The Washington Examiner offers a “road map” for the new Trump administration’s approach to fixing problems with federal education policy.
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.
