Education experts tend to agree on two things: Donald Trump has an aggressive schools agenda — focused on choice and handing more control over to the states. And with lots of other foreign and domestic priorities vying for his attention, from closing the border to extending tax cuts, K-12 issues may take a back seat.
“There will be one-off bills popping up here and there,” said David Cleary, a former Republican education staffer for the Senate and now a principal with The Group, a Washington lobbying firm. “But I don’t see any sustained momentum behind anything of substance getting traction, at least this year.”
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There is one important exception — reversing the Biden administration’s Title IX rule. Trump wants to the clock back to 2020, when the rule bolstered due process rights for male students accused of sexual misconduct and offered no specific protections for LGBTQ students.
“I’d say we will see some pretty bold orders on gender identity and schools coming out in the first days of the second Trump term,” said Jackie Wernz, who runs Education Civil Rights Solutions and served as a U.S. Department of Education civil rights attorney during the Obama and first Trump administrations.
Rights for LGBTQ students
Trump is expected to issue an executive order that could say that sex only “means biological sex or that local control should decide when and if to let transgender students have access to sports teams or facilities,” Wernz said.
A federal judge for the Eastern District of Kentucky hastened the end of the 2024 policy last week when he vacated the regulation. Judge Danny Reeves said three provisions pertaining to rights for trans students, including access to bathrooms and locker rooms that match students’ gender identity, “taint the entire rule.”
While the lawsuit was brought by six GOP-led states, Wernz has advised districts everywhere to stop implementing the 2024 rule and return to the Trump-era regulation. Beyond that, she said, the picture will vary by state.
“Schools will have to factor in federal court precedents in their areas, state laws and interpretations from state courts — like in Illinois and California, where LGBTQI+ students have significant rights,” she said.
Advocates urge students to continue challenging harassment and discrimination through existing local grievance policies and litigation. But Melanie Willingham-Jaggers, executive director of GLSEN, an advocacy organization, said the decision showed “a stunning indifference to marginalized youth.”
Even though the Biden administration withdrew part two of its Title IX rule pertaining to athletics, the House wasted no time this week in passing legislation that would ban trans students from competing on teams consistent with their gender identity. The bill passed the House last year, but gained no traction while the Senate was under Democratic control.
Immigration enforcement
Trump has threatened to initiate mass deportations and end a ban on Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids at schools and other “sensitive locations” where children congregate. He’s also called for denying citizenship to children born in the U.S. to undocumented parents — a right granted by the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment and one that Trump can’t rescind through executive order.
In the short term, he plans to reinstate a pandemic-era policy that expelled migrants crossing the border. But immigration reform is also expected to be a significant part of a reconciliation bill in Congress — a process that allows legislation to pass by a simple majority.
“We have to get a lot of people out,” Trump said in an interview earlier this week.
Trump, however, faces some early obstacles in efforts to swiftly crack down on migrants entering the U.S. and enrolling their children in public schools. In the waning days of his presidency, Biden extended what is known as temporary protected status to about 1 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S., including over 800,000 Venezuelans and Salvadorans. The move allows them to remain in the country legally for another 18 months.
Tom Homan, his incoming border “czar,” told lawmakers that the current Department of Homeland Security budget doesn’t provide funding for Trump’s extensive deportation plans, CNN reports. While some leaders, like Oklahoma state Superintendent Ryan Walters, say undocumented students put a strain on public schools, lawmakers in California are considering bills that would make it harder for ICE to enter schools.
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Linda McMahon’s confirmation
While Linda McMahon, Trump’s pick for education secretary, awaits confirmation, she’s been meeting with GOP members of the Senate education committee to shore up her nomination. As head of the Small Business Administration during Trump’s first term, she’s been through this before, but no date has been set for confirmation hearings, according to a spokesman for Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, who chairs the education committee.
Earlier this month, his office was still waiting on her to submit paperwork, like financial disclosure and conflict of interest forms, to the U.S. Office of Government Ethics. A spokeswoman for the office would not comment on whether McMahon has since turned in the documents.
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Dismantling the department
If McMahon is confirmed, her charge is somewhat paradoxical — to dismantle the department Trump wants her to lead.
But education policy observers doubt the department will be going away anytime soon. The plan would require 60 votes in the Senate, and not all Republicans are on board. Even the conservative American Enterprise Institute’s Rick Hess, who wrote that scrapping the agency would be “symbolically important,” expects “the department to still be with us in four years.”
