The Department of Education is Trolling Your Kid’s Teacher

Teachers are the latest target of the Trump regime.

Pexels | Photo by RDNE Stock project

Now that the school year is winding down and our teachers run screaming from the halls of a defunded academia, it’s time to reflect. Reflect on your teacher.

Everyone has that one teacher.

The one who pulled you aside after class because they saw something in you before you had the machinery to see it yourself. The one who handed you a book like contraband. The one who stayed late, circled the sentence, asked the better question, called your parents, bought the supplies, noticed the bruise, fed the class hamster, learned how you learned, and somehow remembered your name while 142 children were cycling through their day like caffeinated weather systems with backpacks.

Hold that teacher in your mind for a second.

Now picture the United States Department of Education — the stewards of education — looking at that underpaid, overworked, half-feral teacher, and deciding the best way to honor them during Teacher Appreciation Week was to post a cartoon of Mrs. Puff reading from the “MAGA bible.”

Meme posted by the Department of Education during Teacher’s week

To be clear, this is not some meme account called Patriot Eagle Freedom Mom 1776 posting from a recliner in Tampa while sucking down Oreos. This came from the actual Department of Education. The federal agency. The building with a seal. The taxpayer-funded institution allegedly responsible for supporting America’s schools, not cyberbullying third-grade teachers with Nickelodeon deep cuts and the aesthetic instincts of a concussed Turning Point intern.

I am going to need a moment.

For those not familiar with cultural commentary from SpongeBob SquarePants, Mrs. Puff is the chronically traumatized pufferfish whose defining professional achievement is failing to teach one sponge how to operate a boat for 27 consecutive seasons.

Oh, and Mrs. Puff has been to jail. Many times. So I guess the Department of Education is promoting incarceration as part of learning? Because…? There are libraries in prison? I got nothing.

Mrs. Puff was not even the worst of it. The Department also posted Miss Hoover from The Simpsons, a character whose entire vibe is public school burnout with a side order of government cheese.

Meme posted by the Department of Education during Teacher’s week

They paired this bastion of passionate learning with the caption “Teachers Are Mentors.” Mentors to whom? Children? Or the future cabinet members of the Book-Banning Young Pioneers Club who can’t spell?

You heard it here first. The nation’s classroom crisis can be solved by giving every teacher a fascist Trapper Keeper and asking her to smile through the asbestos.

Another graphic announced “Teachers Are Passionate” over a cartoon crone with crazed eyes and a beak-like nose.

Meme posted by the Department of Education during Teacher’s week

Apparently, teacher appreciation now means “Thank you for your service, you exhausted harpy.”

Why so much contempt for our teachers? Isn’t their shitty pittance of a salary enough to make them feel thoroughly disrespected? I think every teacher in America gets the message that Republicans see educating the masses as a giant waste of tax dollars. Keep em’ stupid is in every emergency substitute packet for Mussolini Junior High.

The same account moved on to higher education. One graphic, titled “DEGREE > DEBT,” listed universities, degrees, student debt, and post-graduation salaries over a doom-red campus background.

Notice the message. Not: College is too expensive. Not: Predatory tuition is crushing young people. Not: We should make public education affordable again.

Nope. The message is: Maybe education is the scam. Maybe theater, film, psychology, and the humanities are for losers. Maybe the problem is not that America turned college into a financial meat grinder, but that some dumb little dreamer had the audacity to study art. I dunno. I am just putting my useless liberal arts degree to good use by pondering the cultural reframing of education as Soviet-grade visual propaganda with worse kerning.

Then came the Rosie-the-Riveter knockoff: a 1940s-style female factory worker flexing under the words “SKILLS THAT PAY OFF.”

Meme posted by the Department of Education during Teacher’s week

This one is impressive, in the way a sewer explosion is impressive. It manages to insult women, teachers, students, artists, and the entire purpose of public education in one nostalgic little poster that smells faintly of motor oil and reproductive coercion.

Yes, trades are honorable. Welders, electricians, machinists, plumbers, and builders keep the country standing while half the consultant class is busy monetizing “leadership insights” from airport lounges. That is not the issue.

The issue is that the Department of Education is not celebrating every path. It is narrowing the acceptable ones. It is telling young people — and especially young women — that education is suspicious, teachers are jokes, college is a trap, the humanities are indulgence, and the highest calling of a citizen is to become economically useful, politically obedient, and intellectually housebroken.

Unfortunately, everyone wants authoritarianism to arrive in costume — polished boots, torchlight, a brass band, some dead-eyed youth corps marching through a public square while a tyrant with a bad haircut mistakes himself for destiny. That version is easy to recognize because history has already dressed it for us.

However, authoritarianism rarely begins with armbands. It begins with school-board meetings, “parental rights,” Bible curriculum, book bans, anti-DEI purges, attacks on accreditation, attacks on teachers, attacks on librarians. It begins by asking who teaches the children, what books they read, which facts are too dangerous, which histories are too embarrassing, and which adults must be discredited before a child is old enough to spell constitutional crisis.

If you think this sounds hyperbolic, look at the last time American women turned the schoolhouse into a propaganda factory. In 1894, in Nashville, Tennessee, a group of socially elite white women founded the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC). By 1897, they had a textbook committee. By 1899, they had launched a coordinated educational campaign. By 1902, the Texas Division had standing committees to inspect schoolbooks.

An historical account of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, 1951 | White Southern identity is imagined as one giant bloodline, sealed by marriage, manners, and shared mythology. | Library of Congress

Their primary instrument was Mildred Lewis Rutherford’s Measuring Rod to Test Textbooks — a manual that instructed teachers how to identify which histories were sufficiently loyal to the South and which were “unjust.” Books that called the Civil War a war over slavery were rejected. Books that called it “the War of Northern Aggression” were endorsed. Books that justified the Ku Klux Klan as “the protector of the white race during Reconstruction” were assigned to children.

