Are Big Changes in Store for Education After Trump Victory?

The November 5th elections are expected to have an impact on almost every aspect of government and public policy, including education. In this episode, hosts Pedro Noguera and Louis Freedberg take a deeper dive into what promises  President-elect Trump and the GOP have made regarding both pre K through 12 education and post secondary education. 

Our guests are conservative scholar and analyst Frederick Hess, director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, and co-author with Noguera of  “A Search for Common Ground:  Conversations about the Toughest Questions in K-12 Education.” and higher education expert Steven Brint, Professor of Sociology and Public Policy at the University of California at Riverside, author of “Trump and His Allies Are Preparing to Overhaul Higher Education.”  Our guests suggest that the federal impact on education is likely to be far more significant than many have anticipated.

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Brought to you by the Advancing Education Success Initiative -- Coby McDonald, Producer; Louis Freedberg, Executive Producer and Correspondent

Transcript

After Nov. 5, What Next for Education?

Hosts:  Pedro Noguera, Louis Freedberg

Guests:  Steven Brint, professor of public policy, UC Merced,  Frederick Hess, director of Education Policy Studies, American Enterprise Institute.

Pedro Noguera:

Welcome to Sparking Equity. I'm Pedro Noguera, Dean of the Rossier School of Education at USC,

Louis Freedberg:

And I'm Louis Freedberg, interim CEO of EdSource and executive producer of this podcast. Before we start, we wanted to thank our sponsors, the Hewlett Foundation and School Services of California. Without who support this podcast would not have been possible.

Pedro Noguera:

So the November 5th elections are expected to have an impact on almost every aspect of government and public policy. And this week's podcast, we will take a deeper dive into what promises both President-elect Trump and the GOP have made regarding both pre-K through 12 education and post-secondary education. To that end, we're pleased to welcome two guests. First, Rick Hess, director of Education Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute. I have collaborated with Rick on a range of projects, including our own podcast called Common Ground, and even published a book with Rick called A Search for Common Ground Conversations about the toughest questions in K 12 education, and it's in that spirit. We're having today's conversation. Rick, thanks for being with us. 

Frederick Hess:

Good to be with you.

Louis Freedberg:

We also want to welcome Steven Brint.  He is Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Public Policy at the University of California at Riverside. Steve is focused on higher education for many years. His most recent book is two Cheers for Higher Education. Wonder what happened to the third chair. Maybe Steve will fill us in on that. Six months ago, he wrote a prescient piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education on the potential impact of a Trump presidency on higher education. We've asked him to join us to revisit what he wrote about then, now that we are on the verge of another Trump presidency. Welcome Steve. 

Pedro Noguera:

Rick, the issue that's gotten the most attention so far has been Trump's call for getting rid of the U.S. Department of Education. That's not a new idea, but it sounds like he's serious about making it happen. What are your thoughts about this and is it a good thing, a bad thing? Where you think they might run into some difficulty?

Frederick Hess:

I mean, I think it'd be just fine but it's not going to happen. You need 60 votes to dismantle a department. Even if Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins were up for voting dismantle the department, which is no sure thing, I don't know where they would get one Democrat, much less seven Democratic senators to go along. So you're not going to get a statutory vote to dismantle the department, but there's still a great deal that can be done to substantially overhaul the federal footprint via reconciliation or executive authority.

Pedro Noguera:

There are a lot of red states, red communities across the country that benefit from the policies and the programs. I'm thinking about Pell Grants that go to all kinds of students as well as Title 1 and other protections. Wouldn't that be part of the opposition too -- that you have a lot of Republicans that benefit from the U.S. Department of Education?

Frederick Hess:

Dismantling the department doesn't actually have any obvious budgetary impact. You could dismantle the department and that would not necessarily affect one dollar of IDEA special education or Title I funding or Pell grants. Those would require different votes. The famous illustration on this was in 2012.  Rep. Michelle Bachman was on the stage thundering about the need to abolish the Department of Education when she was, I think, momentarily leading the pack. And then she flew back to DC and the next day voted against any cuts to special education. So these are actually two different conversations -- what's going to happen to spending levels versus what's going to happen to the department.  And you are absolutely right that when you think about special education spending, Title 1 spending, Pell Grants, the support for these outlays tends to be deeply bipartisan.

