Laura Meckler, The Washington Post (c) 2024
Former president Donald Trump’s controversial and sometimes puzzling agenda to reshape schools is framing this year’s education debate, as Vice President Kamala Harris talks more about Trump’s ideas than her own.
Trump’s proposals sometimes contradict one another. He wants to close the Education Department and send education “back to the states,” but he also wants Washington to flyspeck what is taught in individual schools – something the federal government has never done. He also promises to cut federal education spending in half.
He wants tax dollars to pay for private schools, an idea unsuccessfully pushed by Betsy DeVos, his administration’s education secretary. He would pull funding from schools that engage in “inappropriate political indoctrination” and let students pray and read the Bible in public school. He wants to make it easier to fire teachers, a processthe federal government doesn’t control, all according to his campaign platform.
Of the many actions he promises to take on “day one” as president, Trump mentions education more than any other subject, a Washington Post analysis of his speeches through Sept. 10 found, but many of those ideas need congressional approval.
With the presidential campaign in its final stretch, the debate over education policy is unfolding almost entirely on Republican terms. It comes after heated debates in many states the past three years driven by a conservative push to restrict books, limit curriculums and otherwise move school culture to the right.
Harris, for her part, is light on details in her education planand instead focuses on attacking Trump’s ideas, generating criticism from Republicans and some Democrats for being too vague. She is in favor of a federal pre-K program but hasn’t outlined a vision for what it would look like. She praises the work of the Biden administration in relieving student debt but has not said whether or how she would continue it.
In her speech at the Democratic National Convention this summer Harris mentioned education policy just once, and it was to push back against her opponent.
“We are not going to let him eliminate the Department of Education that funds our public schools,” she said. “We are not going to let him end programs like Head Start that provide preschool and child care for our children.”
Some of Harris’s own supporters struggle to articulate her affirmative agenda.
“What are Democrats for? We’re dealing with what we’re against and that is just the problem,” said Jared Bass, senior vice president for education at the progressive Center for American Progress Action, who is working to develop a forward-looking plan for progressives on topics including belonging, democracy and early childhood. “Our message is what we’re against and not necessarily what we’re for right now.”
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The Trump agenda
Few proposals have generated as much attention as Trump’s vow to close the Department of Education, an on-and-off Republican goal since the department was created in 1979. The 900-page Project 2025 blueprint for a conservative administration, which Trump has tried to distance himself from, recommends closing the agency and lays out how to go about it, mostlyby farming out various functions to other parts of government.
The blueprint proposes eliminating federal funding for the $18.4 billion Title I program, which serves high-poverty schools. Trump has not embraced this, though he has repeatedly said he would cut education spending in half.
Last week the former president offered a vision of a “very small staff” reviewing curriculum from all over the country to ensure it does not teach liberal ideas he finds objectionable – a monumental task given that there are almost 100,000 public schools in America.
“You’ll have a secretary. The secretary will have one person plus a secretary,” Trump said at a campaign event in Milwaukee. And all the person has to do is: Are you teaching English? Are you teaching arithmetic? What are you doing? Reading, writing and arithmetic. And are you not teaching woke? Not teaching woke is a very big factor.”
He has also promised that on his first day, he will cut funding from any school that teaches about “critical race theory,” “transgender insanity” or any other “inappropriate racial sexual or political content.”
None of that could be done on day one, as funding requirements are set by Congress. But Trump is working to move debate about race and gender that has played out dramatically in state legislatures and school boards to the federal level. In recent years, dozens of states have enacted more than 120 laws and policies reshaping the teaching of race, racism, sexual orientation and gender identity.
Trump also suggested cutting funding for schools that have vaccine requirements. (A spokeswoman said this would apply only to coronavirus vaccines.) And he has promised to prevent transgender women from playing on girls’ and women’s sports teams, an issue where the Biden administration has taken a middle-ground position.
And he has said parents should be able to elect school principals, though Washington has never had any say over how principals are chosen.
At the same time, he says he would send education “back to the states,” though education is already controlled almost entirely by states and local school boards. The federal government has a limited role in school policy, notably through enforcingcivil rights laws. That includes, under President Joe Biden, requiring schools to respect transgender student rights, policies Trump has promised to reverse. It also attaches various requirements to the billions of dollars it hands out to fund special education, high-poverty schools and other programs.
Overall, the federal government provides only about 10 percent of K-12 education funding. It can influence schools mostly by providing significant new funding or attaching strings to the money it provides, and through its enforcement of the federal civil rights laws.
