Eliminating the U.S. Department of Education. “Universal” school choice. Ending “political indoctrination” of students.
U.S. President-Elect Donald Trump has made a litany of promises during his campaign about what he’ll do in the education space once elected.
But what will that mean for K-12 schools and universities and colleges in Ohio?
When it comes to eliminating the Department of Education, According to Tanisha Pruitt, youth, opportunity and education researcher for Policy Matters Ohio, a policy research institute, the main way the department impacts local schools is by providing funding for low-income students, special education and early education.
Pruitt said if the state or federal government doesn’t step in to provide new programs or resources to replace that funding, school districts, especially in urban and rural areas, will suffer.
“Wealthier districts might better absorb funding losses, while underfunded districts could see severe resource gaps, increasing the challenges teachers face in low-income areas,” she said.
Chad Aldis, vice president for Ohio policy at the Fordham Institute, an Ohio education policy think tank that advocates for greater support for charter and private schools, said eliminating the U.S. Department of Education would not necessarily impact things already in law. That includes funding for students with disabilities, and a federal requirement for states to monitor students’ reading, math and science scores; those would need to be addressed by Congress.
“Even if the department were to go away, those things do not necessarily go away," Aldis said. "They're both in law and would need to continue to be administered. So it might not be an entity called the Department of Education. But there are a lot of things that are baked in that (department) that occur that would have to be overseen by somebody.”
Aldis added that Republican leaders have long suggested ending the Department of Education, starting soon after it was created in 1980, but none have done so. He noted overall, most funding for school districts comes from local and state sources.
What about higher education?
The U.S. Department of Education also distributes billions each year in federal Pell grants meant to help low-income students afford college.
Sarah Kilpatrick, executive director of the Ohio Conference of the American Association of University Professors, an advocacy organization for faculty across the state, said eliminating the department could cause “chaos” for students expecting scholarships, or to be able to take out student loans in general to pay for college.
“I think that they want a feather in their cap to be able to say we eliminated the Department of Education,” Kilpatrick said. “But I think it's very complicated to actually go through such an elimination.”
Trump on his campaign website also pledges to deport “pro-Hamas radicals” on American college campuses.
He also said Republicans will “fire Radical Left accreditors,” drive down tuition costs, and pursue civil rights cases against schools that “discriminate.” Trump and Republicans aligned with him have long argued colleges and universities are biased against conservative principles and stifle the speech of those on the right.
Kilpatrick said she sees those claims as dishonest, however.
“We see those on the right wing claim that they want free speech on campus and claim that they want, quote unquote, intellectual diversity," she said. "But what they really want is to clamp down on a certain kind of speech and promote another kind of speech.”
Trump’s war on “woke”
Trump has said he will eliminate federal funding for, and tax the endowments of, colleges and universities that do not align with his views on diversity, equity and inclusion. Kilpatrick said it’s hard to guess how that would play out, but, if he follows through with the threat, some academic programs and colleges and universities’ DEI programs could be at risk.
“I would venture to guess that gender studies, for example, would be one of them, possibly women's studies as well,” she said. “I think anything that falls into what the right would consider ‘woke’ is potentially on the chopping block if they create rules that withhold federal funding if institutions have these kinds of programs.”
Trump has also made similar threats for K-12 schools promoting “critical race theory” – a college-level concept studying how racism is embedded in society – and “radical gender ideology.”
Christine Collins, executive director for Honesty for Ohio Education, which calls itself a nonpartisan statewide coalition that pushes back against curriculum bans, said these threats aren’t new.
Collins, a former member of the Ohio State Board of Education, said state legislatures across the country have pushed for similar restrictions on what schools can teach for years now.
“Honesty for Ohio Education, alongside our coalition partners, has been fighting back against anti-CRT, anti-LGBTQ+ book and curricular bans, and culture war policies in our state legislature for years,” she wrote. “We are also seeing bills move through the statehouse that want to inject religious indoctrination into public schools and bills attacking policies around diversity and inclusion for K-12 and higher education.”
Aldis, with the Fordham Institute, said some low-hanging opportunities for Trump - that wouldn’t require Congress to act - could be to reverse Biden-era guidance and executive actions on education, like rescinding protections for transgender students put into federal anti-discrimination policies.
School choice and what’s next?
One place where Aldis predicted some movement from Trump was on the topic of boosting access to private and charter schools.
“I would expect that the federal government to be much more friendly toward choice programs," he said.
He said that could look like boosted federal funding for charter schools, while offering some kind of new tax credit for parents who send their children to private schools.
Aldis noted Trump did not push through many reforms on education during his first term in office; he was skeptical that Trump would make it a focus this time.
More realistically, Aldis suggested Trump will direct the U.S. Department of Education’s leadership, led by former WWE CEO Linda McMahon, to cut back on oversight of schools in general.
“There will probably be less federal involvement in local school districts,” Aldis said. “So that means local decisions and state decisions related education policy become all the more all the more important and relevant.”
