Is Education Policy Losing Meaning, Focus Post 2024?
A week after the presidential election of 2024, we’ve read and listened to a significant number of words seeking to diagnose what happened and to ascribe blame for why Kamala Harris lost a race everyone believed to be a gimmee.
Joe Biden, and his reluctance to get out of the race sooner, has been the prime target. White women who betrayed the sisterhood, like they did in 2016, are also targets. Same too are Latino men and Black men. And let’s not forget the “garbage” voters who simply didn’t understand what was at stake and didn’t accept the growing list of shortcomings and offenses posted by the now president-elect.
But if we really want to understand why the 2024 election turned out the way it did, we need to understand both who voted red and why. We need to explore the issues that were important to those voters. We need to appreciate what was more important to them than defending democracy or a campaign of joy.
In an attempt to begin to explain to all those voters who had no doubts that Harris would be elected president and a blue wave would be coming to Washington, DC, over the weekend The Washington Post (yes, the same newspaper that refused to endorse a candidate last month), published a series of explainers on where Donald Trump stands on a number of policy issues.
One only needs to look at these summaries, particularly the “where he stands on education” to understand why half the country is in a sense of mourning over the election results and cannot understand how the vote turned out as it did, despite what legacy media had been saying for weeks now.
Ask any parent or local leader their thoughts on education, and a number of issues likely come up. Student achievement. Graduation rates. Overcoming the COVID lag. Workforce preparation. Social and emotional learning. The science of reading and improving literacy rates. Civic education and engagement. Even the tried and true STEM (science-technology-engineering-mathematics) education.
The Washington Post, though, saw a different set of issues that define Trump’s campaign platform and that will influence how public education is supported come next January. WaPo offered five issues, in the form of questions, leading the Trump education agenda.
· Should the government take any actions to relieve student debt?
· At what age is it appropriate to teach students about sexuality and gender?
· Should students be permitted to use bathrooms and play on sports teams that match their gender identity?
· Should teachers and administrators forfeit their jobs or licenses for teaching about systemic racism?
· Should states be allowed to ban puberty blockers and hormone therapy for transgender kids?
No mention of the value of postsecondary education. No mention of academic performance. No mention of testing, high stakes or otherwise. No mention of post-COVID learning issues. No mention of school choice even, long a top education issue for conservatives.
Instead of exploring how we can make college more affordable for those currently in college or those who may soon pursue postsecondary education, we are focused on debt relief for those long out of college, even after the courts have struck down most versions of federal debt forgiveness.
Instead of digging into how we boost reading, math, science, and history education performance, our sole area of instructional inquiry is when we teach about sexuality and gender.
Instead of discussing teacher tenure and proper salaries for successful educators, we are looking at whether teachers should be fired and stripped of their licenses for teaching critical race theory.
And instead of continuing the Democratic campaign lines that boys on girls athletic teams isn’t a real issue in our communities, we are now leaning into those same bathroom, sports teams, and hormone therapy issues.
It’s no wonder that the 75 million Americans who cast their ballots for Donald J. Trump feel that the Democratic party and the ruling class in Washington, DC just don’t understand them and the issues that are important to them.
For those voters, Washington demonstrated that it wasn’t listening to their concerns. It offered obtuse messages about defending democracy. It assured those voters that the economy has never been stronger, at a time when those same families struggle to pay their power bill or for a full cart of groceries. It assured voters that this would be an election decided solely on reproductive rights. And it resorted to lecturing voters that if they were women, men, Black men, Latino men, women without college degrees, that they were betraying their positionality by not voting for Harris.
Once all of the votes have been counted, it is essential to dissect the data and truly understand the issues that drove election turnout in 2024. Clearly, the constant reminders of Trump’s legal and ethical challenges were not the spark that so many believed them to be. Clearly, the $1 billion spent by the Harris-Walz campaign was not directed at the issues that would drive voters to the polls (as evidenced by the decline in Democratic votes compared to 2020) or that would have them choose blue over red. And clearly, lecturing and telling voters you know better than them about what is best for them is not a winning strategy.
Yes, education is but a small issue that is rarely a driver when it comes to national politics and candidate votes. But so many of the social issues advanced by those who voted for Trump have now been identified by WaPo and others as how we now define education. CRT and gender identity now trump reading and math. And consider that the Democratic concerns with book banning didn’t even make the Post’s short list of top education issues in the Trump administration.
Instead of telling people what we think should be most important to them when it comes to education, perhaps we should take the time to listen to parents about what is most important to them. If not, we will continue to have individuals who insist the Latino population use a term like LatinX, despite it being ridiculed within the Latino community. If not, we will continue to think positionality and identity are more important to families than teaching and learning. And if not, we will continue to see more and more families not trusting the system when it comes to educating their kids and preparing them for successful futures.