Louis Freedberg:

But I did want to ask Steve Brint about the impact on higher education should they actually close the Department of Education? Because one of the things the department does is handle student loans and everybody's like, oh, well what's going to happen to these loans? Steve, any thoughts on that piece of it?

Steve Brint:

Well, I assume that if they did close the department, and I agree with Rick, that seems very unlikely that that could happen. But if they did, I presume that there would be some other agency of government that would take over that function. The function's not going to go away, so it would go to Labor or some other federal agency.

Frederick Hess:

Treasury, most likely is what folks tend to expect

Steve Brint:

One agency or another. So the kinds of things that federal government does in terms of student loans and Pell Grants, unless there was other legislation would continue, they just continue under a different authority.

Louis Freedberg:

There is one other sub-department in the Department of Education, which is the Office of Civil Rights, which has been a contentious one.  There are concerns that that office would be abolished and what would happen around civil rights and education in the current climate.

Frederick Hess:

No, no, I think it will be very far from abolished. I think there is going to be unbelievably aggressive civil rights enforcement, but for the first time in the history of the department we are going to see a Republican administration aggressively and unapologetically embracing the full discretion of executive authority. So if you think back, for instance, to what Catherine Lhamon did with investigations and then with Dear Colleague letters, guidance on say, Title IX and campus sexual assault. 

Louis Freedberg:

She was the Assistant Secretary of Civil Rights in the Dept. of Education in the Obama and Biden administrations.

Frederick Hess:

I think there's a very high likelihood that a Trump Office of Civil Rights is going to go very aggressively after colleges and schools, which it has deemed to be insufficiently serious about protecting the rights of Jewish students under Title vi. In terms of hostile learning environments in the wake of last October, I think you will expect it to take a very hard look at instructional materials and instruction which engage in gross stereotypes based on race or ethnicity, deeming those to be in violation of the Civil Rights Act and the Equal Protection Clause. And for higher ed, that could mean institutions are no longer eligible for federal grants. It could put their federal research funding at risk, their eligibility (for student loans) at risk. There's a lot of questions about whether colleges are actually honoring the Supreme Court's ruling on affirmative action. I think you will see public record requests and investigations of institutions which are suspected of trying to sidestep the Supreme Court ruling. So, I don't think the OCR is going anywhere. I think what folks are going to be a little shocked by is for the first time they're going to see a Republican administration using OCR the same way that the Obama or Biden administrations did

Louis Freedberg:

OCR being Office of Civil Rights. So Steve Brint, a lot of this would affect higher education, right?

Steve Brint:

Yes, I agree with Rick that it's likely to take a different tack than it has before. And if you look at the Supreme Court's decision on affirmative action and their interpretation of the 14th Amendment protection of white students is going to be a priority for the Trump administration. Any programs that seems to suggest that whites are responsible for systemic racism or anything of that nature is likely to come under the scrutiny. It's a different day, so to speak, in, in government. And the direction of OCR is going to change dramatically.

Pedro Noguera:

I would imagine that if they target a college or colleges, there'll be pushback and they'll get tied up in courts. And as we all know, that could take a while to get resolved. Do you think that would be what happens or, or there would be a fast resolution?

Frederick Hess:

Folks in the education space are going to be furious about this, but what they need to understand is what's likely to be happening is nothing that hasn't been done. UCLA for instance, had a situation last spring where Jewish students were barred from the campus quad by protestors for weeks. The campus stood idly by allowing this to occur. This seems like a cut and dried violation of Title VI. These institutions promised to the federal government as a condition of being eligible for federal grants, for Pell, for research fundings that they will uphold these protections. What'll happen is in all likelihood, is that a Trump Office of Civil Rights would go in, they would start to investigate. So where they think they have evidence of clear violations, that would then give a Trump administration clear ground to reach out and say, here's what it means to uphold the Supreme Court language and what equal protection means. Here's what it means to enforce protections for all students..

