For nearly the last 40 years, presidential candidates have made K-12 education policy centerpieces of their campaigns. They promised bold and ambitious solutions to fix an American public school system rife with inequalities. The difficulty actually delivering on these promises has never stopped presidential hopefuls before now.
“I want to be the education president,” then-presidential candidate George H. W. Bush told a crowd of New Hampshire high school students in 1988. “I want to lead a renaissance of quality in our schools.” After taking office, President Bush pledged that, by 2000, all children would start school ready to read, high school graduation rates would increase to 90 percent, and U.S. students would be the first in the world in science and math achievement. He came up woefully short of those ambitious goals.
President Bill Clinton also made education a cornerstone of his administration. His administration trumpeted their success implementing “rigorous standards and systems of assessment and accountability,” while “investing in proven strategies to improve the education performance of all students.” By all measures of improvement, Clinton missed the mark entirely.
The second President Bush took one of the biggest swings when he introduced No Child Left Behind. Like his father, George W. Bush stood in a high school—this time in Hamilton, Ohio—to promise big things while on the campaign trail. “Some say it is unfair to hold disadvantaged children to rigorous standards,” he told the crowd in 1999. “I say it is discrimination to require anything less. It is the soft bigotry of low expectations.”
NCLB proved to be one of the biggest education policy failures in recent history, with many unintended negative consequences falling on the backs of Black and brown students.
President Barack Obama’s signature education platform, Race to the Top, which awarded more than $4 billion to 18 states and the District of Columbia, was a frenzied cash grab with no real results.
President Donald Trump’s administration marked the beginning of the end of presidents committing to an education agenda. Trump focused more on restricting students’ civil rights than addressing systemic inequalities. In contrast, much of President Joe Biden’s K-12 education policy has centered on undoing Trump’s bans and reinstating protections. Although the Biden-Harris administration has been a champion for student-debt relief, forgiving more than $167 billion, Biden has yet to clearly define his education goals for America’s children.
And now, with the presidential election weeks away, neither candidate is willing to take a swing at education with an ambitious plan to address K-12 education inequalities. Improving K-12 education is not even a bullet point on either Trump’s or Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign websites. During the Sept. 10 debate between Trump and Harris, not one question on education was posed to the candidates, even though the debate came just six days after two students and two teachers were killed by a 14-year-old school shooter in Winder, Ga.
The vice presidential debate on Oct. 1 was hardly better. JD Vance and Tim Walz, a former educator, neither addressed nor were asked about the compounding issues in K-12 education beyond school shootings.
Watching both debates, I was ashamed to see that our current public K-12 education system was barely even a topic of conversation. Public schools are facing multiple crises. In 2023, 26 percent of public school students were considered chronically absent; teacher job satisfaction is at a 50-year low; and the unprecedented disruptions of the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated low reading and math scores. A Harvard report found that the average public school student in grades 3-8 lost the equivalent of half a year of learning in math and a quarter of a year in reading due to pandemic learning disruptions.
Where is the national plan to make up for these learning losses, as ESSER funding dries up?
Today, presidential candidates have abandoned large-scale education reform, perhaps correctly viewing it as a losing issue. Yes, most education policies are flawed from the start, relying on punitive high-stakes standardized testing and teacher-accountability measures to “fix” the broken system, which was never designed to work for students of color, low-income students, and neurodivergent learners. That doesn’t mean we can give up.
What does it say about our country if presidential candidates walk away from education policy? We may not be able to repair all of America’s problems through an education filled with critical-thinking skills, rigor, compassion, joy, and love—but it can’t be left out of the solution.
As an educator and researcher deeply concerned about the future of education policy, I firmly believe that K-12 policy must undergo an unraveling if equity is to become the true goal of education. Currently, the unspoken but very real aim of our system is to maintain a two-tiered structure that perpetuates the divide between the haves and have-nots. Our education system is not an engine of social mobility, and this is a direct result of flawed policy.
We need policies that effectively change the life trajectories of low-income students. Research shows that teachers have the greatest impact on student achievement—a well-trained teacher increases the likelihood of students attending college. Highly skilled teachers also foster classrooms that support students’ social and emotional growth.
Why isn’t either presidential candidate proposing a national policy focused on recruiting, developing, and retaining highly skilled teachers?
Decades of data reveal that high-stakes standardized testing is a flawed approach to improving student outcomes. We need less testing and more funding at the national level. Studies show that relying on local property taxes to fund schools perpetuates our country’s wealth disparities in education.
What I am proposing isn’t new or bold—these ideas for improving education have been around for years. The challenge is that these solutions are difficult to scale, costly, and would require a shift toward equity, which should be the goal of any presidential candidate.
However, the hard truth is candidates would rather not try at all than risk failure when it comes to education policy. This lack of vision and policy, as usual, disproportionately harms low-income students of color. How many more students will be ignored before we make education a priority at the White House again?
