Whoever becomes President-elect Donald Trump’s secretary of education will face the heavy task of undoing the damage that four years of President Joe Biden has wrought on K-12 education.
Trump was elected in no small part because he promised to address concerns that parents have with the regulatory agenda that Biden and the Democratic Party have imposed upon public and private schools alike. Instead of empowering students and families for success, the administration has sold them out to teachers unions and special interest groups keen on enacting an agenda of far-left culture wars.
For the new Trump administration, maximizing parental rights and local control of education must be its lodestar. And with a mandate to govern, previous policy goals that once seemed far out of reach can and should be enacted. And that begins with school choice.
With unified control of Congress, Trump and Republicans must wield the mandate that was delivered to them and finally enact a tax credit scholarship program to make school choice a reality in all 50 states. This program can be attached to the renewal of the Trump tax cuts and passed through budget reconciliation. There is absolutely no reason why a Republican trifecta cannot pass it into law.
The impact of a universal school choice program will provide an enormous and early legislative win for Trump and the Republican Party. No policy the Department of Education can enact will be more transformative to K-12 education. Polling has consistently shown that a supermajority of voters support school choice programs, meaning once it is signed into law, it will be extremely difficult for even a Democratic-controlled Congress to repeal it without facing the wrath of the voters.
With school choice available to every single family in all 50 states, the Trump administration can then turn its attention to the bureaucratic behemoth that is the Department of Education and aggressively enact a regulatory agenda that protects the rights of students and families while working to draw down the operations of an agency that conservatives long to eliminate.
The most important priority is reversing the Biden administration’s Title IX regulations that allow biological males who identify as female to use women’s bathrooms and compete in women’s sports. On the campaign trail, Trump ran ads attacking Vice President Kamala Harris for supporting these regulations with the clever tagline “Kamala Harris is for they/them. President Trump is for you.” Repealing the Title IX regulations is an easy way of delivering on that promise.
The Trump administration must also investigate the extent to which the Chinese Communist Party has infiltrated K-12 education through its Confucius Classrooms program. This investigation should mirror a similar one that targeted higher education and Confucius Institutes on college campuses during the first Trump administration that proved extraordinarily effective at constraining foreign influence on higher education.
The majority of policymaking by the Department of Education that affects K-12 education comes in the form of federal grant programs to states and schools. This is where the Trump administration must flex its governing muscles.
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Perhaps with help from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency initiative, each and every grant should be scrutinized to ensure that it is delivering a return on investment to taxpayers. Grants that allow for or promote ideas such as critical race theory, gender theory, or diversity, equity, and inclusion must be eliminated or reformed, and regulations must be enacted that ensure that no funding recipient can use taxpayer funds to promote toxic and divisive ideologies.
Trump himself has stated that his goal is to eliminate the Department of Education, and while that goal is a long way off given the long odds of securing the necessary 60 votes in the Senate to pass such a bill, his administration can lessen the weight of the agency’s bureaucracy on the nation’s education system. It would send a powerful statement that the department is a case study in administrative bloat.