Trump Will Bring The School Culture Wars To Every State

Donald Trump promised over the course of his campaign to abolish the Department of Education. It’s been a pet policy goal of the right ever since the agency was created in 1980 under former President Jimmy Carter and is spelled out in Project 2025, the conservative playbook that Trump will probably use once he is back in the White House.

But Trump doesn’t need to shut down the department in order to launch an all-out war on public schools.

He outlined his plan for education in a video last year, saying that not only will he close down the agency, he will bring back prayer in schools, end the supposed indoctrination of students and take politics out of schools.

“We will ensure our classrooms are focused not on political indoctrination but on teaching the knowledge and skills needed to succeed,” Trump said, adding, “We will teach students to love their country, not to hate their country like they’re taught right now.”

It’s the same agenda that right-wing culture warriors have been pushing in red states for the last four years — and Trump wants to spread it across the country.

“This renewed push to go after the Department of Education isn’t so much a sincere push for smaller government or even reducing the federal role,” Jon Valant, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution, told HuffPost. “It’s more about this continued attack on public education as a concept and eroding support for public schools in general.”

The Department of Education’s primary functions are providing funding for programs that serve low-income public schools and children with disabilities and protecting students from discrimination. If Trump were able to abolish it, it would spell disaster for the entire country. But public education has increasingly become politicized, and support for public schools, especially among Republicans, is now at an all-time low.

The upcoming Trump administration will likely seize on that sentiment to further attack public schools through rolling back Biden-era rules designed to make them safe and equitable for all students, supporting the expansion of programs that take away funding from public schools and promoting laws that restrict books and censor teachers.

“One of their first moves would be pulling back Title IX protections for LGBTQ+ students,” Valant said. Title IX is the federal regulation that protects students from sex-based discrimination. The Biden administration expanded it to include protections for students in the LGBTQ+ community. Republicans have fought against the change from the beginning, and several GOP-led states sued to block the rule.

An overwhelming majority of transgender students have reported feeling unsafe or unwelcome at school.

Then there’s the Office for Civil Rights. This arm of the Department of Education allows students, parents and families to sue their school districts over civil rights violations. Often, the department works with both sides to seek a resolution because it’s a low-risk way of settling civil rights violations. But Project 2025 proposes gutting the office and only allowing lawsuits to go through the courts, thus eliminating an avenue for addressing discrimination in our nation’s schools.

Parental rights have been at the forefront of the conservative agenda for years, and the approaching Trump administration has already signaled that it will follow suit. The term is broad, but Republicans have been using it to pass laws and measures that restrict books and censor teachers.

“There is broad support among the Republican Party for some form of parental rights bill and there’s some shared understanding of what that should mean,” Valant said.

Multiple states have already passed their own versions of parental rights bills, like in Iowa and Tennessee. These laws often ban books that conservatives believe are sexually explicit but usually target books with LGBTQ+ themes. Teachers are typically restricted in what they can say about gender identity and sexual orientation and are required to inform parents if their child wants to go by another name or pronouns at school — even against the student’s wishes.

Abolishing the Department of Education would also mean getting rid of Title I funding, the program that supports low-income schools across the country. But since red states disproportionately rely on these funds, the Trump administration would face fierce opposition from both parties to any rollbacks of Title I. Instead, Republicans will likely focus on school voucher programs.

These programs, which are often expensive and operate with little oversight, give parents the opportunity to send their children to alternative schools like religious ones with public funding.

“I think they will try a federal school choice program,” Valant said. And if there’s a new tax bill, he noted that “Republicans might build in some tax credits that would essentially function almost as a school voucher program as a way of getting public funds to private schools.”

But diverting funds from public schools can wreak havoc on the students who are left behind and on the state’s resources. In Arizona, the state is facing a $1.4 billion shortfall. And after North Carolina expanded its voucher program, the number of students who were already enrolled in private schools getting taxpayer funding to subsidize tuition exploded.

“These big universal voucher programs are dramatically restructuring how schools are run in some states and creating threats for public education systems that we haven’t had at any time in the recent past,” Valant said.

The Department of Education doesn’t need to be abolished in order for Trump to damage public education. It’s unlikely that he’ll succeed in abolishing it, but there’s a reason he made it a priority on the campaign trail. As his base grows increasingly against public schools, chipping away at them has become a way to shore up support.

“It’s just a way of going after public schools, and it’s not just a symbolic battle that just scores political points, but it has real consequences,” Valant said.