Education Policy 2017: Trumpian Levels of Uncertainty
With the election of Donald Trump to the Presidency (I will take a long time to get used to typing that), education policy until at least January 2021 is a giant question mark. Secretary Clinton’s education policy was fairly easy to predict – she’d attempt to chart a “middle course” between the full embrace of corporate reform by President Obama and the concerns of her union supporters and close confidants like AFT President Randi Weingarten. She’d have softened the test and punishment aspects of federal education policy while continuing to support standards and testing in general, and she’d try to pivot the charter school debate into more oversight for the sector as a whole and narrowing federal support to co-called “high quality” charter schools. That’s hardly my ideal, but at least it would have been highly predictable territory and her credentials as someone genuinely interested in policy meant that she’d have approached education with a degree of thoughtfulness that I’d have appreciated.
President Trump? Not so much.
The only thing guaranteed by Donald Trump is something that I will deeply regret and his own preening self-regard. Make no mistake: education policy in the Trump Administration will favor privatization and be hostile to unionized teachers. The evidence for this is fairly clear in his choice of Indiana Governor Mike Pence as his Vice President. Governor Pence made education reform a central feature of his administration, and the results have not been especially pretty. Pence’s administration made a hard charge for additional charter school funding, although he did increase oversight in the sector. He also pushed to allow more public funds to go to vouchers for private schools, and he “rejected” the Common Core standards, only to have Indiana develop its own that look remarkably like the Common Core standards along with an Indiana specific standardized test that costs far more than the federally backed PARCC and SBAC exams. Even if Mr. Pence does not have much say in federal education policy (his real passions in government seem far more related to banning abortion and making life hell for LGBTQ people), Trump surrogate Donald Trump Jr. used his July convention speech to trash public education in the United States without regard for facts or nuance, and when Donald Trump spoke on education he focused mostly on bashing the Common Core Standards and emphasizing school choice as curative.
Suffice to say: Education policy in the Trump administration will come down to as much privatization as they can squeeze in, aided by a Congress that is wired to the bone to hate teacher unions and to believe that the free market can do anything. People who loathe the Common Core standards will be relieved to see an administration that is hostile to them, but they certainly cannot expect any Education Policy 2017: Trumpian Levels of Uncertainty | Daniel Katz, Ph.D.:
