How will the second term Trump presidency affect education and family life in the United States?
As a sociologist who has researched and taught about the interconnections between U.S. schools and family life for over a decade, this question has been at the forefront of my mind over the past year but especially since November 6th.
Education was not a major talking point of Donald Trump’s campaign. However, his approach to education during his first presidential term, talking points from his 2024 campaign (here and here), his nominee to head the Department of Education, and plans laid out in Project 2025, are all revealing. In short, the right to schooling for all of our children is in danger.
What Will the New Administration Actually Do For Schools?
The president-elect has expressed his intention to abolish the Department of Education (DOE), an organization established in 1979 to support U.S. schooling, including low-income students’ access to quality education. Why would President-elect Trump want to abolish the DOE? He has accused the DOE of pushing “woke ideology” onto children, despite it being the state and local governments that actually set K-12 curriculum.
The second Trump administration will be unlikely to fully abolish the DOE, because such a move would require congressional approval. However, his administration will likely attempt to shrink the DOE by cutting ongoing practices like national data collection. These efforts produce the only national data to document trends in schooling disparities, and without them we will be unable to monitor the predicted growth in learning gaps between students in more- and less-resourced schools.
Trump’s administration is also predicted to chip away at public K-12 schooling, which he began doing during his first term. One such tactic may be using civil rights inquiries, through which the administration targets schools that promote diversity and inclusion by cutting funds and threatening legal repercussions. As fourteen percent of a schools’ budget comes from the federal government, these punitive measures will likely persuade other schools to fall in line.
Betsey DeVos served as the Secretary of Education and head of the DOE during the first Trump term. DeVos advocated for diverting tax dollars from public schools to private options. In her final push before leaving the position, she introduced the Education Freedom Scholarships and Opportunity Act introduced in 2019, which aimed to offer federal tax credits to corporations that supported voucher programs. While never implemented, the Act was critiqued as set-up to primarily benefit wealthy families and further contribute to the erosion of public education.
For his second term, Trump has nominated Linda McMahon, former head of US Small Business Administration during his first term and former CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE), to lead the Education Department. McMahon’s nomination is concerning not only due to her lack of education experience, but also because of allegations that she enabled the sexual exploitation of children hired as “ring boys” for WWE.
Since his reelection, Trump has spoken favorably about many policy proposals put forth in The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. These policy proposals include banning books with themes of race, gender, or sexuality from public school curriculums and libraries, while also barring transgender students from using school bathrooms that align with their gender identity and requiring teachers to misgender transgender students. Project 2025 also details the elimination of Title I, which was initially established in 1965 to decrease inequalities in K-12 education. Title I is far from perfect, but entirely cutting off underperforming schools and the 2.8 million students who benefit from this program will undoubtedly worsen inequalities. In its place, Project 2025 plans to offer no-strings-attached block grants to states, with zero regulations and oversight.
It's Not Just Trump Who Has Chipped Away at Public Education
The Trump Administration’s efforts to undermine the DOE continue a bipartisan trend of weakening public education. Reagan’s administration shifted the focus of public education from equity to standardization and accountability, which drove a quasi-market place model in which parents compete to enroll their kids in the “best” available school. The Bush administration’s 2002 No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) penalized schools that failed to meet testing benchmarks, giving students within those schools the option to leave. The Obama administration extended NCLB through Race to the Top, a competitive state based grant program in which states could apply for funds in exchange for overhauling schools primarily focused through teacher ratings, standardized testing, and bolstering charter schools.
But Trump has done something different. Rather than chipping away at public funding, he has vowed to abolish such funding altogether. His first administration used executive and administrative tools to undermine public schooling and Civil Rights legislation. And he is predicted to pick up these efforts where he left off during his second term.
How Will These Efforts Impact K-12 Schooling?
Punitive education policies worsen inequalities. Specifically, eliminating Title I would remove up to 6% of the K-12 teaching workforce in low-income schools, with those left behind facing even larger classrooms with fewer resources. We are already facing a teaching shortage driven by low-pay and poor working conditions. In 2023, teachers’ wages were 26.6% lower than the average college graduates in other professions. School teacher is arguably one of the most important jobs, as teachers educate and shape our young – America’s future leaders, educators, parents, workers, and caregivers. The devaluation of teaching negatively affects all aspects of students’ learning, from large class sizes, high teacher turnover, to teaching quality.
Research on education consistently (see here, here, here, and here) shows that school choice policies worsen educational inequalities, as low-income families are often unable to transfer to more resourced schools. For example, research in the Chicago Public School district found that for families with children attending schools on federal probation, poor families were less likely to be able to changes schools – whether to a different public or private school - as compared to non-poor families. This demonstrates the impact of family resources on educational access. School choice also burdens families, particularly mothers, who take on most of the work involved in navigating the complex choice system. This not only worsens schooling inequalities but it also pulls mothers from careers, contributing to gender inequality within families.
It Doesn’t Have to Be This Way
The right to government funded schooling was formalized with Reconstruction through the 1865 Act of Congress which instituted the Freedman’s Bureau. The Bureau established schools for formerly enslaved African American and poor White children, youth who had previously been denied this right. The Freedman’s Bureau set the foundation for compulsory education as a goal that sought to ensure equal opportunity no matter one’s family of birth. Despite these origins, the American education system as a great equalizer is currently at-risk of being dismantled. What do we do? Like the generations before us, we resist. In these trying times, I remain heartened by the millions of Americans who are fighting to protect K 12 schooling as a human right. Our nation – indeed the future of the country – depends on it.
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