Given the record of excellence at the Defense Department’s educational system, serving the kids of active-duty service members, it’s tempting to think the Trump administration would leave the K-12 schools alone.
It did not leave the schools alone. In fact, less than two weeks after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth took the oath of office, The Washington Post reported that the Pentagon had begun “restricting access to books and learning materials covering subjects from immigration to psychology.” On-base school libraries have also been directed to remove books from shelves that don’t meet with Team Trump’s approval.
What’s more, school sporting events were canceled because they were not deemed “essential” under a Trump executive order, and students on a culinary career track weren’t able to practice cooking — because of the administration’s $1 credit card limits for staff.
The reaction from some of the affected students was striking, with rare on-base protests and student walkouts at schools around the world. As Military.com explained last month, “At a public school, the protest might have led to a detention and maybe some revoked after-school privileges. But on a military base, the students were putting more on the line. The same officials in charge of their Department of Defense-run school also had authority over their parents’ careers and status in the military.”
These students not only followed through on their protests anyway, they kept going. Military.com also reported last week:
Hundreds of military children who are students at Defense Department schools across the globe walked out of class Thursday to protest book bans, curriculum changes and restrictions on extracurricular activities that have resulted from the Trump administration’s crackdown on diversity. The walkouts, which included about a dozen schools on U.S. military bases in Europe, Asia and at least one stateside, represent the biggest collective action military children have taken since the start of the Trump administration to demand a voice in their own education after similar, smaller-scale walkouts in February and March.
In case this weren’t quite enough, this week, The Military Times reported that the American Civil Liberties Union sued the Department of Defense’s education agency, challenging the administration’s removal of books from school classrooms and libraries. The New York Times noted that the ACLU’s lawsuit “was filed on behalf of six families whose children attend schools in Virginia, Kentucky, Italy and Japan.” Steps like these are extraordinarily unusual, but so are the kind of policies being imposed on the schools by the Trump administration.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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