So obviously the higher we get the better, but this is not 60 votes, which is what they had at the beginning of President Obama.
So I think we did pretty well with narrow majorities during the previous administration.
Three new Supreme Court justices.
54 new circuit judges, comprehensive 30-year overdue tax reform.
Yeah, I mean, it's harder, but I think we were successful before with a narrow majority, and I think we will be again.
Senator, looking at the results from last night, what do you take away from the mood of the country, where it is now, where it is headed, and how it lands according to your expectations?
Well, if you're looking for a simple answer, I think it was a referendum on the current administration, in part.
People were just not happy with this administration, and the Democratic nominee obviously was a part of it.
Thank you, Mr. McConnell.
In your role as former leader moving forward, what do you think your level of engagement is going to be directly with the new Trump administration?
Again, given your criticisms of the former president?
I'm going to do everything I can to help the new administration be successful.
Torrance Banks.
Would you be in support of Elon Musk and RFK Jr. having positions in the cabinet for the next presidential I'm sorry, say that again.
Would you be in support of RFK Jr. and Elon Musk having positions in the cabinet, presidential cabinet, considering that Elon Musk has been reported to be in contact with Valdemar Putin and R.F.K. Jr. has been accused of sexual assault?
One of the things about advancing age, if you all live as long as I do, you're going to have a hearing aids on and have a hard time hearing a question like that.
Why don't you come up here?
Torrance, thanks.
Notice.
Thank you. Thank you.
Would you be in support of Elon Musk and RFK Jr. having cabinet positions considering that Elon Musk has been reported to be in contact?
Yeah, I'm not going to get into that subject.
Anything else related to what happened yesterday?
Yeah.
I'm wondering, President Trump and Senate Republicans sometimes butted heads in the first administration.
Do you think the relationship will be smoother this time?
What advice would you have to President Trump to dealing with the new majority in Congress in general?
You know, I had a lot of dealings with him during the previous administration.
I think we did a lot for the American people.
Yeah.
Do you expect any clashes with President Trump over nominees in case he goes more towards the economic populist route?
I think it's way too early to tell who the nominees are going to be, and I think the Senate will treat them fairly.
Carl?
A lame duck question.
Democrats have a lot of judges in the channel here that they could try and push through in these last few weeks.
What do you think Republicans should do if that would happen?
One advantage of being the majority leader is you get to decide what to bring up.
And I think if that's what the majority leader wants to do, that's what we'll do.
And each one will be voted on.
Now that Republicans have control of the Senate and the presidency, how do you expect some lame duck priorities like appropriations to be handled?
Is that going to be punted into the new year?
I don't expect what.
Appropriations and other big lame duck priorities be handled.
Well, I mean, I think getting our work done, which no matter who's been in the majority, we've not been able to do that very well for quite a while.
Deciding how to spend the discretionary money that we have, which is not a very big part of what we spend every year anymore, is really important.
And I would hope we would put a greater priority than the current Senate has on doing the basic work of government, which is getting it, deciding how much to spend and getting it done as close to regular order as possible.
Thank you, sir.
I was hoping you could compare the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act extension that Republicans are pursuing now to the Bush tax cut extension that we saw.
Are these comparable periods in policy now?
And what does the Republican position mean for that?
Well, I can speak for most Senate Republicans.
We're going to want, we thought it was a huge success.
It produced more revenue than less.
And I'm sure virtually all of us would like to see most of that extended.
Okay, I think we're through.
Good luck to you all.
I enjoyed talking to you, and it was a hell of a good day.
Thanks a lot.
Thank you.
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We go to Eat, and black students from North Carolina Central are sitting in.
You can look at the, you can Google this.
That's when the sit-in started in Queensboro and Durham.
And I said naively to my fraternity brother for New York, why are they doing this?
And he said, what universe do you live in?
Because they can't be served.
And it was like somebody lifted a veil from me, and I saw the world in a very different world.
I had gotten so used to the segregated world, I didn't question it.
I became very active in the civil rights movement in UNC.
And when I was with President Carter, we supported affirmative action and minority set-asides for black contractors.
So these kinds of transformative events when you're young can sometimes carry over into your career, and they certainly did for me.
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I'll look now at how the 2024 election results could impact education policy, funding, parental rights, and the role of the Education Department under a second Trump administration.
It's hosted by the American Enterprise Institute and lasts about an hour, 15 minutes.
