Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey delivers the State of the State address in the Old House Chamber at the Alabama State Capitol on Feb. 4, 2025 in Montgomery, Alabama. The governor last week said she would “trust President Trump” in his efforts to destroy the U.S. Department of Education. (Will McClelland for Alabama Reflector)
Gov. Kay Ivey is a sure-footed politician.
She’s walked the narrow and dangerous path of Alabama politics all the way to summit. It requires focus, dedication and balancing performative apathy and winking cruelty. And constant, emphatic declarations that you care more about your party than the people who live here.
That may explain why Ivey said last week that she supports the efforts of President Donald Trump and effective President Elon Musk to destroy the U.S. Department of Education.
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“I’m all for shrinking government where we can,” al.com reported Ivey saying. “And truth be known, every state has an education department. I know we’ve got a good one and a state board of education and local boards that can handle education very well. So I’m going to trust President Trump on this one.”
Alabama’s chief executive puts more trust in a man who defrauded students than civil servants trying to make children’s lives a little easier.
Excuse me. “Bureaucrats.”
Here’s what these bureaucrats do. They provide resources to Alabama students that our state government will not.
The department administers Title I, a federal program that sends money to high-poverty schools, about a third of all public schools in Alabama. It pays for special education programs and for educating children with disabilities.
The department investigates civil rights complaints. It creates regulations to protect students. And it oversees federal aid for college. The department does not set curriculum. That’s up to the states.
In short, it provides needed resources to students who lack them and — at least before Trump took over — advocates for those on the margins. It does this with far fewer employees than most other federal agencies, even prior to the White House throwing 1,300 of them out on the street.
Federal aid may be a fraction of state money spent on schools, but with so many Alabama schools operating on shoestring budgets, losing it would be a disaster.
Ivey either doesn’t understand this, doesn’t care, or actively opposes aid to poor Alabama children.
Trump and other conservatives have targeted the Department of Education for years, claiming it had powers over what students learn that it does not. On the campaign trail last year, the president said he wanted to return education to the states.
Alabama shows that you can’t trust the states to put children first.
Exhibit A is our school funding model, created over 150 years ago and refined in the racist Constitution of 1901.
The white planters who designed that model had one overriding goal: making Black Alabamians miserable.
They especially hated the idea of Black children getting an education. (They didn’t like poor whites going to school, either, but they couldn’t stop them once formerly enslaved Alabamians built our public education system.)
So they imposed extreme property tax caps on cities and counties, strangling their ability to pay for education. They repealed laws requiring equitable school funding. They forced Black students into segregated schools with few resources and used Black taxpayers’ money to fund white schools their children could not attend.
In the 1910s in Wilcox County — Ivey’s home — the state spent $13 on every white student. It spent 60 cents on every Black student.
Black Alabamians had to pay tax taxes and then reached deeper in their pockets to make private payments to teachers. That was the only way to keep schools open more than three months a year.
Black Alabamians also shouldered the burden of building schools in their communities. In the 1910s, Black southerners paid more to build schools sponsored by white philanthropist Julius Rosenwald than Rosenwald did.
The funding gaps began to close in the 1960s. And only because the federal government started providing money to education.
State leaders’ “leave us alone” argument would be plausible if Montgomery took concrete steps to address the destructive legacy of Jim Crow in our schools. Instead, officials further crippled public education in the 1970s with the lid bills, severely limiting property tax assessments and local governments’ ability to pay for services.
Last year, the Legislature approved a law that will stuff $100 million a year — and probably more — into the pockets of wealthy families to pay for private school tuition.
Turning your tax dollars into gifts for the rich is “educational choice.” Aid to impoverished children is government overreach. This isn’t how you make schools better.
Let’s be clear. Alabama’s method of funding public education was designed by racists. It had racist goals, and it led to racist outcomes. Federal money is the only force that provides any counterbalance to it.
Our state leaders, by and large, hate the agency that provides that force. But they show no interest in fixing an unjust tax system that created — and sustains — a large achievement gap between white and Black students in Alabama.
They might not endorse the reasons that system was created. But they tolerate it. And its ongoing failures to properly educate every child in the state.
And when they cheer efforts to stop federal aid to poor students — and insist the state’s methods are the right ones — they own those failures.
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