Steve Brint:

Well, I would suspect that the states will try to sue if, for example, financial aid funds are stripped or research funds are cut.  I don't know that they'll be successful.  I also think that it will only take one or two of these cases before you'll see widespread compliance because this is a huge lever that the federal government has, this financial lever, both in terms of financial aid, which is twice as much as research funding. I think it's about$111 billion in financial aid and about half of that for research funding. Universities are absolutely dependent on that money. They can't survive without that money. So the lever is extremely serious and one guess is that compliance will follow shortly after the first or second case goes forward, if one does go forward.

Pedro Noguera:

Can I bring up an issue around race and the way race is playing out in this? As you know, the federal government requires school districts report student attainment data on the basis of race. We've been doing that in health and in other areas as well, which exposes disparities when you do that. But they've also, the courts have ruled said you can't use race as a way of concocting remedies. How would you expect this will play out with respect to the Department of Education.

Frederick Hess:

Folks like Steven Miller, who's going to be deputy chief of staff for policy and was the point person on hard-edged immigration enforcement as a wunderkind in the first Trump White House. Folks like Miller have made it very clear that this whole Biden equity/DEI apparatus that they have sought to promote in the federal government, or to use race-based differentiation in an active way, they will do their very best to dig it out and roll it back. That will have a lot of implications. I think that's obviously going out the door. 

What's useful for people to keep in mind is that most of our simple kind of racial caricatures that we've grown used in the education debate simply did not play out in this national election. The only major demographic group that Trump lost voter support with was white voters. He was about a point down from 2020. Trump ran the best with the African American vote since any Republican in a half century, he ran the best with the Latino vote of any Republican in exit survey history. So partly the Trump administration feels like it is on politically solid ground and on the moral high ground. And I certainly agree in trying to move away from an undue emphasis on race identity as a foundational pillar. Whether folks agree or not, that that's what they should expect for the next four years.

Steve Brint:

I would be very surprised if this kind of demographic reporting goes away. I think it's not absolutely unprecedented in the world to ban reporting of racial ethnic statistics. It's illegal in Germany, for example, to do that because they have had such a vexed history with race and religion. And so I don't expect that. But it's not absolutely outside of the realm of possibility in 10 or 20 years that something like that could happen. Just seems unlikely to me at this time.

Louis Freedberg:

But one of the things that's been talked about for a long time on the Republican side is challenging how the way colleges and universities get accredited. What is that all about?

Steve Brint:

There are several different approaches to accreditation reform that are circulating in Washington. Some in Congress, and in the Trump administration, have ideas. Some of the people who advise Trump, like Chris Rufo, have ideas about this, and they don't all necessarily align. So, for example, Ron DeSantis has said, “you know, we won't accredit you if you do DEI.”  He wants to have his own accreditation in Florida. Something like that could catch on in Congress.  Virginia Fox has focused more on whether students (from a certain college) pay back their loans and are they getting jobs,  and trying to put much more market oriented rules in about accreditation. Trump has floated the idea that there needs to be attention to the, so-called American tradition, which is going to be very difficult for Democrats and Republicans to agree on what that would mean. But he has made that a feature of his accreditation reform proposals.

Frederick Hess:

I think accreditation is absolutely going to be a major source of contention. The rights argument is that higher ed accreditation, especially for four year institutions, operates like a cartel, is just a huge headache. So there's huge concerns about creating barriers to entry. When you look at the major accreditors, among their major pillars is that they often explicitly embrace DEI. So on the right you find frustrations that institutions, even if they weren't so inclined, feel pressured by the accreditation process to create bureaucracies and embrace the tenets of DEI. What the accreditors as they stand don't focus on are things like outcomes. So there's an argument that what you want is a much more robust and dynamic accreditation sector with accreditors who have particular missions and which create opportunities for new entry. 

This is actually going to be one of those places where state attorneys general are going to get in the game. What the Trump folks in all likelihood are going to try to do is take executive authority and say it's well within their bounds to throw out the existing accreditation framework and create a new framework which is going to push out some of the old guys, and create opportunities for new entrants. It's very possible the Democratic State Attorneys-Generals will try to sue. And what will be a question is if they can get standing. This was a continuing source of drama, if you recall, from the student loan lawsuits. And if they have standing, then it will be a question of whether or not that kind of executive discretion exists under the current language of the Higher Education Act, or as Steve mentions, whether you would actually need to reauthorize the law. There are deals to be struck on Capitol Hill, on higher ed accountability and federal policy. You could potentially imagine a bipartisan deal getting done in which accreditation is one piece of it. But if they can't do it through executive authority, it becomes much less likely that it's actually going to happen.

