Some Republicans insist they’ll still prevail, pointing to the GOP’s money advantage or the shaky performance of polling in recent elections. It’s possible; time will tell. But odds favor a good November for the blue team, and I’ve been fielding a lot of queries about what that could mean for education. I figured I’d share a few thoughts.
Expect oversight with a vengeance. Remember how House Republicans put the screws to Hunter Biden and Claudine Gay? You ain’t seen nothing yet. The Trump White House has been flagrant in its norm-breaking and unapologetic about its self-dealing. Democrats are itching to launch investigations and start imposing some accountability-cum-payback.
With so many potential targets for Democratic investigations, the presumptive majority will have to pick and choose what deserves scrutiny. For those who don’t spend a lot of time noodling on such things, The Dispatch’s Kevin Williamson last week offered up a partial accounting of Trump’s second-term “excesses”:
The enrichment of the president and his family and his cronies; the campaign of wanton murder on the high seas; the illegal war against Iran; the illegal war against Venezuela; continued attempts to undermine confidence in our elections and to meddle with their administration; the illegal imposition of a new national system of taxation in the form of unconstitutional tariffs; . . . the attacks on allies undertaken while the president enabled actual literal enemies of the United States of America, including the Vladimir Putin junta in Moscow and the Kim Jong Un cult in North Korea; financial arrangements that run from the shady to the illegal and that stretch from Caracas to Doha.
You’ll notice what’s missing from the list. It’s unlikely much of the recent education turbulence will make the cut. Democratic leadership will want to focus on the things they judge most likely to resonate while avoiding narrative overload. What’s that mean for education? I’d guess that Democrats would take a hard look at DOGE’s cuts to education contracts and staff, the push to dismantle the Department of Education, the legal settlements with elite universities, and the way the administration has approached civil rights enforcement. If the Democrats take both chambers, they’ll have added bandwidth for more such investigations.
While the savvier hands in the Department of Ed have probably been careful about their paper trail, Democrats are likely to surface a treasure trove of incriminating missives from DOGE’s amateurs and Trump’s White House apparatchiks. Fielding oversight requests would become a huge time-suck and distraction for the executive branch. The pace of Trump 2.0’s education efforts would slow markedly.
The DSA isn’t likely to loom large for education. A lot of political conversation this year has focused on the rise of the Democratic Socialists of America. While their numbers will be small in the new Congress, DSA-aligned members will argue that they represent grassroots energy on the left.
Tensions between the DSA and establishment Democrats may loom large for healthcare or our relationship with Israel, but it’s less likely to shape education policy. It’s notable that DSA candidates have embraced hugely expensive measures like Medicare for All, free childcare, and a national rent freeze but have had little to say about schools. Indeed, the DSA platform’s education agenda is limited to universal pre-K, free college, and loan forgiveness. There’ll likely be some noise about Dems exploring a deal to boost early childhood funding, but it’s a good bet that the Democrats’ direction on education will be determined more by the familiar tug-and-pull of unions and centrists than by the priorities of the AOC-Mamdani camp.
Choice will dodge a bullet. The effects of a potential blue wave on Congress are obviously significant, but so are the potential consequences beyond the Beltway. DSA candidates who reject “privatization” and champion government-run healthcare have been oddly quiet about their hostility to school choice. It just hasn’t been a big target for them. Heck, New York City’s democratic socialist mayor hasn’t even really gone after charter schools.
What’s going on? Well, these programs are popular with core Democratic constituencies. Low-income and minority parents with lousy neighborhood schools like having the choice to send their children to better ones, and, in cities like Los Angeles or D.C., many now take choice programs for granted. In Wisconsin and Arizona, Democratic governors have been reluctant to square off against established choice programs. The easier path is to cap, regulate, and quietly stifle them. The Biden administration, for instance, would insist that it wasn’t “anti”-charter school even as it pursued federal funding rules that made it tougher for new charters to open.
