Former President Donald Trump’s unexpectedly decisive victory in the presidential race doused political accelerant over his long-articulated plans to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education, slash K-12 spending, and enact a sweeping federal school choice program.
Trump has “one of the largest mandates in presidential history,” said Ryan Walters, Oklahoma’s elected superintendent of public instruction and a vocal Trump supporter who has been discussed as a potential education secretary. “He has definitively laid out a plan for education. It’s actually even better [than in the first term] because we’re seeing more specifics. We’re seeing more support. He has put himself in a position to have the most effective education policy in the nation’s history, and it’s exciting to watch.”
Meanwhile, teachers’ union leaders and civil rights advocates are steeling themselves for a fight to maintain federal protections for poor children, students of color, and LGBTQ+ students, and keep the federal government from shifting financial resources to private schools just as federal pandemic relief money for public schools is drying up.
“We will absolutely be mounting an effort and movement across this country to promote, to protect, and to strengthen public education, because we know the majority of Americans believe in it,” said Becky Pringle, the president of the National Education Association, the nation’s largest union. “They believe it’s a foundation of this country.”
To be sure, Trump, who is only the second president in American history to be elected to non-consecutive terms, pushed forward a similar K-12 vision the last time he was in the White House, without significant success.
But both his critics and supporters argue that Trump—who will have a Republican U.S. Senate as a governing partner and potentially a Republican U.S. House of Representatives—may now have the experience and firepower to bring his K-12 vision to reality.
“He’s made some promises to the American people about actions that he’s going to take as president, and he’s had time to reflect also on the four years that he served,” said Tiffany Justice, the co-founder of Moms for Liberty, the conservative parents’ advocacy group. “I think you’re going to see him selecting people across the board who are going to eliminate a lot of the [K-12] bureaucracy” and empower parents. (Justice has also been mentioned as a prospective education secretary for Trump.)
Trump’s stunning electoral comeback has also emboldened K-12 leaders and parent advocates who see schools as a key battleground in what they describe as a war against “wokeness"—loosely defined as efforts to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion; support transgender and nonbinary students; and teach what critics consider a less-patriotic view of American history.
“I think you’re going to continue to see [Trump] find ways to ensure that our kids are not going to have critical race theory in their classroom,” Walters said. “We don’t want kids being told they’re racist or evil or inferior because of the color of their skin. … [Trump will] make sure that the American people know that when their kids go to school, they’re receiving an education, not being indoctrinated to hate this country.”
Having Trump throw the full weight of the White House behind cultural warriors who have gone after teachers who disagree with them is a frightening prospect, Pringle said.
The past few years have seen “teachers being fired and threatened for teaching the complete history of this country,” Pringle said. “Now you have a president who not only supports that, but will work as best as he can to codify that into law, through executive orders, all of those things.”
Could Trump actually pass a federal school choice program in his second term?
Back in 2016, Trump campaigned on creating a $20 billion federal school choice program and chose as his education secretary Betsy DeVos, a battle-tested school choice advocate.
All that promise never resulted in the passage of any major school choice legislation, beyond a provision in a 2017 tax overhaul package allowing families to use 529 college savings accounts for K-12 private school tuition.
But longtime proponents of federal school choice programs have a lot more reason to be optimistic about their chances now, said Max Eden, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a right-leaning think tank.
“The difference between now and then is that he took office [in 2017] without a clear school choice plan,” Eden said. By contrast, this time around, a key House committee has already passed legislation to create a federal tax credit scholarship program, Eden said.
If Republicans retain control of the House of Representatives, the legislation is “probably more likely than not” to pass, Eden said.
“Most Republicans are prepared to vote for it, and President Trump has promised it, and so I don’t see a good reason why that wouldn’t happen,” he said.
Meanwhile, civil rights advocates are readying their case that directing increasingly scarce resources to private schools—even in the form of a tax-credit scholarship or direct tax credit for families—would undermine public education.
“We know that vouchers and education savings accounts drain money from already inequitably funded public schools,” said Allison Socol, the vice president of P-12 policy, practice, and research at the Education Trust, a nonprofit research and advocacy organization that works on behalf of low-income students and students of color. “They lack accountability, compromise protections against discrimination and exclusion, have very questionable educational outcomes, and just generally undermine public education.”
Could Trump make headway in dismantling or diminishing the Education Department?
Republicans have run up against a legislative brick wall in trying to shutter the U.S. Department of Education since its inception in 1980.
But Justice believes Trump’s arguments against a federal education bureaucracy resonate more with the public these days.
That’s in part because of parents’ frustration with school closures that stretched well into the 2020-21 school year, at the behest of teachers’ unions, she argued.
“I think COVID really showed America who was really controlling our country, that it wasn’t the elected officials, the people that they were electing to do their will, but that there was a system that’s working against elected officials, working against the American people to serve their own interests,” Justice said.
It would be foolish to not expect Trump to accomplish more on K-12 in his second term than he did in his first—even though Republicans in Congress previously resisted his attempt to nix the Education Department and slash federal school spending, Socol said.
“I think it is dangerous for civil rights advocates to sit back too much, on the hope that he can’t get things done because he didn’t get them done last time,” she said.
