What the presidential candidates haven’t said about K-12 education
How the Next Administration and Congress Can Expand Equal Opportunity in 2025
Neither candidate was asked a question about education in Tuesday’s presidential debate. And while both candidates have provided few details about their respective education agendas, they are offering very different visions. Former President Trump has called for closing the Department of Education, universal school choice, and strengthening parental rights. Vice President Harris has issued few policy recommendations focused on K-12 education. But the Biden administration has focused on increasing funding for the K-12 public education sector, including $130 billion in new funding provided through the American Rescue Plan. The DNC platform includes familiar calls for special education funding and strongly opposing private school choice.
But what neither candidate will likely admit is that neither of their visions for K-12 education will be implemented after November.
What the candidates won’t admit about K-12 education
The Department of Education will not be abolished. The federal government is in no position to provide significant funding increases for K-12 schools, since Washington will spend more on interest payments than the national defense budget this year. Even if it were, there’s little reason to believe that more federal funding will reduce education inequality since public schools serving low-income students now actually spend more than low-poverty school districts. With less than 11 percent of revenues coming from the federal government, there’s only so much that the next president or Congress can do to change K-12 education, and that’s a feature not a bug of our system of government.
A realistic K-12 reform plan for the next White House and Congress
But that doesn’t mean that the president and Congress shouldn’t be pursuing serious reforms to the federal government’s education laws and programs to address the nation’s longstanding, bipartisan goal to promote equal opportunity in K-12 education.
This week, FREOPP published our new report—Reforming Federal K-12 Education Programs to Expand Equal Opportunity—which provides recommendations for executive and Congressional action for 2025 to expand equal opportunity in K-12 education. Here are some of the report’s recommendations.
Executive actions to expand school choice and improve transparency
Reform federal programs with statutory flexibility to expand parental choice
Following the historic progress of parental choice across the country, the White House could use existing statutory authority to grant flexibility to enable parental choice, as the Trump administration proposed in December 2020, starting with the Community Services Block Grant program.
Improve transparency about public school spending and performance
The Department of Education and the Institute of Education Sciences already collect and publish information about K-12 education, a federal role that dates back to the 1860s. In 2025, this federal statistical work could evolve to include collecting and publishing information in federally-mandated school report cards to improve transparency about students’ academic performance and to inform the public exactly how much all of the nation’s public schools are spending. This would help in two ways. States’ school report cards are opaque and hard to use–denying parents the opportunity to use this information to choose their children’s schools. Second, the public grossly underestimates what public schools spend per-student (guessing $5,000 when schools on average spend more than three times that amount)
Reverse the Biden administration’s restrictive charter school regulations
Yes, this one might be a bit awkward for a potential Harris administration to take on. But the next administration should surely reverse the Department of Education’s burdensome charter school regulations that are making it harder for innovative public schools to provide high-quality options. A recent national evaluation conducted by Stanford University researchers found that children attending public charter schools received the equivalent of 16 additional days of learning than their peers in traditional public schools.
Issue policy guidance to leverage existing tax benefits to expand education options
For example, the Federal Employer-Provided Child Care Credit was created to encourage employers to expand the availability of affordable child care for their employees. The Treasury Department could issue guidance clarifying that employers using this credit could also provide educational instruction at child care facilities, which could help establish new microschools that provide both child care and educational services to children.
Congress should pursue reforms to major K-12 education laws
The new report also describes actions that Congress could take, including considering legislation to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) and the Individuals with Disabilities with Education Act or IDEA (which was last reauthorized in 2004). While past legislative efforts to encourage state flexibility and portability have had limited success, that was before the growing momentum across the nation to expand parental choice in education in recent years. In addition Congress could consider tax reforms to expand parental choice and expand access to education savings accounts during the upcoming 2025 tax reform debate. Just this week, the House Ways and Means Committee approved the Education Choice for Children Act, which would make $10 billion in tax credits available to taxpayers who contribute to organizations that award scholarships for private school tuition and tutoring.
What’s Ahead and the Freedom and Progress Conference in November
Please mark your calendars for FREOPP’s annual Freedom & Progress conference in Washington, D.C., on November 17-19. (Check out the details here.) Last year, FREOPP honored former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and former Arizona Governor Doug Ducey for their leadership in expanding parental choice in education.
And keep your eye on the FREOPP website for more federal policy recommendations for 2025 and beyond in the coming weeks. While FREOPP’s scholars will be covering a broad range of issues in these new papers, I’ll be publishing my recommendations for preschool and child care as well as foster care. Stay tuned.
FREOPP’s work is made possible by people like you, who share our belief that equal opportunity is central to the American Dream. Please join them by making a donation today.
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