While presidential contests have never raised education policy to the heights of jobs, health care, and other issues, the election has always been an opportunity for both parties to at least explain what their intentions are for the nation’s schools.
The GOP has no actual platform beyond supporting whatever President Donald Trump says.
But this year, the GOP has no actual platform beyond saying the press is bad, opposing anything that Democrats want, and supporting whatever President Donald Trump says.
The Trump/Pence agenda calls for just two education-related things:
- Providing “school choice” to every child in America
- Teaching American exceptionalism
There’s no explanation in the agenda for what those two things actually mean or how Trump would implement them, but we can make some educated guesses.
Providing “school choice” is a long-standing goal of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. She has been boosting her Education Freedom program, a tax credit scholarship program that provides school vouchers and tax relief for the wealthy.
In this program, some wealthy Pat McGotbux would contribute, say, $10,000 to a scholarship fund that pays for students to attend a private school, and in return, Pat gets a $10,000 tax credit. The DeVos program carries a $5 billion price tag—which means that up to $5 billion worth of tax bills could be forgiven, leaving a $5 billion hole in the treasury.
Vouchers in the United States are used primarily for students to attend private religious schools. As a result, Trump has leveraged the issue of school choice to get some Catholic Church love for his campaign. And while the program is sold as an opportunity for families to choose a school for their children to attend, it’s important to note that the Trump Administration has also come down heavily in favor of religious organizations’ right to discriminate. In September, for example, Trump’s Department of Justice filed an amicus brief supporting a Catholic school’s right to fire a teacher for being gay.
Not every Trump-DeVos move in favor of school choice has been successful. Earlier this month, a federal court struck down DeVos’s attempt to redirect extra CARES Act relief money to private schools.
But the U.S. Supreme Court’s June decision in Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue, which held that religious private schools cannot be excluded from tax credit scholarship programs, has blown a huge hole in the wall of separation between church and state. Private religious schools are looking to sprint through that hole with the Trump Administration’s blessing and assistance.
Trump’s school choice agenda is about cutting funding for public education and increasing tax dollar support for private schools—schools that will have no obligation to educate any and all students that show up on their doorsteps.
Trump has also sent clear signals about what he means by American exceptionalism.
Last month, the Education Department indicated its plans to seek and destroy diversity training in government departments, stamping out any instruction about white privilege or that paints the United States as “an inherently racist or evil country.”
Trump also called teaching about systemic racism “a form of child abuse.”
His desire to eradicate “divisive, anti-American propaganda” has extended to a threat to cut funding for any school found teaching The New York Times Magazine’s award-winning 1619 Project.
On September 17, at an event held at the National Archives hosted by the White House, Trump railed against educating students about racism in American society and demanded schools “restore patriotic education to our schools.”
Trump also called teaching about systemic racism “a form of child abuse” and announced the formation of a committee, called the 1776 Commission, that would pose an alternative to the “repression of traditional faith, culture, and values” he feels are running rife in the nation’s public schools.
Even more salaciously, Trump has since pressured Walmart, Oracle, and ByteDance, the China-based company that owns TikTok, to devote $5 billion of the video-sharing app’s sale to his “patriotic education” initiative.
“Do me a favor, could you put $5 billion into a fund for education,” Trump told the crowd at a rally in North Carolina, recounting a conversation he allegedly had with the companies’ executives. “So we can educate people as to the real history of our country. The real history, not the fake history.”
Trump’s vision of education as privatized and dutifully teaching students a conservatively edited version of U.S. history is not a desirable goal for our future.
Overall, Trump’s bloviations on education fit well with his general campaign theme of “They are coming to get you, and only I can save you,” as well as his portrayal of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden as a puppet for shadowy far-left forces.
The Trump campaign has also accused Biden of vowing to close all charter schools (which is not true). In fact, Biden’s position on charters and choice is not entirely clear at the moment.
A policy brief, hashed out between the Biden and Bernie Sanders camps, takes a hard line on charters and the pursuit of profit in that sector, but Biden’s actual “Plan for Educators, Students, and Our Future” doesn’t mention charter schools at all.
One of Biden’s major staffers, Carmel Martin, is a longtime supporter of charters and the education reform movement. On the stump, though, Biden has been quiet about charters and school choice, but you can expect the Trump campaign to continue building Biden into a straw man on these issues.
Trump’s vision of education as privatized and dutifully teaching students a conservatively edited version of U.S. history is not a desirable goal for our future.
Clearly, the only way Trump will be remembered as an education President is if he writes the history books himself. And, really, what’s to stop him?