Jan Resseger contemplates what may come next. Reposted with permission.
Last week in a Time Magazine piece anticipating the election, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten wondered: “Will we vote to strengthen the public schools that 90 percent of America’s children and families rely on, or to weaken and ultimately destroy our last remaining truly public institution?”
Weingarten correctly diagnoses the serious threat posed for American public education by Tuesday’s election of Donald Trump as U.S. President. Despite that the post-mortems in the press examining Kamala Harris’s defeat and the impact of Trump’s sweeping victory have hardly mentioned the election’s likely meaning for our schools, Trump’s election will definitely pose an enormous threat to the promise of public education.
The reforms endorsed by Donald Trump as a candidate in 2024 and outlined in formal proposals like Project 2025—from the Heritage Foundation and myriad former staff members from Trump’s first administration—are premised on a whole different set of principles than those that have historically shaped public schools in the United States. In her election post-mortem, the New Yorker‘s Susan Glasser concludes: “At Harris’s rallies, her audiences… would chant her slogan, ‘We’re not going back!’ But, it turns out, we are. Americans, at least enough of them to tilt the outcome, chose Trump’s retrograde appeal. The question now is a different one: not if we are going back but how far?”
Here are some of the proposals in Project 2025 and others that Trump has endorsed in campaign speeches:
- enacting universal school choice (vouchers and Education Savings Accounts);
- eliminating Head Start;
- phasing out Title I, which provides additional funding for schools serving poor children;
- eliminating the U.S. Department of Education and undercutting its Office for Civil Rights—thus undercutting the federal capacity to enforce civil rights law and rescinding federal civil rights protections for LGBTQ+ students;
- reducing funding for the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act—the IDEA;
- eliminating federal funding for public schools that have vaccine mandates; and
- fueling the racist, xenophobic, and homophobic attacks on public school curricula, teachers and school librarians, and on Black, Hispanic, gay and transgender children who are now portrayed by Trump and his MAGA crowd as dangerous or threatening.
Compare today’s threat to public education to the dangerous test-and-punish reforms that came with No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top two decades ago. While we must keep on trying to undo the remaining strands of these awful reforms gone awry, at least they were premised on the myth that they would help the most vulnerable children—that no child would be left behind.
The agenda that candidate Donald Trump has endorsed abandons the commitment to John Dewey’s foundational principle defining our system of public education: “What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child, that must the community want for all of its children. Any other idea for our schools is narrow and unlovely; acted upon, it destroys our democracy.” The agenda that Donald Trump and his allies have been promoting is a direct attack on equity and inclusion. Many of the programs, including the existence of the Department of Education itself and its Office for Civil rights, Title I, and Head Start were established as part of Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty or in response to the Civil Rights Movement.
Policies promoted by candidate Trump would take us back to the 1950s. The protections for vulnerable groups of children are threatened today by political efforts to adopt an individualist Parents’ Rights agenda, which would elevate the power of particular parents to protect their children from ‘woke’ policies or from peers the parents consider undesirable. Certainly the drive to expand school privatization represents parents’ drive to be able to remove their children, at public expense, to private educational institutions that can insulate their children from experiences and peers that threaten their parents’ values. The culture war revival embodied in these policies is an attack on the principle promising that in public schools, every child is seen, heard, and welcomed.
Many have suggested that the MAGA agenda for public schools is the product of a growing ethos of white Christian nationalism. Certainly Trump has himself played with references to religion and himself as a savior. However, in their profound book, The Flag and The Cross, a short and helpful analysis of white Christian nationalism, two sociologists of religion, Philip Gorsky and Samuel Perry define what’s happening not so much as a religious phenomenon but instead as the emergence of a wave of ethno-nationalism—based on the exclusion of “the other.” Gorsky and Perry’s definition explains how so many of the culture war attacks on public education are at their heart a challenge to the principle that public schools must welcome all children no matter their race, ethnicity, or sexual orientation:
“White Christian nationalism is a ‘deep story’ about America’s past and a vision of its future… The United States is blessed by God, which is why it has been so successful… Like any story, this one has its heroes: white Conservative Christians, usually native-born men. It also has its villains: racial, religious, and cultural outsiders. The plot revolves around conflicts between the noble and worthy ‘us,’ the rightful heirs of wealth and power, and the undeserving ‘them’ who conspire to take what is ours. But this story is a myth.” (The Flag and the Cross, pp. 3-5) Gorsky and Perry conclude: “The first and most fundamental way in which white Christian nationalism threatens American liberal democracy is that it defines ‘the people’ in a way that excludes many Americans. White Christian nationalism is a form of what is often called ‘ethno-nationalism’…. Liberal democracy rests on what is usually called ‘civic nationalism.’ It defines the nation in terms of values, laws, and institutions.” (The Flag and the Cross, p. 114)
There are built-in protections against the President’s imposition of such an anti-public education agenda as Donald Trump has been proposing for the nation’s public schools. The President cannot merely eliminate departments and programs that were enacted through statute. Congress has a say, but the checks and balances may be weakened right now because Tuesday’s election shifted the U.S. Senate majority to Republicans who are more likely to support Trump’s ideas. The post-election majority in the U.S. House of Representatives won’t be clear until later this week when all the votes are counted. In the U.S Senate, the filibuster still does require 60 votes to pass all bills apart from one reconciliation bill in each session. Checks and balances can stop bad policy and at least slow down dangerous change.
Additionally, state governments have a much greater role than the federal government to operate the public schools under their own constitutions and laws. While this fact often results in regrettable inequity in the funding of schools across the states, the role of the states can sometimes protect the public schools. This week, for example, in three states, voters rejected school privatization through private school tuition vouchers. In Tuesday’s election, Nebraska voters repealed Referendum 435 and thereby ended a 2023 state law that established universal school vouchers. Kentucky voters rejected state constitutional Amendment 2 and prevented the establishment of school privatization through vouchers. Kentucky’s constitution permits the state to fund only one system of common schools, and voters chose to protect the public schools. Finally, CPR News reports that Colorado voters rejected Amendment 80, which would have, “added language stating each “K-12 child has the right to school choice” and that “parents have the right to direct the education of their children.”