The UDC’s campaign ran into the 1970s and shaped the political imagination of multiple American generations — including, not coincidentally, the white Southerners who later staffed segregationist legislatures, Birch societies, and the entire scaffolding of the modern right.

This is how we bred little racist MAGAmuffins from generation to generation.

The Trump regime understands how to weaponize education better than most liberals do. Liberals still talk about education as opportunity, as uplift, as a ladder out of poverty. That is lovely. It is also inadequate. The right does not see education as a ladder. It sees education as territory.

And we are losing ground in education. Since March 2025, the Department of Education fired more than 1,300 workers — roughly half its workforce. The Trump regime even shuttered several offices of the Office for Civil Rights (OCR), including Chicago, San Francisco, Dallas, Cleveland, Boston, Philadelphia, and New York. The remaining offices have caseloads they cannot process. Title I — the federal program that funds schools in low-income districts — is on the chopping block; Project 2025 calls for phasing it out over a decade.

Most alarmingly, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act [eliminated the Grad PLUS loan program](http://One Big Beautiful Bill Act eliminated the Grad PLUS loan program). Effective July 1, 2026, graduate students may borrow no more than $20,500 a year, with a $50,000 cap for the narrowing category of programs still classified as “professional.”

Just a reminder that the cost of attending Harvard Medical School, MIT, or Yale Law ranges from $90,000 to $120,000 a year. So how will students afford higher education? Most won’t unless they come from a rich family. The math doesn’t work without private lenders charging 10–15 percent interest. Sorry, but you can’t privatize education and then claim you are a meritocracy.

And then there is the reshuffling, which sounds like paperwork until you remember that empires have always loved paperwork.

The Trump regime recently moved special education oversight from the Education Department to HHS. That is not a minor bureaucratic transfer. It changes the frame. A disabled student is no longer primarily a student with an enforceable educational right. She becomes a service case. A health file. A needs assessment. A cost center with a backpack.

Meanwhile, civil-rights enforcement is being redirected to the Department of Justice, which does its own sorting. Discrimination in schools no longer looks like a daily condition that children endure in classrooms, hallways, bathrooms, buses, and disciplinary offices. It becomes a litigation problem. A compliance dispute. A risk file.

The old theory of federal education civil rights, however imperfectly executed, was that schools are public institutions that receive public money, and therefore students have enforceable rights within them. The new theory is colder: education is a managed population system. Civil rights complaints become files to route between agencies. Disability becomes a health-service problem. Discrimination becomes a litigation-risk problem. Children become categories.

And when children are reduced to categories, the state can sort them. History tells us that sorting never ends well.

Southington, Connecticut. School children pledging their allegiance to the flag. Look familar? | Public Domain

Unfortunately, Republicans have one problem: young resistance. For all the swagger, Gen Z is proving remarkably resistant to fascism. The Harvard Spring 2026 Youth Poll put Trump’s approval among 18–29-year-olds at 25 percent — the lowest in the poll’s history and a four-point drop from the previous fall.

Trust in the federal government among the same cohort hit 15 percent — the lowest ever recorded by Harvard. The Yale Spring 2026 Youth Poll registered 68 percent disapproval of Trump among voters 18–22, 72 percent among voters 23–29, and 75 percent among voters 30–34.

Many Gen Zers look at Trump and only see diapered corruption with bronzer. They see a collapsing climate, rent they cannot pay, jobs requiring degrees they cannot afford, and old men in flag pins telling them the real national crisis is pronouns. Grifters might be grifting, but young people aren’t buying it.

That is the part nobody should miss. They are not attacking education because it failed. They are attacking education because it worked well enough to make young people resistant to it.

As a generation, Gen Z remains the leak in the authoritarian roof. They are less deferential, less religiously obedient, less loyal to old hierarchies, more suspicious of propaganda, more comfortable with pluralism, and much less inclined to see strength in an octogenarian president sleeping through cabinet meetings.

It’s funny. For all the trash talk of teachers failing students, they sure did a stellar job instilling resistance to fascism.

But let’s not get too cocky. Education is often the unfinished front of state capture. And so far, the Trump regime has captured the courts, the agencies, propaganda channels (what we used to call news outlets), billionaire donors, state legislatures, and enough of the national-security language to label anti-fascism (Antifa) a terrorist threat.

And yet, they have not captured the young.

That’s not from lack of trying. Trump has repeatedly discouraged young Americans from getting an education. He even bragged in 2016, “We won with poorly educated. I love the poorly educated.”

Everyone laughed. It became a meme.

Stop laughing.

A man running for president stood before cameras and celebrated the least educated part of his coalition. Staying ignorant is not a flex. It’s how a nation gets conned by a serial felon.

Listen, all politicians flatter their voters. That is normal. What they do not usually do is identify ignorance as a political asset and then spend the next decade building a movement around celebrating stupidity.

So ask the obvious question. Why would a leader want his base uneducated? Why would a regime mock teachers, gut the Department of Education, attack universities, defund public media, cap graduate loans, purge civil-rights enforcement, and post propaganda telling young people that education is not liberation but bad math?

The answer is obvious. Whoever controls education controls the future. They control what children think happened before them, what they believe is possible after them, and whether they grow up with enough moral imagination to know when power is lying.

An uneducated society is a controlled society.

That is why the trolling matters. The Department of Education was not mocking teachers because teachers failed; it was mocking them because teachers are still the people standing between children and the con.

Carlyn Beccia is an award-winning author and illustrator of 13 books. Subscribe to Conversations with Carlyn for free content every Wednesday, or become a paid subscriber to get the juicy stuff on Sundays.