When it comes to education, I consider myself a normie parent. What I want is for my children to have a strong foundation in the core subjects: reading, math, science and history. I want my kids to be challenged to the best of their abilities and be prepared for the future. I want to be guaranteed that they will be physically safe. I don’t want monthslong school board fights over book bans or school renaming. I just want my children to read books and go to school.
People disagree about how best to meet these goals (roughly, liberals think the worst public schools should be made better, conservatives think parents should be given more choices outside the public system, though there are some heterodox advocates). But the depressing fact is that neither party has delivered on the basics. As I argued last month, neither Donald Trump nor Kamala Harris had a plan for increasing test scores, fixing Covid learning loss, working on the student absentee crisis or addressing the fact that the teacher pipeline is drying up.
Though education is not a top -five issue for voters, I don’t think Democrats on the city and state levels have done a good job as leaders on K-12 schools under President Biden. And on the federal level, he also has struggled. To name one, there’s the ongoing FAFSA debacle — the federal student aid application form was delayed for a second year in a row after last year’s disastrous rollout of a new form.
A lot of students are still suffering from the prolonged school closings of 2020-2021, and schools in blue cities and suburbs were closed the longest. While the Biden-Harris administration isn’t responsible for these decisions made on the local level, I don’t think they did enough to push back on the districts that were completely closed for in-person learning after adults could be vaccinated. The federal government pumped a lot of money into Covid education relief, but that funding expired in September. As a public school parent, I can feel it: My third grader’s class has 30 kids in it, more than we’ve ever experienced since my older child entered the system in 2017.
In Trump’s first term, he proposed billions of dollars of cuts to the Department of Education that did not get through Congress. His secretary of education, Betsy DeVos, was a huge proponent of school choice. “But for all her efforts, DeVos has little to show for it,” NPR’s Cory Turner said in 2020.
Despite Trump’s lackluster record, his ability to gain voters in urban areas might have had to do with how much voters were fed up with Democratic leadership on things like education. As Politico’s Charlie Mahtesian explained, he was able to win in part because “In big, diverse urban places — like Houston’s Harris County or Chicago’s Cook County — he pared down traditionally large Democratic margins.” Trump also increased support in blue places like New York, San Francisco and the densely populated Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C. And a lot of city-dwelling Democrats stayed home.
Chicago, the third-largest school district in the country, is a prime example of how chaotic Democratic leadership has been on education in the past four years. The mayor, Brandon Johnson, is a former teacher whose 2023 campaign received millions from teachers’ unions.
This year, Johnson proposed taking out a $300 million high-interest short-term loan to fund teachers’ contracts, despite the fact that the city faces a $1 billion funding shortfall coming in 2025. The district lost nearly 40,000 students between 2019 and 2024, but staffing is up 20 percent, and it is fiscally irresponsible to put the city deeper into debt without facing the reality of declining enrollment head on.
The entire board of education resigned in opposition to this proposal. Just before the election, Johnson appointed a new school board president who had to resign within a week after it was revealed that he had posted Sept. 11 conspiracy theories on social media. According to a late October poll from Change Research, a left-leaning polling firm, only 14 percent of Chicagoans had a favorable rating of Johnson. Though he was the most unpopular person or group polled in the Change poll, the Chicago Teachers Union, Chicago Public Schools and the school board have negative favorable ratings.
If Trump actually cared about K-12 education, he would make a bold move right now to help public schools. Though only a small portion of public school funding comes from the federal government, the problems we are facing are so large that they are crying out for a federal response that includes continued funding for things like high-dosage tutoring to ameliorate Covid learning loss.
Unfortunately, Trump’s first term offers scant evidence that he has the desire to do much more than wage painful culture war battles. He has released plans to attack the college accreditation system, which involves firing “the radical left accreditors that have allowed our colleges to become dominated by Marxist maniacs and lunatics.”
I spent last week talking to education experts from across the political spectrum. And while I hate prognosticating, especially with someone as unpredictable as Trump is, the consensus was that whatever he does with colleges, he is unlikely to accomplish some of what he has threatened to do with K-12 education.
They did not think he would actually abolish the Department of Education (which Republican presidential candidates have threatened to do since 1980). “Even with a united Republican Congress, it will be hard for him to get his party to go along with these policies,” said Michael Petrilli, the president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, referring to dismantling the D.O.E. and cutting education spending. These ideas are “deeply unpopular,” Petrilli added.
What Trump will certainly do is pick splashy fights that he can win through executive orders. For example, he will almost certainly reverse the transgender student protections put in place by an executive order from President Biden this year. He may also try to use executive orders to “cut federal funding for any school pushing Critical Race Theory, transgender insanity, and other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content on our children,” as he vowed to do. Though it’s pretty unclear how that would play out in practice, it’s certainly chilling.
Two things give me a sliver of optimism. One is the hope that parents and other citizens with students’ best interests in mind can look beyond the polarizing presence of Trump this time around and try to organize on the state and local levels to fix the huge problems we have right now. Educational reform doesn’t have to be political, and so much is decided outside the federal government.
The second comes from Tim Daly, the chief executive of EdNavigator and the author of a newsletter on education. He said: “It’s just as important to focus on what Trump won’t do as what he will. He isn’t going to make it illegal to run a good school. Teaching and learning can proceed. The bonds that families feel to their local schools aren’t that affected by partisan politics.” I really hope that he’s right.
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The post Trump Doesn’t Care Enough About K-12 Education to Break It appeared first on New York Times.
