School choice will have a proponent in the Oval Office, and the federal Department of Education could be in existential danger after Tuesday’s election.
GOP education initiatives have been stymied at the federal level for the past four years, but that’s about to change after Republicans recaptured the White House and the Senate while potentially keeping the House.
President-elect Trump and the GOP will try to turn their momentum into reforms, but experts say they face some major decisions.
“I’m very curious to see who Trump nominates for Education secretary and whether he goes in the direction of a culture warrior. Is he picking someone like [Moms for Liberty co-founder] Tiffany Justice, or is he picking someone who’s a little more traditionally conservative? I think that will be a signal about the direction where things are going,” said Jon Valant, director of the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institute.
Trump’s first administrative steps are likely to include pumping the breaks on Biden-era matters directly within his control, such as student loan relief and Title IX.
The Biden administration has given the most student loan relief in history and is in the process of defending a new income-driven repayment program in the courts that Republicans are fighting against.
Trump will likely face pressure to stop the loan forgiveness and change the Title IX rules back to what his administration had in his first term, cutting the new additions under President Biden that added protections based on sexual orientation and gender identity.
“I think they will likely revert to what they did the first time around” with Title IX “given that they really did take quite a bit of time to go through what due process should look like and things like that. I mean, it took several years to do so,” said Jonathan Butcher, the Will Skillman senior research fellow in education policy at the Heritage Foundation, who added he “would also anticipate” a swift death for Biden’s student debt relief efforts.
Activists also aren’t forgetting what Trump said on the campaign trial with promises to eliminate the Department of Education, potentially following the plan of Project 2025, a blueprint released last year for a potential Republican president.
“I believe that there should be continued conversation about doing so. And I think that the programs that have proven ineffective should be closed, and I think other parts … remain essential, like the Office of Civil Rights,” Butcher said.
The potentially reduction or destruction of the department plays into further fears about what resources students will have, especially with college affordability, as Trump likely reigns back relief.
“We would worry that the Department of Education will orient itself to serve the interests of lenders and creditor institutions instead of making sure that there’s equitable access to post secondary education across our country,” said Sameer Gadkaree, president and CEO of the Institute for College Access and Success.
But a weaker Department of Education could also hurt another one of Trump’s campaign promises: to punish schools by removing federal dollars if they have policies undesirable to the president-elect, such as diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) offices.
“If Trump were to eliminate the Department of Education and all federal education funding, which seems unlikely, but if he were, he wouldn’t have any leverage to take funding away from colleges or public schools that have DEI offices or teach what he thinks is critical race theory,” said Neal McCluskey, director for the Center for Educational Freedom at the Cato Institute.
“But if there is still federal money in education, and there probably will be, I don’t think that there’s appetite, even if” Republicans control all three branches of government to eliminate all federal funding, he added.
“I think the Trump administration will try to use that as leverage” against schools, McCluskey said.
Outside of Trump’s direct control, if there is a Republican trifecta in Washington, there are certain policies he may embrace.
A Parental Bill of Rights has become a popular conservative proposal that passed a Republican House back in 2021 but couldn’t make it through a Democratic Senate.
But other policies popular for Republicans at the state level may not translate to the federal government.
Conservatives have made significant strides in multiple states to pass school choice measures, with Trump in recent weeks floating the idea of a national school choice policy.
But observers are looking at the results from last night’s school choice ballot measures, which lost in all three states where they were up, and the pushback against the policy from rural Republicans in places such as Texas as signs it wouldn’t be an easy sweep, even in a unified government.
“I think historically, Republican presidents have not had in recent history […] a whole lot of success in bringing congressional Republicans along for big federal education programs. So, for example, early in Trump’s first term, they pushed for some kind of federal tax credit scholarship program, and it didn’t go anywhere because congressional Republicans were so reluctant to do anything big in education,” Valant said.
“I do think there are some constraints that will come from within the Republican Party because I don’t think there’s unanimity in what Republicans believe when it comes to federal education and what exactly to do,” he added.
School choice advocates argue the results from the ballot measures, some of which aimed to change state constitutions, are a different ball game and not indicative of the future of the movement or difficulty in the federal government.
“I think, especially if they control the House, there will be a concerted effort to pass a federal school choice bill, probably a federal scholarship tax credit. There’s legislation already out there, and I suspect that’s something they would pass without too much difficulty,” McCluskey said.
For now, much is unknown as the president-elect did not give many details on future education policy on the campaign trail and the issue was put on the backburner during presidential debates.
“I think there’s a temptation for people to look at who wins the presidential election, who wins control the Senate and House, and sort of project the positions of that party onto the desires of the voting population. There’s kind of that temptation. But at the same time, there were a bunch of ballot initiatives that look very different with respect to the results from these like higher-profile elections,” Valant said.
“And so, I think we should be honest that it’s very unlikely that the outcomes of the presidential election, the Senate races, the House races, reflect the public’s views on education policy while we’re getting much more direct evidence of what people think about education policy issues,” he added.
