A lot is riding on the 2024 presidential election. In whom should educators instill their trust to ensure K12 education is revered and teachers respected? It’s hard to say.
According to Pew Research Center data published in April, some 33% or more of teachers trust neither political party to improve several education issues. This includes topics like funding (33%), teacher pay (35%), access to high-quality education (31%), shaping school curriculum (42%) and making schools safer (35%).
Meanwhile, the majority of public school teachers identify as Democrats, the research adds. Only 35% lean to the right. Could our current presidential candidates garner more support from America’s teachers?
The National Education Association, the country’s largest teachers union, endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris in July and thanked President Biden for his leadership.
“Our students’ future will be shaped by the decisions made in the Oval Office over the next four years, and the future of our public schools, freedoms and democracy is on the ballot this fall,” said Becky Pringle, president of the NEA.
Harris and K12
The union’s support for Harris dates back to 2017 when she was a U.S. senator. She received an “A” grade from the NEA based on how she voted on critical legislation, spanning public education to labor.
During her 2020 presidential campaign, she advocated for teacher pay increases of $13,500 for every teacher, universal preschool and increased funding for Head Start programs. Most recently, she’s played a key role in securing billions in federal funding through the American Rescue Plan, which helped support schools as they recovered from the pandemic.
Also under the current administration, $167 billion in student loans has been wiped clean, impacting roughly 4.75 million Americans and counting.
“One out of every 10 federal student loan borrowers approved for debt relief means one out of every 10 borrowers now has financial breathing room and a burden lifted,” said U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona.
K12 education is typically a “party splitter” for Democrats, says Dale Chu, an independent consultant on education programs and policy and a senior visiting fellow at the Thomas Fordham Institute, an education reform think tank. But until Harris selects her secretary of education, if elected, it’s hard to say how education might be impacted.
“Consider the parlor game among insiders about who Harris might pick for her cabinet and note how education is usually off of the list,” says Chu. “But if I were to put money down, my guess is that Harris would largely hew to Biden’s education priorities, which on K12 meant no daylight between the White House and the teachers unions.”
Donald Trump and Project 2025
With former president Donald Trump, the elephant in the room for many educators is Project 2025. The policy aims to dismantle the Department of Education by shifting control and funding of education from D.C. to parents and state and local governments.
Weadé James, senior director for K12 Education Policy at the Center for American Progress, says Project 2025 puts education at risk. “The proposal to eliminate the Department of Education is very concerning,” she says. The Department has numerous responsibilities, like ensuring states have adequate funding to provide equal access to education for students with disabilities under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA).
“The Department of Education is actually the least funded in terms of cabinet agencies,” explains James.
Title I support for America’s most marginalized students would also be in jeopardy under Project 2025. According to James, the current playbook seeks to phase out such funding over 10 years and relinquish that responsibility over to the states.
However, these ideas ring hollow for Chu, who says the GOP has been trying to eliminate the Department of Education since Jimmy Carter. “When Trump talks about deep-sixing it, he’s all hat and no cattle,” says Chu. “Which is to say, he’s got no plan to rally popular support for shutting the agency down, let alone marshaling the votes needed on Capitol Hill to make it happen.”
Trump’s impact on K12 during his first term was hardly measurable, adds Chu. Instead, he’ll likely feed off of COVID’s negative impact to propel his larger movements.
“In a second term, he’ll stoke the culture war fires when it’s convenient and some will sympathize with his calls for private school choice, but that’s in large part because many parents are still frustrated about what happened with their kids during COVID,” explains Chu.
School vouchers
One topic that James says is gaining rapid momentum is the school choice movement. As of April, at least 29 states have adopted some form of an Education Savings Account, according to the Mountain States Policy Center.
James worries that such policies will dramatically impact public school funding. “Parents can now pursue vouchers using public school dollars to send their children to private schools,” she says. “Not just private schools, but we’re also seeing the evolution of different choice options. Now, we’re seeing micro-schools.”
We don’t know how these schools are structured, either, she adds. There’s no federal definition of a micro-school, although there are numerous state definitions and policies.
“None of them are using state curriculum, we don’t know who the educators are,” she says. “There are a lot of concerns there when we think about school choice and the layers to it.”
And finally, she questions who’s benefitting from private school vouchers. Many states only award as much as $8,000 when average tuition costs are much higher.
“It’s going to benefit the parents who have the means to make up the difference,” she explains. “There are concerns surrounding equity when we think about the use of taxpayer dollars to fund private and religious education.”
