The last several weeks have seen a flurry of actions from the Trump administration on education, including the cancellation of contracts and grants, the reduction in force at the Department of Education, and most recently, the executive order to eliminate the department.
While many Trump supporters may be cheering his actions to cut spending, “end DEI,” and “eliminate bureaucratic bloat,” so far we have not seen major action what is arguably the largest education crisis in a generation: the massive learning loss sustained during Covid that has not yet, even five years after the onset of the pandemic, been fully made up. As the latest NAEP results showed, fourth and eighth grade math and reading scores are still below their pre-pandemic levels.
Others in the political realm are starting to take note. A few weeks ago, Politico reported on Rahm Emanuel’s apparent gearing up for a presidential run, quoting his talk at a conference hosted by liberal legal organization Democracy Forward:
“I am done with the discussion of locker rooms, I am done with the discussion of bathrooms and we better start having a conversation about the classroom,” Emanuel said, drawing applause as he alluded to a new study showing more than two-thirds of eighth graders can’t read at grade level.
As we have stressed in this newsletter before, “culture war” issues like DEI or “wokeness” do have standing, and likely did play a role in the 2024 Republican victories. But when we asked voters in our 2024 election survey whether dealing with learning loss and boosting student achievement or dealing with “culture war” issues should be the priority in education policy, voters said boosting achievement by a margin of over 2.5:1 (66-25), a view that was consistent across the political spectrum, from conservative Republicans (65-28) to moderate Democrats (67-24) and liberal Democrats (62-29). Clearly, the focus of the electorate was student outcomes. Both parties should note that slightly more than seven out of ten independents were focused on student outcomes.1
Student outcomes was also the theme of former Education Secretary and Bipartisan Policy Center President Margaret Spellings’ interview with Politico out yesterday, in which she clarified what should be the focus of the education debate:
We’ve got to keep the main thing the main thing. This is the main thing: Student achievement, not what agency is going to do this or that.
As for the current administration, it is clear that the push to end DEI and dramatically downsize the federal government will continue. But even if the administration reaches its full goals on both fronts, the question will remain: what will the administration have done to improve student outcomes?
- Note: Numbers may differ slightly from previously reported results due to updates in the weighting. ↩︎
