MAGAed?
It’s hard to believe that Donald Trump will be president again. Even though I’m having all the feelings associated with Kamala Harris’s loss, and I’m sifting through all the autopsy-takes on why she lost, and I’m even having glimmers of strategic thoughts about ‘what to do’ on the left about it all, I decided that, at first, I just wanted to get to know a little bit more about what Trump and his campaign’s attendant institutions have been saying about education. I hadn’t really been paying close attention to it other than secondhand accounts.
What do they want to do, what can they do, what will they do? What should we expect? So this week I wanted to write some specific education policies we might see coming out of a second Trump administration, so we can be better prepared and understand the terrain. Here are some thoughts in no particular order.
Bye bye IRA
Right off the bat, Trump’s administration will most likely gut the Inflation Reduction Act’s direct pay tax credit provisions, which reimburse local governments like school districts for green infrastructure projects. This was a big step towards a different kind of political economy of public education which will probably just disappear. The presence and absence of this sort of program will further diminish the potentials for federal intervention into school infrastructure, further exposing school districts to the costly interest and fees of the municipal bond market and removing incentives to decarbonize their buildings.
The school buildings that are supposed to prepare future generations will contribute to the ruination of the environment that future is supposed to exist within. Ugh. An interesting precedent here is when the Obama Administration passed the Build America Bonds program in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis and the Tea Party killed that program, another attempt to help districts out with their capital programs.
Deportation impacts
If this incoming administration does even part of what it says its going to do with deportation, this will have a huge impact on education. Specifically, it’ll forcibly remove people from their communities, a violent dislocation, changing class compositions. A knock-on effect of reduced migrant populations in school districts will be decreased per-pupil revenue provided by state government funding formulas. When enrollments decline, so will dollars for all students.
Local struggles
We have to remember that public education is very decentralized in the US. This is a blessing and curse. I usually think of it as a curse because the federal government could do so much more for public education, but during the first Trump administration I saw the blessing-aspect of it: Trump wanted to force all schools open in the pandemic, but superintendents all over the country just said no and right wingers couldn’t do much about it other than support initiatives at the local level, which they did of course, launching campaigns on multiple fronts against closures, vaccines, and then critical race theory and ‘gender ideology’, sprouting groups like Moms for Liberty, Parents Defending Education, etc.
There’s no doubt that this was and continues to be bad, with know-nothing rightwingers and their proto-neo-technofascism getting elected to school boards (but actually not winning that much), but, on the other hand, there are more institutions pushing back against these groups now, like Public School Strong, the Advancement Project’s anti-privatization work, and recent defeats of school voucher bills in multiple states. School boards are better adapted for these right wing formations and it won’t be a simple matter of ‘destroying public education’ for a new Trump administration. Or will it?
Generally, destroying public education from the top of the state apparatuses isn’t an easy thing to do because of how the US organizes education. Only 8% of funding for schools comes from the federal government, and while certain key programs are overseen at the national level, most of the action in education legally and financially happens at the state and local levels. State and local and district governments have a high amount of relative autonomy in the system.
Of course, changes at the federal level can have big impacts, particularly if there’s a change in the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. But while Republicans will have the Senate, they won’t have a veto-proof majority, and they might not control the House of Representatives, so they’ll have to change laws through the budget reconciliation process, which would most likely be arcane piecemeal stuff rather than sweeping transformations. There is one sweeping thing they keep talking about though.
No more DOE?
A recent USA Today article about possible cabinet members doesn’t have an entry for the Secretary of Education. This may be due to a lack of information given the early stages of the transition team, but it could also be purposeful: one of the things Trump repeated in the campaign was that he’d get rid of the Department of Education. Republicans have been saying this since Jimmy Carter created the department in the 1970s. It was a favorite of Reagan’s. But what would this really mean?
Chalkbeat interviewed someone who served in Trump’s education department the first time around and what they said is illuminating: winnow down the department’s budget, fire bureaucrats working in its offices, get rid of programs deemed as ‘government overreach’ like student loan cancellation and transgender student protections, and reassign core tasks of the department to other departments, like the Department of Human Services administering Title 1 distribution (money for schools serving poor students), which they say should be transformed into a “block grant,” rather than layered multiple grants through multiple formulas, and moving civil rights enforcement to the Department of Justice.
I guess I’m wondering whether/how a Trump administration would want to centralize public education more, attacking the relative autonomy that states and districts have. This was Ron DeSantis’s approach in Florida and depending on who’s in charge of these parts of the apparatus I suppose we might see more federal control to enact the MAGA program for education. Another article mentions that Tiffany Justice, co-founder of Moms for Liberty, could be a potential education secretary. But again, what could she really do from that position other than what we’ve mentioned? There actually are some proposals they’re making in this vein.
Block granting with no strings attached
Two policy documents that came up during the campaign were the America First Policy Institute’s platform and the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. What do these say about potential Trump administration initiatives?
Schools have been a key terrain for the MAGA, from primary to higher education. AFPI has a long list of think pieces, policy briefs, and op-eds on things for higher education, which range from getting rid of degree requirements for public jobs, defunding DEI writ large, increasing protections for Zionism across campuses, halting student loan cancellation programs, etc. Their K-12 page is similar and not terribly illuminating.
Project 2025 though certainly lives up to its infamy. The education section is extensive and goes into some gory details which, while I abhor them, gives a pretty concise picture of the federal government’s role in education generally speaking and provides some insight into their vision.
For instance, not only should Title 1 be administered through the Department of Human Services, and not only should its funds be allocated in block grants, the authors of Project 2025 want to “restore revenue responsibility for Title I funding to the states over a 10-year period.” That would wind down the meager amount the government does already to zero. (In an inadvertent nod to modern monetary theory, they want states and localities responsible for all education funding since these governments’ budgets are bounded and must be balanced, whereas the federal budget doesn’t have to be.)
To do all this, they say Congress should pass and the president should sign a “Liquidating Authority Act” or a “Department of Education Reorganization Act” to get all of this done. I don’t think Congress will be a position to deliver this legislation, but it’s good to know their ideas about how they’ll do this.
There are a bunch of other recommendations, which, while numerous and complex-sounding, they’re actually just versions of the same move: getting programs out of the DOE, blockifying the grants, winding down positions. They say this should happen with the Higher Education Act and special education laws too. They also talk a lot about making these education grants “no strings attached,” which to me signals the removal of civil rights compliance. The law is such now that, if school districts get federal money, they have to comply with civil rights regulations. “No strings attached” means they don’t have to do that anymore.
As an editorial note, this just seems like a ton of work. There has to be so much federal energy spent on undoing this federal energy, it just seems dumb.
Other things of note:
Rolling back recent regulations on charter schools created through a notice put out by the DOE in 2022.
Take a firmer hand with federally funded education programs like tribal education and schools on military bases.
Getting rid of the new ‘nonbinary’ category in civil rights data collection.
A ton of stuff about Title IX and gender, reinstating all the traditional binary bullshit.
Undoing Title VI guidance on restorative justice.
Get rid of federal school meal policies.
Incorporating “family structure” measurements into the data pool for education statistics.
Ending negotiated rule-making for educational policies (basically don’t ask for input).
Switch to fair-value accounting from FCRA accounting practices in student aid calculations.
Even though they throw a lot of stuff at the wall to see what sticks, and it’s all pretty repulsive, doing this exercise made me less overwhelmed by everything in the wake of the election, at least to the extent that I have a better sense of what’s potentially on the table rather than some mythical “huge” transformation. Knowing what’s possible in terms of the right’s activity in education policy makes it easier to imagine opposition and counter-tactics, which perhaps will take up future newsletters as this next period descends.