Trump spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said that by returning education to the states, Trump will “help empower parents, protect good teachers and ensure our schools teach reading, writing and math in the classroom – not gender, sex and race.”
Trump could swiftly change the way federal civil rights laws are enforced, including Title IX, which bans federally funded schools from discrimination based on gender. The Biden administration is relying on Title IX to require that schools protect the rights of transgender students, which Trump could reverse if elected.
He has also promised to restore Title IX rules put in place under DeVos that gave students accused of sexual assault more due process rights.
When he was president, Trump repeatedly proposed budget cuts to education programs, though Congress did not go along. And in his final months, he promoted “patriotic education” through his 1776 Commission, which helped spark the education culture wars that followed.
On higher education, the Department of Education runs the $1.6 trillion student loan program – the single biggest mission of the agency – but Trump has said less about his vision for college affordability or student borrowing.
Trump’s platform promises to fire “radical left” accreditors, who monitor the quality of colleges and have been accused by conservative groups of ideological influence. Last year he promised to create a free online university where “wokeness or jihadism” would not be tolerated. He goes on to promise creation of “drastically more affordable alternatives” to traditional four-year degrees, but does not specify how.
Despite the sweep of his promises, some conservatives who track this issue closely are not sure how much of this would come to fruition if Trump is elected.
“Education policy under a second Trump administration would depend on appointees and on which side of the bed Trump woke up that morning,” conservatives Frederick M. Hess and Michael Q. McShane wrote in the journal Education Next. “His prior tenure made clear that his attention to education is likely to be sporadic and fleeting.”
Hess also questioned Trump’s promise to return education to the states.
“He certainly could try to reduce the federal footprint by trimming programs, pruning rules and the like,” he said. “But until I hear any clarity on what he’d cut or which rules he’d prune, I have trouble taking any of these very seriously.”
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The Harris agenda
The morning after Biden addressed the nation about why he left the presidential race, Harris made her first campaign stop at the American Federation of Teachers convention in Houston.
Harris used the speech to go after Trump’s plans to close the Education Department and his attack on what she called “the freedom to learn.”
“We want to ban assault weapons, and they want to ban books,” she said. “Can you imagine?”
But when she spoke about the future, Harris telegraphed values rather than policies. She told teachers assembled that they were doing God’s work and were underpaid for it. She said she was a proud product of public education.
On Harris’s campaign website, specifics are scarce. A one-paragraph section on education says she will fight for high-quality child care and preschool, “strengthen public education,” without saying how, and continue the Biden administration’s work to relieve student loan debt. She also cites some accomplishments of the Biden-Harris administration.
Harris spokeswoman Mia Ehrenberg replied to questions about Harris’s agenda by touting Biden-Harris administration accomplishments, including the single largest investment in K-12 education in history – a $130 billion infusion to help schools reopen and recover from the pandemic. Harris was the tiebreaking vote in the Senate on the legislation that included that funding, one of several education-related issues that she has been personally involved in, a White House official said.
Ehrenberg said that if elected, Harris would “build on those investments and continue fighting until every student has the support and the resources they need to thrive.”
For higher education, Harris has expressed support for vocational training and apprenticeships as a path to the middle class and said she would cut college degree requirements for some federal jobs if elected. But while many higher education experts anticipate Harris will build on Biden’s efforts to reduce the cost of college – including his unsuccessful effort to persuade Congress to approve two years of free tuition – Harris has not explicitly said what she would do.
Even some of Harris’s allies have trouble detailing her education agenda.
Asked what Harris would do for schools if elected, Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association, replied by praising her selection of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, a former teacher, as her running mate. She said that what the Biden-Harris administration has already done is a “road map” to discerning what she would do next.
Pressed for Harris’s affirmative agenda, Pringle mentioned increasing funding for schools, along with several proposals not directly related to education, such as tax policy and gun restrictions. But Pringle and her staff were unable to point to where Harris has promised to increase funding.
None of this is a problem for campaigning, said Lanae Erickson, senior vice president for social policy and politics at Third Way, a centrist Democratic policy and advocacy group. Attacking Trump’s policies is smart, she said. But she argued it is a problem for governing.
“I don’t think we have a real plan for addressing learning loss and inequities in public education and all the things our system is lacking post-covid. We’re kind of in a vacuum right now,” she said. “How our party wants to make K-12 schools better? I don’t know the answer to that question.”
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Danielle Douglas-Gabriel contributed to this report.