Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

The U.S. Supreme Court’s July 14 decision to allow President Donald Trump and his secretary of education, Linda McMahon, to proceed with dismantling the U.S. Department of Education came with no explanation from the conservative majority that issued the ruling. It didn’t need to.

Indeed, if the court’s conservative majority had provided an explanation, it would likely have been the kind of rhetorical sleight of hand that Justice Elena Kagan described in her dissent to the court’s Free Speech Coalition, Inc. v. Paxton ruling, which radically shifted legal precedent for free speech rules. In her dissent to that ruling, Kagan argued that the conservative majority’s explanations for its decisions were not based on legal precedent nor the U.S. Constitution, but on “these special-for-the-occasion, difficult-to-decipher rules. … needed to get to what it considers the right result.” And the “right result” regarding the fate of the Department of Education appears to be whatever Trump and the conservative majority want.

This case was, meanwhile, decided “using the ‘shadow docket’—usually reserved for emergency cases, but more and more used to quietly rule on controversial questions with brief, often unsigned opinions,” according to a newsletter by Michael Waldman, president and CEO of the Brennan Center for Justice.

The court’s ruling came on the heels of the Trump administration’s announcement to withhold nearly $6.8 billion in funding that was to be distributed to schools and districts across the country. The money allocated by Congress was supposed to be distributed to states on July 1, 2025. It was, by and large, funding that schools and districts were counting on to pay for programs and personnel, some of which, according to Education Week, are required by law. Now, with many schools set to open in a few weeks, districts are hard-pressed to find alternative sources of funding or cut services and lay off staff.

Twenty-four states have sued Trump over this “illegal” action. “The withheld money includes about 14 percent of all federal funding for elementary and secondary education across the country. It helps pay for free or low-cost after-school programs that give students a place to go while their parents work,” according to a July 2025 New York Times article.

That Trump administration edict was also issued with “little explanation,” according to the New York Times, with only some vague reassurance about being “committed to ensuring taxpayer resources are spent in accordance with the president’s priorities.”

The Trump administration later partially reversed its decision to withhold this amount after receiving a letter from 10 Republican senators “imploring” it to release the funds. On July 18, the administration announced it was releasing $1.4 billion in grant money meant for summer and after-school programs with “new conditions relating to the president’s executive orders,” Education Week reported. But the president’s proposed budget for the upcoming fiscal year does not include direct funding for these programs, according to NC Newsline.

Compounding the harm inflicted on public schools, Trump and his obsequious conservative majority in Congress also pushed through the One Big Beautiful Bill that will require staffing cuts and additional costs from public school budgets. The administration has also enacted the nation’s first federal school voucher program that redirects public tax dollars to private schools.

‘Harmful Risks for Students and Families’

Trump and his conservative allies justify these harms to public schools by insisting that the K-12 institutions, attended by 83 percent of students in 2021-2022, are “woke”

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