The election results were not great for fans of public education. Trump has promised to end the department of education and use federal money to impose MAGA priorities on public schools (Students must learn patriotism, declares the man who called the country a third world hell hole and a garbage can).
Yet there are some hopeful signs to be seen among the results. Many Americans may love Trump, but it turns out they also love their public schools and vote against policies and people who threaten them.
Vouchers
School vouchers come in a variety of flavors, but they are all policies designed to funnel public tax dollars to private schools. Voucher proponents insist that the idea is popular with Americans, and will cite their own poll numbers, but as with many polls, it’s all in how you ask the question. Ask “Should students be able to pick a school that fits them,” Americans say sure. But in poll after poll, when taxpayers are asked, “Should public taxpayer dollars be used to fund private schools,” they say no. No surprise.
If I ask you, “Should every child have a pony,” you’ll say yes. If I ask, “Should your money be used to buy a pony for the rich families in another city,” you are likely to be less enthusiastic.
That includes this poll in Pennsylvania, showing the majority of voters oppose school vouchers. Josh Shapiro, please take note.
Governor Shapiro should also note that school vouchers have only ever been implemented by legislators, sometimes over strong voter objections. But vouchers are implemented by legislatures because voters reject them. Every time. That record remains clean, as three states put vouchers on the ballot.
Colorado
In Colorado, school privatizers pushed an amendment to the state constitution that would have created a constitutional right to school choice, including school vouchers. The amendment was promoted by Advance Colorado, a right wing anti-tax group headed by a former leader of the Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity.
Colorado already has school choice policies in place for charter schools, but privatizers wanted to expand to vouchers while ensuring voters wouldn’t elect officials who might oppose such policies. A constitutional amendment is meant to protect favored policies from actual voters.
Colorado voters defeated the measure.
Kentucky
Kentucky’s courts have repeatedly struck down attempts to funnel taxpayer dollars to private schools, based on a constitution that clearly says “No sum shall be raised or collected for education other than in common schools.” In other words, no public taxpayer dollars for private schools.
Voucher fans in Kentucky had one option — rewrite the constitution. And supporters pushed hard.
“Anti-public education activists and outside billionaires tried everything they could to win school privatization in Kentucky,” Jason Bailey, executive director of Kentucky Center for Economic Policy, says in an email to The Progressive. “They spent more than any ballot measure in the state’s history, advanced culture war themes with mailers that identified supposedly prurient books in specific local public schools, linked the issue to support for Donald Trump and Republicans, and even lied by saying the amendment would increase teacher pay and public education spending.”
Kentucky was deep red in this election. Various MAGA officials were swept back into office, and Trump took the state 65% to 34%. But the voucher amendment was brutally defeated by that same margin—65% to 35%. The amendment lost in every single county in the state.
Nebraska
In Nebraska, voucher supporters did their best to avoid the will of the people. Lawmakers passed a voucher law in 2023, and public school supporters circulated a petition to put the measure to a voter referendum. So voucher legislators passed a new voucher bill that repealed the first one, rendering the petition moot. So in 2024, public school supporters circulated a second petition to put the law up to a vote. After some attempted shenanigans by the Nebraska secretary of state, the referendum ended up on the ballot, where the voters soundly rejected it.
Moms For Liberty and Culture Warriors
Hard to believe that the Moms have only been on the scene for five years. The Moms were created by experienced political operatives to help elect The Right People, and by that measure, they have lost momentum. In local school board elections, they have adopted a lower profile and make far fewer direct endorsements, having correctly sensed that local voters have had enough disruption and culture panic in their local school district, resulting in drubbings in 2023.
In fact, candidates running on culture panic suffered defeat in many parts of the country.
