How Trump Can Reform American Education By Jordan Adams
https://tomklingenstein.com/how-trump-can-reform-american-education/
President Trump has a crack team this time around. The president has come out swinging on parental rights, protecting girls in schools and sports, and stomping out CRT, DEI, and the rest of the insane woke agenda.
With the White House’s statements on the disastrous new National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scores, President Trump has even shocked and received heavily caveated approval from many in the education punditry class, an almost exclusively left-of-center crowd. On top it all, Trump publicly directed Linda McMahon, his Secretary of Education, to prepare for the controlled demolition and hollowing-out of the Department of Education, whose workforce has now been reduced by roughly half.
Yes, we’re off to a great start. But there be dragons.
New to the Party
Republicans have long neglected education, partly because the teacher’s union arm of the Democratic Party controlled the space, but often because conservatives simply were not interested. Education was “boring” compared to fighting communism and bombing third-world peasants; curriculum reform didn’t get you invited to Wall Street soirees. After all, Jeb Bush — who admittedly did a tremendous amount to reform education in Florida — was the face of conservative education policy, and we know what Trump did to Jeb. School choice was about as daring as Republicans would get on the issue, and even that was tepid. Many still viewed local schools as a quaint bit of Americana, a trustworthy and decidedly small-c conservative system. The Left traded on that goodwill and trust for decades, quietly pushing their garbage down from on high, even as achievement eroded.
Then came the lockdowns, the remote schooling, the wokeness, and the National School Board Association collusion with the Biden administration to blacklist concerned parents as terrorists.
Conservatives woke up. DeSantis made education a priority. Youngkin was handed an election victory after Terry McAuliffe’s own-goal attacking parents in the race’s eleventh hour. Democrats didn’t even pretend school served any purpose besides money laundering and social engineering. Four years later, Republicans — for maybe the first time ever — were more trusted on education than Democrats heading into the 2024 election. And Trump won a historic mandate.
This is all to say, being in the driver’s seat on education reform is new for Republicans, and of all Republicans Trump is the newest to the subject. And that’s the linchpin.
What Failure Looks Like
Between the greenness of the party and the even greener Trump, there is a strong temptation to resort to the standard Republican position of rejecting crazy things, expanding school choice, and moving decision making out of D.C. These are all necessary moves, but they’re not sufficient.
Trump will fail on education if he decides to go small, falling back on establishment GOP positions. What he needs is what he is best at providing: big, bold, positive plans and a substantive vision for ushering in an American renaissance. The American education system is a disaster, and a new Golden Age will be impossible without a robust and compelling vision for the teaching of young Americans and without Donald Trump’s leadership to make that vision a reality. In short, when it comes to education, let Trump be Trump.
Many on the right like to play nice with an overwhelmingly leftist field and wring their hands about how Trump shouldn’t “go too far.” And those on the Left are downright terrified of Trump using his mandate to drive a viable competing vision for education. This bipartisan establishment reaction is the tell.
Why Trump Must Be Different
State departments of education are still the bluest, wokest, most incompetent sectors in every ruby red state in America, to say nothing of purple and blue states. When it comes to implementing conservative education reforms, self-styled education starlets like Iowa and Virginia are underdelivering. Run-of-the-mill red states like Alaska, Idaho, Alabama, West Virginia, and Indiana botched their recent opportunities at meaningful social studies reform. Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Texas are more successful, but even these states are all still stymied by bureaucratic inertia and resistance. They’re still not thinking big enough.
This is to say nothing of local school districts. The local bureaucrats, union bosses, and school board and administrator associations still run the show in almost all of America’s 13,000 school districts. Reform-minded school board members offer the greatest hope here, but they are both inexperienced and outmanned, even as noble efforts are being made to support them in office.
The American education system is largely controlled by a corrupt cartel that hates the American tradition of free self-government and is only good at protecting itself — not reforming, not raising student achievement, not respecting parents as first educators. Turning things over to the states and local districts without further support, without an alternative vision, will do too little too slowly.
Wormwoods will attempt to indulge President Trump’s novice engagement in education with appeals to restraint. He must ignore them and take the screeds from the Left and the pearl-clutching Right about their worst-case scenario as a signal of precisely what to do.
What Success Looks Like
President Trump will save American education the same way he will save America in any other area: by using his bully pulpit. Putting forward a compelling but optional vision for American education that will establish it as the Gold Standard for the world is the key to an American education revolution. President Trump needs full rein to use the grandeur of his office and, more importantly, the momentum of his second term, to reform education in three main ways.
First, President Trump needs to ensure that an education funded by the American constitutional government will cultivate a citizenry that will preserve it in turn. The president should not be shy about providing a model for patriotic education. President Trump has taken impressive first steps in this direction, but more will have to be done.
The administration should craft a set of model learning standards or benchmarks respecting the formation of American citizenship. This can include standards for American history, western civilization, civics and government, and literature, at the very least. His administration can then spotlight curricula and instructional materials that would meet these standards and endorse institutions, programs, and professional development to train teachers in this model.
Second, President Trump should extend this positive vision to student achievement. The education cartel is very good at shapeshifting and rebranding for the latest fad. There’s a very real risk that the cartel will pay lip service to Trump’s efforts while pushing the same junk teaching practices that have gotten us into this mess.
To set apart the effective from the ineffective, the Trump administration should recommend curriculum and educator-training providers that adhere to the best nonpartisan cognitive research on how students learn, as well as time-tested elements from the rapidly expanding classical education movement.
The White House can make clear the math, literacy, and science programs that actually result in successful student learning. They can highlight career-technical education programs that are models for the nation and champion physical education and character programs that reflect Trump’s MAHA vision for a restored American citizenry and soldiery. And the administration can encourage states to decentralize and streamline teacher certification and preparation, allowing a professional chemist, for example, to teach high school chemistry without a formal teacher certificate.
Third, Trump should enter the local education arena. The president is famous for going on offense against gross incompetence.
Identify failing states. Pick on their governors and state superintendents. Catch a local school board story. Rake its superintendent over the coals. Push for the local election of district superintendents. Everybody from governors to state departments of education to local school boards and superintendents: the incompetence and complacency is palpable. They’ve overseen not only the wokeification of American education but also its staggering implosion. They deserve every bit of President Trump’s rather benevolent fury.
And President Trump should pick out and help out winners: state superintendents who are beating the odds like Cade Brumley in Louisiana and Jacob Oliva in Arkansas; schools that are overperforming; school board members who run on back-to-basics, pro-America platforms; district superintendents who are standing up for teachers and students and putting parents first.
These folks need air cover from above. By giving them a vision and endorsing resources for implementing it, President Trump can circumvent the entire bureaucratic monolith and cut out the so-called education experts who oversaw the unprecedented destruction of American education. By weighing in from time to time on state and local education matters, President Trump will give them the personal momentum necessary to carry through these reforms.
President Trump can do it. Despite being new to the field, he can be himself in education. Go big, be bold, make common sense judgment calls, lean on people and evidence that have a track record, whose ideas and experiences have worked, who have been exiled by the leftist-dominated Big Ed Cartel.
President Trump will only usher in a Golden Age if the next generation of citizens are raised with both a love of America and the ability to preserve and defend her. That means making America the Gold Standard for education once again. And this return can only happen if Donald Trump leads the charge himself, with the virtues that have made him such an effective commander-in-chief in other theaters.
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