In fact, Cleary expects Trump to use the department’s Office for Civil Rights to “ramp up investigations” into antisemitism. And states might ask for more flexibility around testing and accountability, but Cleary said he doesn’t foresee “any pro-active policy from McMahon.”
Trump wants states and districts to have more control over education, and in an interview with Time, listed Indiana and Iowa as places he thinks do a better job than the federal government of running education.
“We’ll spend half the money on a much better product.” he said.
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A Supreme Court ruling last year could also significantly weaken the department’s power over state and local policy. In Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, the court overturned a longstanding precedent, known as Chevron deference, that gave federal agencies broad leeway to issue regulations based on their understanding of the law. The ruling is likely to have a greater impact on higher education than K-12, but overall, the landmark decision gives courts greater authority to interpret the will of Congress and could lead to more lawsuits claiming government overreach, experts say.
But lawmakers aren’t likely to give up on closing the department. In November, GOP Sen. Mike Rounds of South Dakota introduced a bill that would have terminated many education department programs, and transferred some, such as special education and college loan programs, to other agencies. The bill died at the end of the session, but Hess predicted Rounds would reintroduce it and that others might file similar legislation.
With so many confirmation hearings, judicial appointments and a reconciliation bill to tackle, it’s doubtful that Senate Majority Leader John Thune “will want to burn the floor time” to consider those proposals, Hess said. “But he may feel pressure to give a bill air time.”
Curriculum questions
Despite calls to dismantle the department, Trump told Time that the government would still “need some people just to make sure” schools teach English and math.
But he’s also hinted at offering the department broad power to advance his priorities, like cutting off federal funding for districts that push “critical race theory, transgender insanity and other inappropriate racial, sexual or political content onto the lives of our children.” And his campaign platform called for reinstating the 1776 Commission, an advisory committee charged with promoting “patriotic education.”
Anton Schulzki, interim executive director of the National Council for the Social Studies, said the commission’s report read like “very traditional history that came right out of the late 1950s and early 1960s.” Trump, he said, will likely use his platform as president to encourage or reward districts to adopt conservative curriculum materials, like the Birthright Standards from the Civics Alliance, which the Council said minimize “the experiences, contributions, and perspectives of Indigenous peoples, people of color, women, the LGBTQIA+ community, the working class, and countless others.”
Morgan Polikoff, a University of Southern California education professor, said red states and even conservative districts in blue states could become “quite emboldened” to adopt right-leaning materials.
“States know that the courts and the Department of Education won’t get in their way, so they can do whatever they want,” he said. And districts might expect the federal government to “come to their defense, which they probably will.”
But federal education law clearly limits how much Trump can dictate from Washington, stating that officials can’t “mandate, direct or control” curriculum “as a condition of eligibility to receive funds.”
Changing the law would also raise concerns among lawmakers over “how the pendulum could swing back in future administrations,” said Julia Martin, director of policy and government affairs with The Bruman Group, a Washington law firm.
Charter schools
While not nearly as controversial as his Title IX changes, outgoing Education Secretary Miguel Cardona’s revisions to the federal Charter School Program proved highly unpopular among Republicans and charter operators.
Cardona intended the 2022 rule to encourage more racially diverse schools and increase transparency into charters’ business dealings with for-profit companies. But charter advocates said the regulation created unnecessary burdens, hurt founders without substantial startup funds and limit student options.
Changing the rule isn’t expected to be an immediate priority for Trump, Martin said. But Starlee Coleman, president and CEO of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, is eager for the process to begin in time for grants awarded in 2026.
“Rewriting the regulations will help to unwind the additional layers of burden imposed on grantees and schools that create too much friction in the complex process of opening or expanding a new charter school,” she said.
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Private school choice
Republican focus on charter schools has waned in recent years amid the explosive growth of voucher programs and education savings accounts, which parents can spend on private schools or homeschooling.
In September, a House committee passed the Educational Choice for Children Act, which would provide tax credits to groups and individuals who donate to a private school choice program. An estimated 2 million students would be able to use the funds for tuition, fees and supplies. The plan would cost the federal government about $5 billion in lost revenue, according to the House Ways and Means committee.
Because it didn’t pass in the last session, the bill would need to be reintroduced, but a spokesman for Nebraska Rep. Adrian Smith, who co-wrote the bill, couldn’t say when that might happen. The Invest in Education Coalition, an advocacy group, launched an ad campaign in December to ensure the issue stays on Congress’s radar. Cleary said the plan could appear as
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