President Donald Trump has tasked his secretary of education, Linda McMahon, with dismantling the U.S. Department of Education. She should start by ending the Department of Education investigation into Chicago Public Schools’ Black Student Success Plan, focus on long-needed changes and remove the obstacles that will improve quality choices.
CPS’ plan, at this stage, is merely an outline of an effort to develop a state-mandated strategy for improving Black student outcomes. A plan to make a plan, in other words. A Virginia-based conservative group, Defending Education, prompted the Education Department’s investigation into the plan, alleging that it violates Title VI, a provision of federal civil rights law that bars discrimination on the basis of race or national origin.
This is an overreach. Public education is awash in scores, statistics and trend lines. Student subgroups — separated by gender, race, socioeconomic status, special education needs and so on — have been identified in that data for a long time. This is not some recent “woke” phenomenon. Any school superintendent would say it is entirely appropriate for school systems to use multiple factors, including race, to identify challenged student populations and inform strategies for improvement.
The administration’s rationale for eliminating the Education Department is returning decision-making authority to states and local school districts, while giving parents more control over their children’s education. In that context, the federal government’s heavy-handed investigation is not only hypocritical; it also undermines Trump’s stated goals.
Parents who keep their children in district schools instead of using vouchers, for instance, to place their children in better schools deserve state leaders and school district administrators with the courage to craft strategies that will meet the often-unique needs of students. Effective education demands flexibility and attention to local conditions. It doesn’t need buttinskis from 900 miles away siccing federal investigators on a school system trying to improve academic outcomes for marginalized students.
While increased school autonomy and local control are sound education policies that the Department of Education embraces and is now betraying with its investigation into CPS, the district’s plan itself provides little evidence that it will successfully reform or remove the systemic obstacles that have denied Black Chicago students a quality education — and that have also degraded education outcomes for all students in the system. By almost every metric, CPS is failing students of all races and ethnicities.
Rather than picking on a fledgling program that is likely doomed by local politics anyway, the Trump administration should keep its eye on the prize: implementing policies that serve all students by greatly expanding school choice.
Why doomed? Let’s face it. Neither the Chicago Teachers Union nor CPS leadership will wholeheartedly adopt a plan or any reform that improves Black student outcomes if it threatens their control over programs, staffing or funding — or disrupts their grip on the system. That includes structural changes such as decentralizing the district so that more than 56% of funds reach the schools; empowering elected Local School Councils and principals to adopt more effective school models and make staffing decisions; and adding more instructional time.
It’s ironic that our legislature and governor who mandated local school districts develop a black students’ success plan are the same group that ended the state-funded Invest in Kids tax credit scholarship program for private schools. Invest in Kids ensured thousands of low-income families had a shot at a quality education outside of CPS. Our union-beholden lawmakers also capped the number of public charter schools and gave the CTU the tools to weaken and shut them down. This, despite charters serving 54,000 students in Chicago — 98% of whom are Black and Latino.
Charter schools, of course, have also shown significant academic gains for Black and Latino students. A 2023 Stanford University study found that Black and Latino students in charter schools made far more progress in math and reading than their peers in traditional public schools. Economist Thomas Sowell reached the same conclusion in his 2020 book “Charter Schools and Their Enemies,” which studies charter and traditional schools in New York City.
The Trump administration should focus on the problem-makers: education bureaucracies and teachers unions that have long colluded to deny Black and Latino families access to quality schools. Chicago, like many cities, has unequal education opportunities — wealthier families choose private schools or move to the suburbs, while low-income Black and Latino children are trapped in failing, underenrolled public schools with weak academics, poor oversight and little accountability.
Chicago may very well require federal intervention, but the Department of Education should tread carefully in local school district decisions to use multiple factors, including race, in designing academic improvement strategies. It’s a fact that public education has failed to improve the outcomes of Black students or show progress at closing the achievement gap since the department was created. But we must keep trying.
Otherwise, we accept institutional racism — if not in intent, then certainly in outcome. It festers when low-income families are denied access to high-quality educational choices and cannot force meaningful change in their failing schools. It flourishes because teachers unions spend heavily to preserve their monopoly on public education.
Federal efforts would be better spent intervening, even by use of a consent decree, to dismantle an education system that locks poor, overwhelmingly minority students in archaic education bureaucracies based on their income and ZIP code. The goal should be simple: Let funding follow the student, empower parents to choose the best school for their child and give local school leaders the authority to select the right model for their neighborhoods.
Forget the small-time investigations. It’s time to seize the moment and make the big changes that will matter.
Paul Vallas is an adviser for the Illinois Policy Institute. He ran for Chicago mayor in 2023 and 2019 and was previously budget director for the city and CEO of Chicago Public Schools.
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