Politicians love to proclaim that education is America’s top priority. They insist that investing in children’s futures is nonnegotiable.
In Northern Michigan’s rural, largely low-income First Congressional District—where most K-12 schools are small—PBS has been a proven educational ally for decades. Here, every tool matters in helping our kids learn.
Yet in June, President Donald Trump and Congress did the opposite of investing in education. They passed a rescissions bill cutting $1.1 billion from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), the single largest source of national support for PBS and NPR.
This followed Trump’s May 1 executive order directing CPB to end all federal funding for public broadcasting, claiming it was politically biased and an unnecessary public expense.
PBS has long provided a free, ad-free educational lifeline for children—delivering programs like Sesame Street, Daniel Tigers Neighborhood, and Wild Kratts that foster reading, critical thinking, and a love of learning.
With federal funding gone, CPB will shut down by Sept. 30. More than 1,500 local public media stations—many serving underserved communities—will lose essential support. In our region alone, that includes stations in Mt. Pleasant, Alpena, Standish, Traverse City, Oscoda, Harbor Springs, and Sault Ste. Marie.
Affluent families will still stream or subscribe to educational content. But rural and low-income families will lose an irreplaceable resource. Schools and educators will lose access to PBS’s curriculum-based materials. Communities will lose local civic coverage, emergency alerts, and other critical services—deepening the “news desert” problem in rural America.
PBS costs us less than 0.01% of the federal budget. Yet its return on investment in literacy, school readiness, and civic awareness is immeasurable. Cutting it undermines decades of progress while school boards and parents demand stronger literacy programs and better educational outcomes.
There is a glaring disconnect between the rhetoric—“education first”—and the reality.
If education truly mattered to our leaders, they would protect PBS, not dismantle it in the name of “smaller government.” The federal budget still borrows heavily to fund tax breaks for the wealthy and for-profit corporations—while sacrificing the greatest educational tool ever created by the United States of America.
Ask your representatives why. We suspect the answers will be creative—and have little to do with education itself.
