What will Trump 2.0 mean for education? His supporters have promised to return America’s public schools to the vision of the Founding Fathers. They might succeed, but not in the way they imagine. The results would be disastrous for all of us, including conservative Trump supporters.
With Trump’s Tuesday night announcement of Linda McMahon as his pick for secretary of education, we see some continuities with the president-elect’s first term. Just as the first Trump administration talked about merging the Education and Labor departments, so too McMahon brings together the world of work and school. In the first Trump administration, McMahon ran the Small Business Administration, and she has lauded the idea of “apprenticeships” as a key education reform. Her organization, America First Policy Institute, focuses on education as “workforce innovation.” And just as Trump’s first secretary of education, Betsy DeVos, had no experience in the world of public schools, so McMahon’s experience running World Wrestling Entertainment has rendered her, in her words, an “outsider” in the field of education.
If confirmed, McMahon will likely place an even greater emphasis on two key ideas popular among Trump supporters: shifting funding from public schools to private ones, and guiding more children toward the world of work. In their view, this would align the nation’s education system more closely with the real vision of “the American Founders.”
Here’s the irony, from my perspective as a historian of American public education: The likely results really would move the country toward the educational world of the founding era, but toward the real version of that world, not the cheerful myths of the MAGA imagination. In reality, in the decades between the Revolution and the Civil War, when schools were under local control and highly vulnerable to the market, schooling was chaotic and inadequate; children were often workers first and learners second.
Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement AdvertisementNo one was satisfied with their educational options back then. Worst of all, enslaved Black children were often legally barred from any kind of schooling. But even free Black children in the North had trouble finding schools to attend. In 1828, for example, the Rev. Peter Williams warned that only 600 Black children were enrolled in New York City’s public schools, even though there were 2,500 children in the city who Williams thought should be in school.
White children, too, were often out of luck. Horace Mann, the crusading head of Massachusetts’ school system, warned in 1839 that there were just not enough schools. Like a lot of reformers of his time, Mann had the stats to prove it. As part of his campaign to improve........