OK. I guess we’re doing this (again).
It feels awful for lots of reasons, of course, but mostly it’s because the country chose political vibes over policy ideas. As a researcher who spends his days trying to find evidence-based ways to make schools better, I’m at something of a loss.
See, whatever you thought about the Harris-Walz ticket’s particular proposals, the Democrats had things to say about education issues that genuinely shape children’s development: affordable early care and learning, access to nutritious school meals, funding for English learners, and more.
President-elect Trump’s education platform was made of much vaguer stuff — mostly culture war vibes. For instance, conservatives are eager to get the government involved in biological screenings to determine if kids have the “correct” genitalia for peeing in a particular bathroom or playing on a particular sports team. Trump talks about schools secretly imposing gender transition surgery on children. Finally, it’s likely that the administration will try to voucherize more public dollars to support families sending their children to private schools.
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But, again, all of this is light on substance. It’s pretty hard to see how bathroom-usage policies will help kids recover from the pandemic’s academic consequences, or get more children ready for kindergarten, or more third graders ready to read on grade level. School voucher programs may give anxious parents public money to pay for private education, but there’s not much evidence that they help students or the public schools they’re leaving behind.
Worse yet, some of conservatives’ K–12 ideas are at war with themselves. The Republican platform calls for federal defunding of schools teaching curricula that conservatives don’t like, but it also pledges — immediately afterward — to “veto efforts to nationalize Civics Education [sic].” So they’re promising not to nationalize how schools teach history, except when they don’t like how certain schools teach history.
Now, there was a detailed conservative plan for federal K–12 education drifting around during the campaign. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 proposes to “eliminate” and “redistribute the various congressionally approved federal education programs across the government.” But Trump claimed to want nothing to do with it.
Related: How would Project 2025 change education?
Maybe he’s telling the truth — perhaps he’s realized that Project 2025 would significantly reduce his ability to enact any sort of affirmative education policy agenda. It would be harder to remake American schools in a Trumpian image without a federal Education Department, after all.
Of course, that’s assuming 1) that Trump has given K–12 enough thought to work through that strategic calculus, and 2) conservatives actually have an affirmative agenda for making schools more effective, something that goes deeper than lines like this from their platform: “Our Great Teachers, who are so important to the future wellbeing of our Country, will be cherished and protected by the Republican Party so that they can do the job of educating our students that they so dearly want to do.”
Related: What education could look like under Trump and Vance
Perhaps there’s a concrete, substantive plan for reforming Title II of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act lurking in those words, and I just don’t have the right GOP decoder ring?
So look, conservatives: You’ve got to figure something out. The country’s schools can’t afford another four years like the first round of President Trump’s leadership, which left U.S. public schools reeling.
By 2018, the leadership at the Fordham Institute, the country’s most august conservative education policy think tank, was calling for Secretary Betsy DeVos to resign in the hopes that troubles from her first two rocky years could be sorted out by a replacement.
In a January 2021 piece headlined “The Wreckage Betsy DeVos Leaves Behind,” the New York Times editorial board wrote, “The Department of Education lies in ruins at precisely the time when the country most needs it.”
Related: Trump’s deportation plan could separate millions of families, leaving schools to pick up the pieces
Please forgive me if this reads like I’m being overdramatic. Perhaps it’s my outmoded instincts as a Very Serious Beltway Policy Researcher; I still think about policymaking as an effort to actually solve big public problems.
I’m a hidebound fossil that way. Of course, if you really want to own me, really want to prove experts like me wrong (again), you could shock everyone by setting aside the culture wars and giving substantive education reform a try.
Conor P. Williams is a senior fellow at The Century Foundation, a founding partner with The Children’s Equity Project, and a father of three children currently enrolled in public schools in Washington, DC. The views here are strictly his own.
