, schooling leaders should be amongst those that maintain agency.
Our youngsters are watching.
Jason E. Glass served as state schooling chief in Kentucky and Iowa, and as a college superintendent in Colorado.
Contact the opinion editor at opinion@hechingerreport.org.
This story about schooling leaders’ response to authoritarianism was produced by The Hechinger Reporta nonprofit, impartial information group centered on inequality and innovation in schooling. Join Hechinger’s weekly e-newsletter.
