This is an opinion column.

It’s tempting to say that if you’ve seen one Trump speech, you’ve seen them all, but that’s not true. Like a Grateful Dead performance or a Phish concert, each one isn’t quite like the last. From stop to stop, he works in new bits — dropping the old lines people have heard too often, testing new material, and gluing it all together with a mesh of run-on sentences.

It’s a setlist of grievances — flavor-of-the-month fears he’s pilfered from cable TV talk shows or the weird Facebook groups your friend from high school keeps inviting you to join — and it changes from town to town.

Mexicans.

The Wall.

(Adjective) Joe. (Adjective) Hillary.

DeSanctimonious.

The Wall. My beautiful wall.

Fake news.

Fake prosecutors.

Marxist prosecutors.

Communist prosecutors.

Nancy Pelosi – evil spirit animal.

Over time, it evolves, and last Saturday night I noticed a new bit amidst old material.

Donald Trump’s new hit track is education.

I’m tempted to quote it in its entirety, lest I lend it coherence that wasn’t there, but we haven’t got all day.

“I will return power to the parents of our country,” he said. “Who would have thought we would have ever had that? Can you imagine that? We will return power to parents. Of course, you want to return the power, especially when it comes to schools. You will have your power back. I will close the Department of Education and move all education back to the states where it belongs.”

Trump bemoaned American schools being at “the bottom of every list” and — standing in front of 2,700 people, with a straight face and in all seriousness — he proposed a solution to this problem.

By letting Alabama do Alabama.

“It’s terrible. So we’re going to move it back so that — Kay, you can handle it? Can you handle it? Are you okay with that? Good. Lieutenant Governor, you gonna help her out a little bit? Yes? Good. We’re gonna move it back to the States because in Alabama, you’ll run a great system.”

Trump is under the impression that, in Alabama, poor performance comes with political consequences.

Also, savings.

“And if they don’t, those people won’t be around very long,” he said. “But that’s where it’s going to be. The states are going to run education. By the way, the government will save massive amounts of money. And the states will do a phenomenal job some states will do unbelievably.”

The appeal of the local control rhetoric is understandable. What parent doesn’t want more say in their child’s education? Whole cities have come into being for this very thing. Parents will pay a premium to private schools, and some will turn their dining rooms into classrooms.

But that’s not a viable education policy, and policy is what’s missing here.

Trump isn’t proposing solutions to shortcomings in education. He’s making it somebody else’s problem.

Alabama’s problem.

But this has been Alabama’s problem for a long time, and it’s Alabama’s problem right now. It was Alabama’s problem before the Department of Education existed, and it will be Alabama’s problem after it’s gone. Deleting the Department of Education doesn’t change things. It makes them worse.

This is the state that has been consistently in favor of school choice when it allowed white kids to leave majority Black schools.

This is a state against school choice when Black kids showed up to attend majority white schools.

This is a state with active desegregation orders that are older than I am.

This is the state that has used trailers for classrooms.

This is the state where corporal punishment is still legal and widely used.

This is the state where school systems still put children in solitary and strap them into chairs, even after the state board told them to quit.

This is the state where our schools land at or near the bottom of most national rankings.

It was this way before. It will be this way after.

At the heart of the local control argument is the idea that parents will hold those officials accountable.

“And if they don’t, those people won’t be around very long,” he said.

Only that’s never happened in the past. Why should we think it would happen in the future?

“Kay, can you handle it?” Trump said to the woman who has chaired Alabama’s state school board for the last six years.

Every governor I can remember ran on the promise of being Alabama’s “education governor,” and every one of them left schools more or less where they found them.

The only thing that has properly motivated Alabama schools to do better in the past has been the threat of intervention.

Trump wants to take that threat away.

And the money.

“The government will save massive amounts of money,” he said.

Where does anyone think those savings will come from? Trump promises “power” for states, which they already have.

But the only way to deliver material savings is to take away the money.

In Alabama, federal spending accounts for more than 10 percent of education funding per pupil. In some schools — poor, rural, minority — it can be much more than that.

It pays for struggling students in poor systems to have special classes.

It pays for kids to eat.

We’re going to save so much money, he said. But that doesn’t mean this sort of recklessness won’t come with a cost.

Can you handle it, Kay?

More columns by Kyle Whitmire

Tommy Tuberville leaves Alabama lost in space

Alabama’s new congressional map is a feat of Republican cowardice

A fight for rights and control in a Black Belt town without elections