Common Ground for the Common School in the Second Trump Age

“She's an ingenious choice by Gov. Newsom [to lead California’s State Board of Education], largely because Professor Darling-Hammond has strong ties with the labor and the social justice communities,” says Bruce Fuller, an education professor at the University of California, Berkeley. “This contrasts the Obama era, and even [former Gov.] Jerry Brown's reign, when one wing of Democrats was pitted against the other. Professor Darling-Hammond has the robust capacity to unite educators and activists intent on building equitable schools,” (Graham Vyse, 2019, Governing for the people making government work).

Donald Trump has a substantive agenda for change in public schools, indelibly etched in the history of his first term, fleshed out in random comments he made over the past few years during his trials, his tribulations, and his bizarre campaign. Would that it included drawing on the wisdom of Linda Darling-Hammond to lead the federal department. of education.

The choice for public schools our fellow citizens have made in hiring this reality tv star for the second time to lead education, particularly, could not be depicted more starkly than by thinking about two competing visions of public schools in a democracy: One held by Professor Darling-Hammond, the other by President-Elect Donald Trump.

We forget at our peril that Donald Trump’s ideal public school system is a financially and socioculturally dismantled federal public school system, such as it is, federally unfunded rather than underfunded, organized in fifty separate school systems at the state level. Whether the Council of Chief State School Officers will pick up the slack is an open question.

His ideal federal response to equity and education is light years away from either the Democrats’ or traditional Republicans’ ideal, a vision that began in 1979 under a Democrat and continued under a Republican. Trump’s ideal has nothing whatsoever to do with access, equity, and outcomes (AEO) animating American politics around public schools from the beginning—a stairway to heaven.

“I say it all the time, I’m dying to get back to do this. We will ultimately eliminate the federal Department of Education” (Trump at a September campaign rally in Wisconsin).¹

Do not miss the understated glee Trump expresses. He will enjoy destroying public schools—perhaps even more than he enjoyed destroying women’s rights to reproductive health care. The satisfaction he takes in confronting educational institutions suggests this is more than policy—it's personal. His rhetoric around dismantling current progress toward AEO without a thought to poverty carries the same triumphant tone he uses when discussing his Supreme Court appointments. He feeds on it.

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Project 2025 recommends closing the Department of Education, turning two funding streams now keyed to special education and high-poverty schools into no-strings-attached grants, take the money and run, and phasing out the low-income support dollars within 10 years. What would be the role of the DOE? These funding streams could be managed through a bureaucratic office of low-level civil service workers.

In 1867, Henry Barnard, a prominent education reformer, was appointed as the first commissioner of the newly formed DOE. With a staff of three and limited resources, located in two rooms in the basement of a building in DC, I know something about working in an office in a basement, Barnard focused on gathering educational data and producing scholarly reports to assist local education authorities. But there was significant opposition in Congress. Critics pointed to the unnecessary expense and feared it might exert too much control over local schools.

As a result, the department's funding was reduced in 1868, and it lost its independent status. Downgraded to a bureau within the Department of the Interior and renamed the Office of Education, it became invisible, likely a satisfying job for people like me who enjoy carving up information about education even if it is in a basement office. Over time, it continued to collect educational statistics but remained a small agency until its eventual elevation back to cabinet-level status in 1980. In 1979, President Jimmy Carter signed the Department of Education Organization Act, which elevated the Office of Education to cabinet-level status as a separate Department of Education.

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In late 2008, as President-elect Barack Obama was assembling his administration, Linda Darling-Hammond, a Stanford University education professor, was considered a top candidate for the role of Secretary of Education. Darling-Hammond had been appointed to lead Obama’s education transition team, a key position responsible for reviewing federal education policy and alchemizing Obama’s campaign promises into actionable policies.

Darling-Hammond was/is highly respected for her expertise and research, and for thought leadership, in teacher preparation and performance assessment, her enduring work on an ever-expanding model of teacher thinking and development, and her breakthroughs in knowledge about what constitutes high-quality professional teacher development. She has devoted her life to creating a more equitable public education system, particularly through her focus on improving teacher recruitment and retention.

Darling-Hammond's appointment as President of the California State Board of Education in 2019 marked a shift in the state's education policy toward more equitable schooling and less emphasis on charter schools. Her tenure is seen as a significant moment for progressive education reform, influencing national debates on teacher quality and school accountability

Alas, rewinding to 2008, President Obama ended up selecting Arne Duncan. If ever the public schools lost an opportunity for enduring, embedded child-centered reform, this was it. As often happens in politics, Duncan was selected because he didn’t raise the hackles of mainstream policy makers who had become mesmerized and anesthetized by standardized test scores. Duncan fit right in. Race to the Top, the signature project, is held up even today as a part of the legacy of the administration despite its reliance on cookie-cutter, best practice models of teaching as opposed to the responsive teaching model of Darling-Hammond.

The Obama administration's relationship with the Common Core exemplifies the crux of a wicked problem: Using power and money to try to buy curriculum and instruction as a way to improve schools. Curriculum does not improve schools. Teachers do. While technically maintaining state autonomy over educational standards, the administration used Race to the Top funding as a powerful lever to encourage Common Core adoption, with Education Secretary Arne Duncan its most visible cheerleader.

Duncan's approach reflected a blend of technocratic over-confidence and educational theoretical naiveté—you could hear it in his voice—he seemed to genuinely believe that standardizing high academic expectations across states would drive educational improvement, while underestimating the volcanic political backlash, not to mention the obvious fallacy. Since when did aspiring to be a thing make it so? Where would the resources come from? How, exactly, do you hope this plays out?

