As a political scientist with a background in policy analysis, I used to approach questions about policy plans in terms of which had data behind them and which didn’t — along with what such evidence might mean for decision-makers.
However, no question about what a new Donald Trump administration would mean for U.S. education can be answered strictly with a debate about facts and figures.
With the former president and his allies still denying that he lost the 2020 election, with Trump and his running mate embracing unfounded stories about Haitian immigrants eating household pets and with Trump’s obsession with the size of his cheering crowds, any analytical projection about his future agenda is all but impossible. With such an absence of facts or evidence-based policy designs, we must turn to past actions, current rhetoric and the priorities of Trump’s political alliances for a hint of what could come.
On that basis, we could expect more debates about bathrooms and women’s sports, more inexplicable musings about whether slavery had benefits for enslaved Americans, more spending of scarce resources to put Bibles in public schools and more singling out of kids because of their immigration status.
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Many Republican proposals have been well-covered, starting with Project 2025 — the policy agenda assembled by the conservative Heritage Foundation for a new Trump term. Although Trump denies that controversial document speaks for his candidacy, more than 140 former members of the first Trump team had a hand in its crafting.
The key education points in the platform Trump does claim as his own — the so-called Agenda47 and the GOP party platform — strike the same notes of emphasis as those in Project 2025. Indeed, the one-page education “chapter” in the 16-page party platform is all but a summary of its much larger Project 2025 counterpart.
What do they emphasize? Culture wars, school vouchers and a peculiar fixation on ending the federal Department of Education.
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Two of the first three paragraphs of Project 2025’s education plan call for universal school vouchers. In Trump’s official GOP party platform, universal vouchers are the second education agenda item, behind a call to end teacher tenure. Both items follow a general statement about making great schools.
And yet, private school vouchers are not only eating up increasing shares of state budgets, some states are now directly funding new construction for private schools to receive those vouchers. These schools are free to discriminate on admissions and expulsion decisions across a variety of child characteristics.
The education bullet point in the 20-point summary of the Trump platform — the highlights of the highlights — excludes any specific policy statements, simply reading in its entirety:
Cut federal funding for any school pushing critical race theory, radical gender ideology, and other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content on our children.
Such a call echoes that of Kevin Roberts, head of the Heritage Foundation, in his Foreword to Project 2025. In that section, after setting a new litmus test for all conservative presidential candidates to support universal vouchers, Roberts insists:
The noxious tenets of “critical race theory” and “gender ideology” should be excised from curricula in every public school in the country. These theories poison our children.
Then there are the statements Trump and his allies make every day, including calls to end the U.S. Department of Education. A similar demand is in the very first paragraph of Project 2025’s education chapter, just ahead of its demands for vouchers.
Moms for Liberty co-founder Tiffany Justice, who hosted a “fireside chat” with Trump in August, has said on X (formerly Twitter) that Trump is “not kidding” about ending the department, and that she “hope[s] to get to help him accomplish this goal,” perhaps as one last secretary for that agency.
She could have competition. Two weeks before Trump’s appearance for Moms for Liberty, former U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos told reporters that she would consider joining a second Trump administration if it were for the specific task of eliminating the department she led in the first Trump term.
Let’s be clear: The U.S. Department of Education does many things, but what really riles up the Trumpian right is its role as the chief anti-discrimination authority for American schools. And that’s why it’s been singled out by the right for special criticism.
So what does all of this actually mean for kids and families?
What is the common theme of attacks on gender ideology, diversity and racial justice in schools; demands for universal vouchers; and calls to end the federal education agency?
If policy proposals, like budgets, are moral documents, what unifies the possibilities of a new Trump term — whether laid out in Project 2025, the GOP platform, Agenda 47 or campaign speeches on the trail — into some statement of purpose?
I say it’s this: A new Trump presidency would usher in an era of isolation and separatism and a casting out of children who differ from their peers or from what Christian Nationalists believe America should look like beyond what we all share as human beings. As just one example: Voucher schemes, like those prioritized by Trump and his allies, have been used by the right to marginalize LGBTQ+ children and families by denying them access to what the right calls the “education freedom” and “opportunity” represented by such “scholarships.”
What, if not a Trump-inspired politics of humiliation, explains the Trumpian right’s current obsession with the names children use to call themselves or how they describe the racial legacy they carry and experience?
Yet presidents only have partial control over which specific plans they’re able to pass during their time in office. For that reason, considering a new Trump term is as much about the broader political coalition he leads as what Trump and his team could personally do in the education policy arena.
So, from all of this, and regardless of what policies actually pass, we can be sure that a Trump victory would extend the era of culture warring in American education.
For nearly a decade in political life, Donald Trump has told us who he is. When it comes to any education ideas he and his allies might have, my humble suggestion is that we finally listen to what he has said, and consider what he has already done.
Josh Cowen is a professor of education policy at Michigan State University and a senior fellow at the Education Law Center. He’s the author of “The Privateers: How Billionaires Created a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers.”
Contact the opinion editor at opinion@hechingerreport.org.
This story about Donald Trump’s education policies was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s weekly newsletter.