Perry Bacon, a regular columnist for The Washington Post, paints a sunny view of the politics of education. He thinks that the public is so strongly united behind their public schools that Trump might back off his plan to turn federal funding into vouchers. Higher education, however, is a different story, he says, with a bipartisan coalition arrayed against student protests and debt relief.
I do not share his view that Republicans will relinquish their fealty to vouchers and privatization. No matter how determined the public is to defend their public schools, the billionaires who want vouchers are unrelenting. Bacon doesn’t see that the monied people don’t give a damn what the public wants. Betsy DeVos, the Koch machine, Jeff Yass, and Texas billionaires Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks don’t care what the public wants. Perry Bacon would have written a different article if he had read Josh Cowen’s new book The Privateers: How Billionaires Started a Culture War …
Bacon writes:
The Biden years have featured some surprising bipartisan and cross-ideological coalitions on education issues, including school vouchers and protests on college campuses, that might extend into Donald Trump’s presidency. It’s the rare policy area where the divides aren’t simply along party lines.
On K-12 education, Republican and Democratic voters have unified — against the desires of powerful conservative groups and Republican politicians. The political right has long been frustrated with American education and is pushing a number of major changes, most notably voucher programs that would put more kids in private schools and either shrink or, perhaps eventually, dismantle the public school system.
But a clear majority (57 percent) in Nebraska earlier this month voted to repeal a voucher initiative, nearly matching Trump’s support there (60 percent). In Kentucky, all 120 counties (and 62 percent of voters) rejected a proposal to start a voucher program.
The results from those two states aren’t outliers. States with huge Republican majorities in their legislatures have struggled to get voucher programs passed because lawmakers are hearing from wary constituents, including Republicans. Even when they are enacted, voucher programs so far have not resulted in a huge number of students flooding to private schools.
In another rejection of conservative education policy, Moms for Liberty, the group that backs right-wing candidates running in local school board races, has struggled electorally. Only about one-third of the candidates it backed won their races last year, according to a Brookings Institution analysis. (There hasn’t yet been a detailed analysis of the group’s election results in 2024.) There has been a strong backlash against Moms for Liberty and other conservative groups seeking to ban books on racial and LGBTQ+ issues from public schools.
Meanwhile, counties throughout Florida, where Trump won easily, voted to increase local property and sales taxes to boost public school funding.
What’s behind this strong support of public schools? Only 45 percent of all Americans and 31 percent of Republicans say they are satisfied with public schools nationally, according to Gallup polling. But 70 percent of all Americans and 62 percent of Republicans are satisfied with the schools their kids are attending. Education policy tends to reflect local dynamics, so schools in very conservative areas are probably cautious in speaking about racism or LGBTQ+ issues. But what I suspect is actually driving that strong support for public schools is that for Republicans, particularly in rural areas, public schools are a central, positive part of their lives, where their friends and relatives work and their kids play sports.
But on higher-education policy, the bipartisan coalition is against the left. Like their Republican counterparts, many Democratic politicians and prominent left-of-center leaders and activists think both that the United States became overly invested in recent decades in having people attend college and that campuses are too left-wing. (I disagree with both claims.)
So in the spring, Democratic politicians, including President Joe Biden, joined Republicans in portraying on-campus protests against Israel’s military actions in Gaza as antisemitic. Schools in both red and blue states, pushed by their centrist or conservative governing boards, have now created new limits on protests, particularly barring the kind of encampments that pro-Palestinian students created.
Biden himself was under fire from centrist Democrats and Republicans alike for trying to cancel student-loan debt, a policy strongly backed by many progressives. Many in either party argue that mass college attendance, unlike K-12 education, is not a necessity for the country and people who accrued debt during college knew the costs and should pay it back in full. The recent progressive pushes for both universal free college and mass debt cancellation seem stalled for now.
Prominent liberals have joined conservatives in questioning the value of humanities classes and departments and want colleges to focus more on graduating students ready to work in science, technology and other fields where jobs are growing. Nearly every day a Democratic politician says something along the lines of, “Our party is too influenced by the views and perspectives of professors and students on campuses and college graduates,” mirroring the rhetoric of conservatives such as Vice President-elect JD Vance.
How did we end up with Republican voters defending public schools and Democratic politicians criticizing colleges? Part of the explanation for why education policy hasn’t split on predictable partisan lines is that Biden hasn’t made the issue one of his major priorities. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona has been more low-profile than Betsy DeVos and Arne Duncan. Biden didn’t have a major education initiative such as No Child Left Behind (President George W. Bush) or Race to the Top (President Barack Obama).
Trump and his incoming administration could make this issue super-partisan. The activist right is unified around the idea that both K-12 schools and colleges are using taxpayer dollars to force liberal ideas on young people, particularly on issues of race, gender and sexual orientation. So, the Trump administration could push hard to get more K-12 students enrolled in private schools, stop K-12 schools and colleges from offering classes out of line with conservative ideology, and limit on-campus protests for left-wing causes.
Trump, in his post on Truth Social announcing that Linda McMahon would be education secretary, emphasized his support for vouchers.
But in that statement, Trump also said that education policy should be left largely to states. (It’s not clear that Trump can or would fully eliminate the federal Education Department, as he suggested during the campaign.) So perhaps his administration will take a more hands-off approach, aware that many Republican voters like how their schools are run locally.
Looking forward, it’s possible that Republican voters fall in love with voucher programs if the Trump administration pushes them hard. Or perhaps Democratic politicians will feel more compelled to defend colleges if they become a target of Trump.