Pedro Noguera:

We talk about race and let's talk about gender and transgendered students and how this might play out in the new administration. Title IX is one of those provisions that comes under the US Department of Ed and women's sports very popular, but it's had a big impact on campuses in terms of athletics and equity in access for women and men. And now recently the transgender participation. What do you expect might come up here on those two fronts?

Steve Brint:

You know, it's obviously a hot button political issue and the Republicans clearly made a lot of gains from highlighting that issue because it's something that the public at large feels very differently about than many academics do. There's a desire to be as inclusive as possible in academia, but the public doesn't seem to want to encourage transgender surgeries or anything like that. And so you have the potential here for a conflict between liberal academia and the more conservative public.

Louis Freedberg:

Rick, you were nodding your head, or

Frederick Hess:

Obviously the Trump department is going to issue a statement that allowing biological males into women's sports and high school or college is a gross violation of Title ix. That creates a hostile environment. That this is going to be true of dormitories single sex dormitories and rooms. It'll be true of showers and locker rooms. It'll be true of sports. Presumably this will be adjudicated. We'll see how the courts sort it out. It'll partly be a question of how do you interpret the existing language of sex and what does that mean when you are trying to stretch this to include gender? Folks should be aware that this is precisely what the Biden folks did and the Obama folks before them. They try to take existing statutory language and they read it in the way that they thought was right.

Frederick Hess:

Elections have consequences, it's now going to go the other direction. And one of the things is that the polling on this suggests, as Steve mentioned, this is not a close issue. In academe there is a lot of support for the kind of the impositions implied by a gender based culture. Everybody uses pronouns and 19,000 plus public schools have formal policies where if the child requests it, they will hide the child's at school gender identity from parents. The larger public thinks parents ought to know how the child is identified at school. The larger public does not think it's a good idea to have biological males playing in women's sports in high school or college. So we'll see how this shakes out.

Louis Freedberg:

One of the things that strikes me about this conversation, talking about t\ the extensive impact that a second Trump administration could have. I mean, Trump was in power for four years before and he was in charge of the Department of Education. And at that time, I think the perception was, the reality was it didn't have much impact. Why is this term going to be so different?

Frederick Hess:

Because, number one, conservatives have learned from what they feel like the Trump administration got wrong in 2016, and, two, that you've seen a fundamental shift in the center of gravity in the Republican Party.  For all of the unbelievable unfair attacks and grief that Betsy DeVos got people completely lost sight of the fact that she was very much a traditional Reagan-Romney, conservative. Betsy believed in dotting i's and crossing t's. She was very aware of not expanding the federal footprint. She was hugely deferential to Congress. And for all of that, what Republicans saw was her getting vilified and they saw the Biden department come in and day one show none of that same kind of humility or measurement. 

So what's happened since 2016, when Trump was an outsider to the Republican Party, in 2024, the party that has been very much “Trumpified.”  What you are going to see are conservatives going in with a mindset that we're going to use the department the same way.  I could be wrong, but I suspect I'm right. They're going to use the department the same way Obama and Biden's folks did, which is a profound shift from 2016. And then the other thing is that between the school closure fights, the masking, the CRT, DEI, transgender fights, what has grown up in the last five years is a network of organizations and advocacy groups on the right that have developed a pipeline of staff and a series of playbooks that were literally nowhere in evidence when the Trump transition was getting plotted at in 2016. So when you talk to the Trump transition today versus when Gerard and Bill Evers were running the Trump education transition in 2016, it is like going from horse and buggy to the post-industrial age. It is just a fundamentally different world. And I think a lot of folks in higher ed are going to be quite surprised by that shift.