The Obama administration's messaging on Common Core exposed contradictions in their approach. While officially maintaining these were "state-led" standards, they simultaneously incentivized adoption through federal funding and claimed credit for their widespread implementation. This calculated ambiguity masked deeper flaws in their theory of change: the naive assumption that new standards plus aligned tests would automatically improve classroom instruction.

The fact that 49 states initially signed on speaks less to the initiative's merit than to the powerful combination of federal pressure and reform rhetoric. Lost in this policy cascade was the essential question: How would teachers translate these abstract standards into meaningful classroom practice? The disconnect between policy ambition and pedagogical reality ultimately undermined both the political legitimacy and practical effectiveness of the entire enterprise.

Common sense critics rightly saw federal overreach in an effort to implement national standards. The following excerpt is drawn from an article titled “How the Common Core Went Wrong” by Frederick Hess in 2014:

“Tea Party conservatives and militant, anti-testing union activists have forged an unlikely alliance to oppose the Common Core. Conservative firebrands like Glenn Beck, Phyllis Schlafly, and Michelle Malkin have denounced it as ‘ObamaCore’ and as a leftist plot, while liberal education expert Diane Ravitch and Chicago Teachers Union president Karen Lewis have called it anti-teacher. The standards have even been ridiculed by media personalities like Jon Stewart, Louis C. K., and Stephen Colbert. The critics are on to something, but their frenzied attacks on individual Common Core worksheets and their talk of cabals and conspiracies can obscure the more serious problems with the enterprise.”

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Trump's perspective on schooling, like that of all of us, reflects personal experiences and histories. Every class has at least one clown and one bully. Few have them combined in one body with orange hair. Donald is combative by nature, well-trained by his father as I understand it, and must have been hell on wheels in first grade. According to Trump's own account, he once gave a teacher a black eye because he didn’t think the teacher knew anything about music.

At age 13, Trump was sent to New York Military Academy. His propensity for face-to-face micro-aggressions, even with a music teacher, revealed itself again at the Academy, where Trump slept in a barracks and rose to become a senior year leader with a private suite—to keep peace among the cadets he ginned up by keeping him segregated. One of his biographers said the following:

“He talks about it as almost this, you know, rite of passage,” says Trump biographer Timothy O’Brien, author of TrumpNation. “He said to me that when he arrived at the military academy, for the first time in his life, someone slapped him in the face when he got out of line.”

Trump is a constellation of paradoxes in his thinking around schooling. On one hand, he is proud of his academic background at Wharton, but critical of elite institutions and skeptical of academic experts except when they agree with him. On the other, he strongly opposes “indoctrination” education, but he just as strongly advocates for “patriotic education.”

It’s hard to use a word like ‘views’ to characterize what Trump’s thoughts are about curriculum. As he says, he has a concept of a concept of a plan about health care. He likes the “basics” and uses “progressive”as a slur, a big brush to tar any child-centered approach with scorn. He would probably characterize SEL as another example of schools doing things they have no business doing, it’s not their job, conflating it with what he terms "indoctrination," seeing it as an encroachment on parental prerogatives to shape their children's values and emotional development.

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Trump’s heart-felt (?) advocacy for market-based solutions and school choice coupled with his often satiric comments about establishment professionals and teachers' unions with a GOP Senate are dangerous. This era is probably the wrong time to think about reforms; energy will be better spent educating the public and public leaders about keeping public schools around for a few more centuries.

His emphasis on traditional curriculum and what he terms "patriotic education" aligns with a broader resistance to progressive pedagogical approaches, while consistently elevating parental authority over professional expertise in educational decision-making.

His thoughts crystallizes (?) around several principles: schools should maintain strict institutional discipline (the police mindset), competitive achievement metrics should be in place (money), and traditional teaching methods work best (memorization). Yet his approach isn’t like conventional conservative policy (think Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger) in its confrontational stance toward schools and its heightened focus on cultural and identity issues within education—the very issues he blames progressives for stirring up.

Advocates for public schools may not get very far with Trump. In many ways, the time has come to ignore him. Don’t respond to his arguments. Advocates can lobby Congress to safeguard federal funding to protect Title I money for low-income schools² and to ensure that federal funds cannot be withheld based on ideological disagreements. I plan to make it my mission to establish email conversations with federal politicians locally and in other states over the next few years via email. I may uncover a few pieces of the puzzle to write about. Even if Trump wins the House, enough GOP representatives from rural areas may not vote against the children of their districts to pass the death bill for public schools in the people’s chamber:³

“Time to put parents back in the driver’s seat when it comes to their children’s education!,” (Moms for Liberty co-founder Tiffany Justice, who campaigned alongside Trump, on the social media platform X).

Active university professors, school administrators, and teachers organized and funded by state education departments could join hands with the Chief State Council of School Officers to begin the project of reconstruction, collaborating to create classroom-friendly principles for teaching and learning to guide and evoke professional conversations across state lines about responsive teaching, not for accountability, but for learning. The hope of a federal practical, scientific, and axiological center for public school with the capacity and resources of the federal military—even moving forward with a Constitutional amendment enshrining the opportunity to be educated at a good public school in federal law—has been dimmed but not extinguished.

1. https://www.k12dive.com/news/trump-wins-2024-presidential-election-k-12-education-impact/732121/

2. Recall that Title I became federal law as part of the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s.

3. https://www.chalkbeat.org/2024/11/06/trump-has-won-a-second-term-heres-what-that-means-for-schools/