North Carolina
North Carolina featured two GOP candidates who were strongly anti-Public Ed. For Superintendent of Public Instruction, Republicans offered Michelle Morrow, a spectacularly bad candidate with no background in education at all. She homeschools her own children and is virulently opposed to public schools, calling them “indoctrination centers” and “socialism centers” and urged parents not to send their children there. When running unsuccessfully for school board two years ago, she said, “I think the whole plan of the education system from day one has actually been to kind of control the thinking of our young people.” Morrow marched in the January 6 insurrection in DC and “called for a military coup”, and has on social media called for the public execution of Barack Obama.
Lt. Governor Mark Robinson ran for governor on the strength of a record that includes setting up a McCarthyesque task force to catch liberal teachers. He called public school teachers “wicked people”—and that was before his campaign descended into a chaos of damning quotes and misbehavior.
Both of those candidates were defeated in a state that went for Trump. But the wins for public education didn’t stop there. Robert Levy chaired the Moore County school board as a Moms For Liberty ally, and he had his picture taken with Michelle Morrow, but he was defeated in his reelection attempt (he blames the press). Across the state, Moms For Liberty endorsed only seven candidates, and five were defeated, including chapter chair Natosha Tew, who came in last of six candidates. They ran on platforms about being anti-woke, pro-God, and removing naughty books.
Texas
In Texas, Frank Strong, publisher of the Book-Loving Texan’s Guides To School Board Elections, tagged 15 school board candidates tied to book-banning groups. Nine lost their election, with three districts handing big (if not conclusive) losses to banners.
Texas was also the site of another pro-public education upset. Texas voters typically vote for school bonds, providing financial support for districts. But Houston voters viewed the bond issue as a vote of confidence for Mike Miles, who was appointed by the state to take over the school district. The former charter operator has come under fire for ignoring staff and community input while operating in an accountability-free bubble. Mellissa Yarborough told the Texas Observer:
I’m waiting for an elected board that I can trust to listen to the people, to plan a bond that is reasonable, to take their time and get real public input on it, to really do thorough assessment of the schools, to see what the real needs are, rather than a rushed one, because that’s also wasteful.
Houston voters turned down Miles’ request for more funds.
Florida
With Florida school board elections in August, Moms For Liberty and Governor Ron DeSantis had already suffered several setbacks. But in the November election, Moms for Liberty and other right-wing activists had thrown their weight behind a constitutional amendment measure to make school board elections partisan. In other words, trying to get voters to ignore the actual people involved and just vote for R’s or D’s.
READ: Trump’s Agenda 47, Like Project 2025, Wants to Dismantle Public Education
In Florida, such an amendment requires a supermajority, 60% of the vote, to pass. The partisan election proposal didn’t make it.
Other Wins for Education
Elissa Slotkin has stood up for measures to keep schools and children safe from gun violence. Ruben Gallego was up against a candidate who had slashed spending for schools in her state, even as he credited his own public school education for his success. Both were elected to the Senate.
Massachusetts voted to stop using their musty old Big Standardized Test as a graduation requirement (imagine if our students had to “pass” the Keystone exams to get a diploma).
Do We Feel Better Yet
No, probably not. There were many local right-wing victories as well.
Furthermore, education under Trump is a bit of a mystery. Trump wants to end the Department of Education and to enforce a specific view of education in local schools, but Trump can’t actually both give up his leverage and use it at the same time, Giving the money for Title I and IDEA to the states as strings-free grants means the feds give up all say for how the money is spent (and leaves education advocates on the state level to scramble over how those dollars are spent). If Trump wants to use that money as leverage for enforcing his anti-woke agenda, he can’t simply give it away.
So Trump has a list of bad things he wants to do to education, but several are mutually exclusive, which means we know that Trump will likely do something damaging to the fabric of American public education, but we don’t yet know which damaging thing it will be.
But what we do know comes through as a low background hum in these noisy elections. Americans like their public schools—rural and urban, left and right, Republican and Democrat.
Those who want to dismantle and replace them have been trying to erode that affection and trust for decades, but in elections we still see indications that it’s still there. Republicans ignore it at their peril, and if Democrats could ever decide to become energetic champions of public schools, they might find themselves with a winning issue.
