The Atlanta Journal-Constitution is publishing a series of guest columns this week from some educators, education experts and a student asking them what President Donald Trump and his administration should focus on during his term. This is the fourth of these columns.
Given that Donald Trump already spent four years in the White House, do we already know what to expect when it comes to education?
Not so much.
Three big things have changed since January 2021. Frustrations with higher education and lousy educational outcomes have boiled over. Red-state governors have racked up resounding wins on reading instruction, DEI and parental choice. And years of combating school closures, politicized classrooms and campus antisemitism have yielded a more robust, ambitious agenda.
These shifts point the way forward.
The elephant in the room is Trump’s promise to abolish the U.S. Department of Education. It’s a reasonable suggestion. The department’s 4,000 bureaucrats mostly manage a trillion-dollar loan portfolio and various federal funding streams, and all this can be done by other agencies with more expertise. For instance, student loans can be overseen by the Treasury Department and civil rights enforcement by the Department of Justice. Due to the Senate filibuster, however, abolition requires 60 votes. Republicans don’t have them. This means the department isn’t going anywhere. Trump’s team can make big strides in reducing the federal footprint, though, by trimming education spending and pruning regulations.
Credit: Contributed
Credit: Contributed
If the Department of Education isn’t disappearing anytime soon, what else should the Trump administration do? Here are a few ideas.
Enforce constitutional protections. Biden’s Office of Civil Rights trampled the plain language of Title IX in service of transgender advocacy and failed to take campus antisemitism seriously. That must change. Federal officials are obliged to ensure that institutions aren’t demeaning racial or ethnic groups (such as in the case of DEI doctrines that caricature “whiteness”) and are abiding by the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2023 decision banning race-conscious admissions. A crucial piece of this is reinvigorating free inquiry in higher education by withholding federal research funding from colleges and universities that allow ideological dogmas to stifle scholarship or silence discourse.
Fix the federal student loan program. Indeed, after former President Joe Biden’s illegal efforts to “cancel” loans, it’s not obvious that it’s still correct to describe it as a “lending” program. Rather, it’s now a program where many collegegoers borrow taxpayer funds, promise to pay the money back, and then don’t. The program needs to be downsized and restored to working order. House Republicans have developed the College Cost Reduction Act, which promises some basic accountability for colleges that pocket taxpayer-funded loans. That’s a great start.
Tackle higher education’s inflated costs and mediocre performance. A good place to start is the accreditation system that protects a cozy status quo by impeding entry and mostly ignoring outcomes. This makes it tough for new colleges to get started and insulates bloated, low-performing institutions from competition. It’s time to encourage the creation of new accreditors more focused on cutting costs and boosting results. This can be done by state and federal officials operating within current law.
Help Americans more readily access the training they need to pursue rewarding, remunerative jobs. Trump’s team should overhaul federal rules governing apprenticeships, make it possible to use Pell Grants at more providers (such as trade schools), and champion “skills-based” hiring, which emphasizes skills rather than credentials. Trump started on all this in his first term; it’s time to build on that work.
Expand school choice without expanding Washington’s education footprint. Trump can deliver the big win on choice that eluded him in his first term. This year’s reconciliation bill offers a chance for Republicans to include a tax credit based on the Educational Choice for Children Act, providing a substantial tax break to those who give to independent, state-based scholarship funds. This is a potentially historic opportunity to expand educational choice without involving federal officials in the design or oversight of choice programs.
This to-do list has more to do with higher education than K-12 schooling. That’s not an accident. Washington doesn’t (and shouldn’t) have a large role in K-12, where it contributes just 10 cents on the dollar and its directives tend to morph into burdensome bureaucracy as they filter down to schools. On K-12, the most useful thing Trump could do would be to address the runaway regulations that slow state leaders and produce piles of paperwork that exhaust educators.
If the Trump administration just targets dumb regulations, enforces the law, confronts our education challenges and insists that colleges behave responsibly, that would be a good four years. And a promising shift from the past four.
Frederick M. Hess is director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute.
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