But if I had to guess, I would predict that education policy continues to be an issue that doesn’t break down simply along party lines. After all, it’s personal for so many Americans, who vividly remember their time in grade school or college. And it’s complicated — exactly how should colleges have handled the Gaza protests? The happy middle for America might be a robust public school system, more of a Democratic goal, along with less liberal colleges that fewer people attend, more in line with Republican preferences.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“So perhaps his administration will take a more hands-off approach, aware that many Republican voters like how their schools are run locally.“
In one of Trump’s later campaign rallies, I heard him give that awful schpeal about sending you son to school one day and he a was a girl when he came back home in the afternoon (paraphrased).
To me that’s a rather obvious and ridiculous scare tactic–but where even reasonable parents are so protective of their children, it still presses a fear button just by bringing up bad things happening to one’s child when the parent is not playing helicopter.
My guess is that Trump’s obvious tactics are a part of the Project 25 policy but in its longer-term manifestation–just to set the seeds of such fears to make private schools and vouchers, etc., more amenable later on, and to continue the smearing of all things public and the “left.” CBK
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The propaganda against public schools has not gained the type of traction the right needs to dismantle public education. In Florida DeSantis’ attempt to make school board elections partisan failed at the ballot box. I live in a part of FL where the GOP dominates. In a recent school board election the M4L candidate lost in the primary, and the remaining two candidates, a moderate GOP parent and an incumbent Democrat vied for the seat in the general election. The Democrat won because she had widespread support from both parents and teachers. I was shocked by the results even though my family had voted for the Democrat because this area, FL Congressional District 1, is a GOP stronghold with lots of MAGA supporters. The GOP propaganda machine failed to convince families that their public schools were in need of disruptive change.
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“Only 45 percent of all Americans and 31 percent of Republicans say they are satisfied with public schools nationally, according to Gallup polling. But 70 percent of all Americans and 62 percent of Republicans are satisfied with the schools their kids are attending.”
Correct me if I am wrong, but I believe this has been a consistent statistic since Nation at Risk. Thus it is posed to suggest that the generally negative view of public education can be attributed to conservative efforts to spawn a cash cow for their own wallet. This shows these false entrepreneurs cannot really make or build, only move money in their general direction.
Who was it that wrote “follow the money?”
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Another explanation is the “Lake Wobegon” effect where people think their local school is just great and everyone else’s is below par. Of course, most probably think their kid is doing just fine because s/he is getting good grades [thanks to grade inflation] and graduating HS, not realizing far too many graduates are at a fifth grade reading level, haven’t been taught how to think critically. The real world awaits far too many of these kids and virtually no public schools are rethinking how they do things to truly prepare ALL kids for the 21st century which is upon us and still might land like a ton of bricks regardless of who the President is.
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David,
I have a suggestion for you. Try to find a public school that will let you take the eighth grade math test. All the eighth graders take it. Let me know how you score. Then apologize to the teachers and kids you defamed.
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Critical thinking skills, like any other, require both practice and just plain maturation. Given that we now “know” that the frontal lobes are not fully mature until around 25 (the car rental agencies have understood it for decades!), is it a surprise that kids coming out of high school still have some growing to do?
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Connecting dots (or columnists) My read is The culture war against “liberalism,” American History and science + cancel the Renaissance, literature, & art + election that slashed taxes on the wealthy = “Perfect Storm 2025” – the demise of public education all at once.
Heather Cox Richardson (11/30/24), after an intellectual, informative history of “liberalism” from Founders through Lincoln… Reagan… today, concludes: “When Movement Conservatives convinced followers to redefine “liberal” as an epithet rather than a reflection of the nation’s quest to defend the rights of individuals—which was quite deliberate—they undermined the central principle of the United States of America. In its place, they resurrected the ideology of the world the American Founders rejected, a world in which an impoverished majority suffers under the rule of a powerful few.”
Sunday’s Barron’s special pullout section on Trump economics: “Make These Tax Moves. Your Future Self Will Thank You.” Subtitle: “Wealthy households may have avoided some looming tax hikes thanks to Donald Trump’s election, but there are still plenty of tax steps to take before the new year.”
In Perry Bacon’s blog above: “Prominent liberals have joined conservatives in questioning the value of humanities classes and departments…”
There it is. Liberal is an epithet. Colleges are too liberal. Slash taxes that benefit the public, the common good, and the under-resourced. Trump’s election effect on wealthy and more advice for wealthy to cut taxes.
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The hyper Republican Utah state legislature rewrote state initiative law in part to keep the public from being able to once again vote down vouchers. In other words, it’s VERY easy to make it impossible for people to vote against vouchers.
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TOW,
Back in 2007, the people of Utah voted against vouchers, overwhelmingly.
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In a nation that equates making money with being educated, real education will always be threatened. Right-wingers, religious fanatics, etc. don’t want people who “think” for themselves. They want a “product” produced by the schools that will be a young person ready to do the job–technical job–assigned.
But democracy, which we don’t totally have but most folks want, requires people who learn to think for themselves–not just take orders or operated machines, widgets, or robots. Come to think of it, robots would do lots of jobs well, and we’re making better robots every day.
This battle to control education, to narrow it into just job training isn’t new. At my first Ohio Education Association convention, in 1970, our Republican governor–a dropout from OSU–proclaimed: “A general education leads to general unemployment.” We didn’t know if he believed what he was saying or if he was just playing to his corporate, no-tax-increase friends.
So it went, and so it goes.
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