Republicans scored a historic electoral victory across the nation, but the public-school establishment held its own on key reform measures promoted by the GOP. Most notably, Massachusetts Ballot Question 2 (to raise the cap on charter schools) lost decisively, even after Governor Charlie Baker campaigned for it. Many believed that initiative was a proxy battle in the national charter war. In Georgia, Republicans supported a constitutional amendment to reform persistently failing schools in the style of New Orleans’s recent successes, but it failed too.
The election of Donald Trump, however, places at the top of American politics a man who has been an outspoken proponent of school choice. The task now is for the federal government to promote school choice in local communities where the public-school establishment is solidly entrenched.
Will they get any help from Donald Trump? Maybe. Trump proposed a $20 billion school-choice block grant in September. But he also wants to scale back the Education Department, which presumably would play a major role in implementing this huge program. Therein lies the potential paradox that education writer Matt Barnum described as attempting to “empower local communities by expanding federal power.”
Conservatives such as Neal McCluskey at the Cato Institute make the obvious critique of Trump from a libertarian point of view: The federal government paying for education means that it has control over it. Solving that paradox now becomes the task of Paul Ryan and congressional Republicans, who passed Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) last year. Speaker Ryan’s press office said that ESSA “gives parents more choices by promoting high-quality charter schools” and also “reduces the federal role in K-12 education, restoring local control and empowering parents.” With Republican control of the White House, Ryan and Trump can push the pendulum toward school choice more than passing ESSA did. Ryan’s “Better Way” agenda includes school choice as key to fighting poverty.
But how much can the federal government push for school choice if states want to continue the public-school status quo? That may be the even greater paradox that conservative school reformers have to face.