by Larry Sand
At the recent Donald Trump-Kamala Harris debate, the subject of education was nonexistent. Despite its hot button nature, the moderators did not broach the subject, and some parents are angry.
Michele Exner, a senior advisor at Parents Defending Education, commented that despite student literacy having “hit a crisis point,” those who were already struggling before the COVID-19 pandemic are being failed now. Yet, the moderators did not ask one single question about education. “They completely ignored one of the top issues parents are worried about.”
Interestingly, Trump, who has been known to wander off script, never brought it up. While he managed to insist that people in Springfield, OH, are eating cats and dogs, the subject of education never crossed his lips. (Thankfully, at least he didn’t erroneously claim, as he did to Moms for Liberty, that schools decide if your child is going to have a gender-changing surgery.)
The debate aside, Harris’s thoughts on education are no mystery. In a nutshell, she is a big government, anti-school choice, teacher union acolyte. She favors the Biden Title IX rewrite, which requires that schools treat students who suffer or think they suffer from gender dysphoria as though they were the opposite sex. The revision also stipulates that male students who identify as female must be allowed access to facilities designated for females, such as bathrooms and locker rooms, and be allowed to participate in women’s sports and organizations.
Harris also wants to expand child tax credits, increase Title I funding, and abolish (essentially nonexistent) book bans, asserting, “We want to ban assault weapons. They want to ban books.”
She also wants to spend taxpayer dollars on electric school buses, is against any effort that weakens public schools (meaning she opposes parental freedom), and ensures the maintenance of the Department of Education. She nonsensically claims that the DOE “funds our public schools.”
Lest there be any doubt about her leanings, Harris gave a speech to the American Federation of Teachers on the last day of the union’s yearly convention in July. She thanked AFT president Randi Weingarten for her “long-standing friendship” and boasted about how she “led [the Biden-Harris Administration’s effort] to eliminate barriers to (labor) organizing in both public and private sectors.”
Also on the teacher union front, National Education Association president Becky Pringle explains, “Kamala Harris illustrated for us what is at stake in this election, as she detailed how she will lower costs for middle-class families, defend our freedoms, and support our communities.”
Pringle then lambasted Trump, arguing that he “showed voters, yet again, why he is unfit for office. Trump is a convicted felon who puts his self-interest before the good of the country. He hired Betsy DeVos to loot and privatize public schools and, if given another chance, he’ll follow the Project 2025 playbook to cut taxes for billionaires, eliminate Head Start, and dismantle the Department of Education entirely.”
The NEA boss ended her screed with: “The choice in this election couldn’t be clearer, which is why NEA members are doing everything possible to ensure Kamala Harris and Tim Walz—an educator, football coach, and former NEA member—are elected this November.”
On the other hand, Trump’s views are not nearly as clear-cut as those of Harris. In addition to Pringle’s assertion that linked Project 2025, a 920-page blueprint for the next Republican presidency created by the Heritage Foundation, to Trump, Weingarten also avers that the document would “institutionalize Trumpism.” However, in reality, Trump disavowed any connection with Project 2025 in July, calling some of its notions “ridiculous and abysmal.”
Yet Project 25’s education portion bears a striking resemblance to the Republican Party’s official 2024 platform, which aims to implement universal parental choice, revert educational authority to states, combat gender indoctrination in classrooms, close the DOE, eliminate the Title I Program, etc.
Instead, Trump supports “Agenda 47,” which would eliminate the DOE and cut federal funding for any school pushing Critical Race Theory, transgender insanity, and other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content on our children. It would also, much like Project 25, install universal choice.
Rick Hess, senior fellow and the director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, writes that the education policies of a second Trump administration are up in the air. In “What Would Trump 2.0 Mean for Education?” and subtitled “I don’t know. You don’t either,” he maintains that it is an open question “as to whether a second Trump administration would actually commit to much budget-cutting or shrinking of the bureaucracy when it comes to education.”
When asked about child care, Trump recently offered gobbledygook, which rivals anything that master word salad chef Kamala Harris has ever spewed. “Because I have to stay with child care. I want to stay with child care. But those numbers are small relative to the kind of economic numbers that I’m talking about, including growth, but growth also headed up by what the plan is that I just—that I just told you about. We’re going to be taking in trillions of dollars. And as much as child care is talked about as being expensive, it’s, relatively speaking, not very expensive compared to the kind of numbers we will be taking in. We’re going to make this into an incredible country that can afford to take care of its people.”
As Hess notes, Trump’s proposed tariffs would help fund a major expansion of federal programs.
Additionally, Hess explains that last year, Trump pitched a federally funded American Academy, “which would open new vistas for Washington’s role in providing higher education. Trump has obviously promised aggressive action on key cultural hot points—from defunding anti-Semitic colleges to busting the higher-ed accreditation cartel—and such moves, while obviously right-leaning, imply a need for a robust federal presence.”
On a similar note, National Review’s Andrew McCarthy observed, “Because he’s an opportunist with some conservative leanings, rather than a conservative in search of opportunities to advance the cause, Trump often can’t decide whether to deride Harris’s cynical policy shifts or try to get to her left. Even in Trump’s first term, when he had an experienced team of small-government true believers, there was little cutting and a whole lot of deficit spending. Recall that it was Trump who supported the first big tranche of unconditional pandemic aid for schools, initiated the hugely expensive student loan pause, and spent his first term watching spending climb on programs he’d promised to cut.”
In conclusion, when it comes to education, the feds certainly have sway, but many more important decisions about the nation’s children are made at the state and local levels. As such, whenever, however, and wherever you vote, please keep state legislators and local school board members on the front burner.
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Larry Sand, a retired 28-year classroom teacher, is the president of the non-profit California Teachers Empowerment Network – a non-partisan, non-political group dedicated to providing teachers and the general public with reliable and balanced information about professional affiliations and positions on educational issues. The views presented here are strictly his own.
