Fomer President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris have widely divergent views on education. In this photo, students are shown in a classroom. (Photo by Klaus Vedfelt/Getty Images)
This is one in a series of States Newsroom reports on the major policy issues in the presidential race.
As former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris sprint to the November finish line, one sprawling policy area has largely fallen out of the spotlight — education.
Though the respective GOP and Democratic presidential candidates have spent comparatively more time campaigning on issues such as immigration, foreign policy and the economy, their ideas surrounding K-12 and higher education vastly differ.
Trump’s education platform vows to “save American education,” with a focus on parental rights, universal school choice and a fight for “patriotic education” in schools.
“By increasing access to school choice, empowering parents to have a voice in their child’s education, and supporting good teachers, President Trump will improve academic excellence for all students,” Karoline Leavitt, Trump campaign national press secretary, said in a statement to States Newsroom.
Trump “believes students should be taught reading, writing, and math in the classroom — not gender, sex and race like the Biden Administration is pushing on our public school system,” Leavitt added.
Meanwhile, the Harris campaign has largely focused on the education investments brought by the Biden-Harris administration and building on those efforts if she is elected.
“Over the past four years, the Administration has made unprecedented investments in education, including the single-largest investment in K-12 education in history, which Vice President Harris cast the tie-breaking vote to pass,” Mia Ehrenberg, a campaign spokesperson, told States Newsroom.
Ehrenberg said that while Harris and her running mate, Democratic Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, “will build on those investments and continue fighting until every student has the support and the resources they need to thrive, Republicans led by Donald Trump and his extreme Project 2025 agenda want to cut billions from local K-12 schools and eliminate the Department of Education, undermining America’s students and schools.”
Harris has repeatedly knocked the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 — a sweeping conservative agenda that includes education policy proposals like eliminating Head Start, ending time-based and occupation-based student loan forgiveness and barring teachers from using a student’s preferred pronouns different from their “biological sex” without written permission from a parent or guardian.
Trump has fiercely disavowed Project 2025, although some former members of his administration crafted the blueprint.
Closing the U.S. Department of Education
Trump has called for shutting down the U.S. Department of Education and said he wants to “move education back to the states.” The department is not the main funding source for K-12 schools, as state and local governments allocate much of those dollars.
In contrast, Harris said at the Democratic National Convention in August that “we are not going to let him eliminate the Department of Education that funds our public schools.”
Living wage for school staff; parental bill of rights
Trump’s education plan calls for creating a “new credentialing body to certify teachers who embrace patriotic values, and understand that their job is not to indoctrinate children, but to educate them.”
He also wants to implement funding boosts for schools that “abolish teacher tenure” for grades K-12 and adopt “merit pay,” establish the direct election of school principals by parents and “drastically cut” the number of school administrators.
In contrast, the Democratic Party’s 2024 platform calls for recruiting “more new teachers, paraprofessionals and school related personnel, and education support professionals, with the option for some to even start training in high school.”
The platform also aims to help “school-support staff to advance in their own careers with a living wage” and improve working conditions for teachers.
Trump also wants to give funding boosts to schools that adopt a “Parental Bill of Rights that includes complete curriculum transparency, and a form of universal school choice.”
He’s threatening to cut federal funding for schools that teach the primarily collegiate academic subject known as “critical race theory,” gender ideology or “other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content on our children.”
The Democrats’ platform opposes “the use of private-school vouchers, tuition tax credits, opportunity scholarships, and other schemes that divert taxpayer-funded resources away from public education,” adding that “public tax dollars should never be used to discriminate.”
Title IX
Earlier this year, the Biden-Harris administration released a final rule for Title IX extending federal protections for LGBTQ+ students.
The updated regulations took effect Aug. 1, but a slew of GOP-led states challenged the measure. The legal battles have created a policy patchwork and weakened the administration’s vision for the final rule.
The updated regulations roll back Title IX changes made under the Trump administration and then-Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.
Trump vowed to terminate the updated regulations on his first day back in office if reelected.
Student debt and higher education
Harris has repeatedly touted the administration’s record on student loan forgiveness, including nearly $170 billion in student debt relief for almost 5 million borrowers.
The administration’s most recent student loan repayment initiative came to a grinding halt in August after the U.S. Supreme Court temporarily blocked the Saving on a Valuable Education, or SAVE, plan.
Although little is mentioned about education in Harris’ extensive economic plan, the proposal makes clear that the veep will “continue working to end the unreasonable burden of student loan debt and fight to make higher education more affordable, so that college can be a ticket to the middle class.”
She also plans to cut four-year degree requirements for half a million federal jobs.
Trump — who dubbed the Biden-Harris administration’s student loan forgiveness efforts as “not even legal” — sought to repeal the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program during his administration.
His education platform also calls for endowing the “American Academy,” a free, online university.
Trump said he will endow the new institution through the “billions and billions of dollars that we will collect by taxing, fining, and suing excessively large private university endowments.”
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