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.