Steve Brint:

I have a slightly different interpretation. I think that Republicans have been very good at identifying weak spots in terms of where the public will disagree with things that are happening in the academy. And they're very good at elevating anecdotes for dramatic effect. They won't credit all of the good things that are going on in colleges and universities and in K 12 classrooms for that matter, our leaders in academia have been not very good at making the counter case politicians are just really well skilled at elevating anecdotes and then using those dramatic anecdotes to have a much broader policy portfolio come into play. And as Rick said, there is this whole organizational ecology in the second Trump administration to follow through and to develop game plans and the contacts with the relevant parties to make these policy changes happen. So I see it as a kind of a political machine that is able to find the weak spots or the perceived weak spots and then capitalize on them. And I'm not dismissing the fact that there are weak spots. I mean, there are, but it's very unbalanced from my point of view.

Frederick Hess:

You're suggesting that the Republicans are more of a political machine and more focused on anecdote than the Democrats were in the Obama or Biden years in education?

Steve Brint:

I haven't done as much of a study of the Democrats. I'm prepared to believe that Democrats operate the same way.

Frederick Hess:

OK. That's, that's all I would say.

Pedro Noguera:

So let me just point out something that might get in the way of this well, oil machine that you're predicting is going to show up Rick, and that's the unknown. We could have a mass shooting on a college campus. We could have some other incident that will, like a war that will take precedent over this agenda and suddenly become the priority to address including DACA.  You know, the fact that there are many undocumented students now who are at American universities and colleges, and if DACA is eliminated, which I imagine they're going to go after, then how will that play out on college campuses?

Frederick Hess:

The immigration stuff and immigration enforcement's going to be a huge issue. And you know, one of the things we've seen about American politics the last eight years is the best thing for the left was the first Trump presidency, and the best thing for the right was the Biden presidency. So it's very easy to see,  Trump sending ICE to campus and triggering enormous pushback and sympathy for the folks in higher ed. One thing I would say Pedro, though, is if we are talking about passing legislation, and trying to figure out how do you get the votes to abolish the department or how to pass a voucher bill, I would totally agree about the impact of those unexpected events. Most of what we're talking about is going to happen underneath the radar of the regular world. It'll be big in education and it's going to happen whatever else is going on in the world because it's not like international affairs or economic dislocation. 

Another big thing that's likely to happen, for instance, is President Trump and the Republican Congress are likely to pass the biggest federal voucher bill in history, but nobody will notice it because what they'll do is they're just going to do it as an amendment to next year's big tax bill. Remember the 2017 tax bill is up for reauthorization.  You can do a $5 billion tax credit for tax scholarships, tack it on. In the scheme of things, it’ss a tiny bill, so it won't get a lot of attention in the regular world. But in our space, it will be by far and away the biggest federal school choice program ever enacted.

If I can just make a plea to your listeners, you have to make sure over the next four years you make sure you talk at least occasionally to a Republican, to make an effort to actually hear what conservatives are saying, not what a UC Berkeley professor tells you conservatives are saying. Pedro and I have benefited enormously from our conversations over the last five years. And I just think it's a healthy discipline for everybody.

Pedro Noguera:

But we need to get some more reasonable conservatives out there, Rick, so we can have a conversation.

Frederick Hess:

I would say if our campuses were filled with more reasonable progressives than we'd be well on the way.

Pedro Noguera:

We've been talking to Steve Brint, professor of Sociology and Public Policy at UC Riverside, and Rick Hess, director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. I want to thank you both for your time and for raising these important issues that can affect the country. So thank you both. 

Steve Brint:

Thank you for an interesting conversation.

Frederick Hess:

Good to be with all of you.

Louis Freedberg:

And I should note that we recorded this episode just a day before Donald Trump nominated Linda McMahon to be his next Secretary of Education. She's the former CEO of the World Wrestling Enterprise and co-chair of his transition team. We also appreciate the support from the Hewlett Foundation and School Services of California sponsors of this week's episode. Thanks also to our producer Coby McDonald and sound recordist Emile Klein. Please be sure to sign up wherever you listen to your podcast for the next episode of Sparking Equity.

Pedro Noguera:

I'm Pedro Noguera.

Louis Freedberg:

And I'm Louis Freedberg

Pedro Noguera:

Thanks for listening.