Education in the U.S. is in a state of flux. The pandemic has left students across the country with learning gaps, especially in math and science. Teacher turnover is high, with some areas hit by staffing shortages. Schools are increasingly targeted in mass shootings and effectively segregated by race. Public schools face budget cuts and declining enrollment, while states across the country are allowing taxpayer dollars to fund private education instead.
The two current presidential candidates propose two sharply different paths forward for the U.S. education system. Former president Donald Trump favors what’s known as school choice, or privatization, and increasing government involvement in curriculum. Vice President Kamala Harris supports programs to address inequity across early childhood, K–12 and higher education. Here’s how their policy proposals measure up.
Federal Education Spending
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Trump’s most eye-catching campaign promise has been to eliminate the Department of Education. “We will drain the government education swamp and stop the abuse of your taxpayer dollars to indoctrinate America’s youth with all sorts of things that you don’t want to have our youth hearing,” he said at a September rally in Wisconsin.
Eliminating the agency, which provides around 11 percent of public school funding nationwide, would require an act of Congress. Even if this were to happen, the Trump campaign has not clarified what it proposes to do with the Department’s two biggest programs—Title I and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA)—which collectively provide some $34 billion in funding to educate students from low-income families and those with disabilities, respectively. But Project 2025, a recently published conservative policy agenda that has many connections to Trump but is not formally associated with his campaign, proposes sending federal funding for Title I and IDEA to states as no-strings-attached block grants—meaning states could use the funds however they choose. The project also calls for phasing out federal spending on Title I funding over a 10-year period.
Upending Title I funding “would have a very substantial effect on districts that have higher concentrations of poverty,” says Mark Weber, a public school teacher and education policy analyst at the New Jersey Policy Perspective think tank.
“A big concern for me [is] that the kids who are already poorly served will fall further behind because there won’t be anything that requires states” to use the funding equitably, says Gloria Ladson-Billings, a professor emerita of education at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
In her speech at the Democratic National Convention, Harris opposed Trump’s plan to close the Department of Education. Harris has previously advocated for increasing Title I funding, and her platform proposes calling on Congress to fully fund IDEA to give schools the resources to educate disabled students.* On the campaign trail, she has mainly focused on affordability measures for early childhood and higher education. Harris has promised to continue the Biden-Harris administration’s push for universal preschool, which has repeatedly stalled in Congress. She has also promised to build on the Biden-Harris administration’s programs to forgive student debt. The administration has so far approved nearly $170 billion in student loan forgiveness for almost five million borrowers, but Harris has not made any specific promises about what future student debt relief would look like.
Trump opposes student loan forgiveness, and during his first term he attempted to end the Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) program, which forgives student debt after 10 years of repayment for eligible professionals including teachers and nurses. Project 2025 calls for eliminating PSLF and other repayment-based forgiveness options.
Public Schools Versus School Choice
The cornerstone of Trump’s education policy is school choice, also known as school privatization. States are increasingly using public dollars to fund private education through programs such as vouchers and Education Savings Accounts (ESAs), both of which give parents public money for private school tuition. These programs reduce the amount of funding available for public school budgets. Since the start of the pandemic, many states have enacted school choice programs; 19 school choice bills were enacted across 17 states in 2023, and 17 bills have been enacted so far in 2024.
Trump has long supported school privatization. During his first term, he appointed school choice advocate Betsy DeVos as the Secretary of Education. And two Supreme Court cases, decided in part by Trump’s three nominees to the court, recently increased the flow of public funding to private schools by requiring voucher programs to include religious schools.
“At this point, the only way to ensure that vouchers do not fund religious education in a state is to not have vouchers at all,” says Bryan Mann, an education researcher at the University of Kansas.
Harris’s platform opposes voucher programs and the use of public funds to pay for religious education. Last year her running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz (himself a former public school teacher) criticized Iowa’s school choice program. “[What] we end up doing is subsidizing folks who are already attending private, religious schools ... or homeschooling. And it leaves our teachers ... in the short,” he said in an interview with the political news outlet Iowa Starting Line.
Research has shown that voucher programs do not improve student achievement and can even hamper it. “School choice does produce positive feelings among parents who value the choice of alternative educational possibilities for their kids, but the vast literature on vouchers shows little or no positive impact on students’ learning,” says Martin Carnoy, a labor economist at Stanford University, who specializes in education. More recent, larger-scale voucher programs in Indiana and Louisiana have shown negative effects on achievement. “If anything, [these programs] seem to result in attracting students to private schools where the students score lower than in the public schools they left,” Carnoy says.
“Over and over again, we are seeing in large-scale studies that large-scale school voucher programs have really profoundly negative effects on student achievement,” Weber says. They also allow for discrimination since unlike public schools, private schools are not required to meet every student’s needs. They are allowed to turn away disabled students and students learning English, and in some cases have discriminated against LGBTQ+ students.
"From my perspective, this is all very insidious,” Elizabeth DeBray, an education policy researcher at the University of Georgia, says of these state-level voucher programs. “It’s not a sign of a state headed toward a healthy public education system.”
Classroom Censorship
Trump vocally opposes federal involvement in education, but he also paradoxically promises to use the power of the White House to determine what schools are allowed to teach. His platform includes threatening schools and educators with civil rights investigations and funding cuts if they teach topics related to structural racism and LGBTQ+ identities. He also supports teaching the Christian religion in classrooms, and he emphatically endorsed Louisiana’s new law requiring public schools to display the Ten Commandments in every classroom.
The number of books banned in public schools nearly tripled in the 2023–2024 school year compared with the previous year, according to recent data from PEN America, and states continue to pass “gag order” laws restricting what teachers can say about gender, sexuality and race. Harris called out these restrictions while speaking at the convention of the American Federation of Teachers, one of the two teachers’ unions that have endorsed her. “While you teach students about our nation’s past, these extremists attack the freedom to learn and acknowledge our nation’s true and full history,” she said at the meeting.
These restrictions have placed educators across the country in a difficult position, Ladson-Billings says. “For them to be at the mercy of these political operatives is frightening,” she adds.
Overall, DeBray sees two big questions at stake in the November 5 election. First, closing the Department of Education would cause substantive harm by fragmenting policy and symbolic harm by devaluing the importance of education, she says. And second, following the height of the COVID pandemic, voters and politicians face a choice between reinvesting in public schools that serve every child—or pulling away from them.
“There are a lot of forces that have concluded in the aftermath of the pandemic that the challenges are too great, the gaps are too wide” in public schools and that privatization is the way forward, she says. But for her part, she advocates reinvestment: “Strengthen funding for public schools. Recommit to them as an institution because they’re so key to our democracy.”
*Editor’s Note (10/31/24): This sentence was revised after posting to correct the description of Kamala Harris previously advocating for increasing Title I funding.