Good morning and welcome to the American Enterprise Institute.
I'm Nat Malkus, the Deputy Director of Education Policy Studies here at AEI.
It's November 6th, the day after the 2024 election.
We have results in, which is nice this time around.
I actually have some results to talk about.
Some are still outstanding, but we have a fantastic panel today to talk about what those results mean for education moving forward.
With me today is this wonderful panel.
I'm going to introduce them now.
Moving from my right to left, Heather Harding is the Executive Director of the Campaign for Our Shared Future.
And Heather's work focuses on the intersection between access to high-quality education and racial equity.
Heather, thanks for joining us.
Rick Hess to the next to the right is the Director of Education Policy Studies here at AEI.
Rick's the author of Education Week's popular blog, Rick Hess Straight Up.
He's an executive editor at Education Next, a contributing editor at National Review, and a senior contributor to Forbes.
And that's just the beginning of the places where Rick's writing can be found.
To his right is Jenny Gentles.
She's the director of Education, Freedom, and Parental Rights Initiative at the Defense of Freedom Institute.
Jenny's a lifelong school choice advocate and a former state and federal education policy leader.
Jenny, thanks for joining us this morning.
One more to the right is Preston Cooper.
He's a senior fellow here at AEI in Education Policy Studies.
He focuses on the return to investment in higher education, student loans, and higher education reform.
Thanks to see you, Preston.
And last but not least, Darrell Bradford, the president of 50 CAN, the 50-state campaign for achievement.
Now, he leads their communications and policy, trains and recruits local leaders nationwide to serve as executive directors of the state CANs.
So today, with this panel, which is an event that's part of the James Q Wilson program here in K-12 Education Studies at AEI, we have a relatively simple show.
I'm going to hog the microphone for a few minutes just to give a quick rundown of the results as we have them so far, all the way down from the top to the bottom of the ballot.
And then we'll do a panel discussion for about an hour.
And then we will open it up to questions from our live audience here, those that are on the live stream and our friends watching on C-SPAN.
We want to make sure that all those in person and online or on C-SPAN can ask questions.
You can do that by submitting questions via Twitter using the hashtag 2024Education or you can email them to Greg.fournier, that's F-O-U-R-N-I-E-R, at AEI.org.
You can find that information on the event page.
So without further ado, I am going to run through some of the election results.
If you have not been paying attention at all, President Trump did storm back indeed.
I'm not so sure about the dark and defiant campaign, but that's how the New York Times has it, with 277 electoral votes.
Harris earned about 224.
Trump won the swing states of North Carolina, Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
Arizona, Nevada, and Michigan still have not been called, but last time I checked, Trump was still leading.
In the Senate, we have 52 Republicans already called and 42 Democratic seats.
This is in contrast to before the election where Democrats held a one-vote majority, that's 51 to 49.
There were three seats that Republicans flipped, Ohio, Montana, and West Virginia.
Save those three, the Democrats held in every other race.
There are six races that aren't called.
Republicans have a narrow lead in Pennsylvania.
There are dead heats in Nevada and Michigan.
And the Republicans are down and Democrats up in Arizona, Maine, and Wisconsin.
In the House.
Republicans have a lead here with 197 seats, 198, if you believe AP, and the Dems have 177, again, 180, if you believe AP.
This is too close to call for a number of reasons, largely because no one's gotten to the magic number of 218.
Republicans have a shorter path to secure the House and unified government.
However, there are a lot more races that the Democrats have opened.
If you look on our map here, you can see on the west coast, there's a lot of those hashed gray districts yet to call, and many of those will probably go blue.
We've talked about the federal elections, but there's lots of action in the states.
Unfortunately, not a lot of action in the governor's offices where there were 11 races and no change in party control in any of them.
All three incumbents won, and the rest held by the party that had them.
In state legislatures, again, we see stasis.
Now, one thing to note here is that I believe it was 48 states had unified government yesterday.
And in the next legislative session, there will be one more that has flipped from split to Democrat, and the remaining 49 haven't flipped or haven't been called.
Stasis in state legislatures.
We have some state superintendents of education in Montana.
Susie Hedelin, and you'll have to forgive me, I don't have all the pronunciations perfect, held on, and Mo Green did change the North Carolina elected superintendent from Kathy Truitt, a Republican, to the Democratic column.
Michelle Morrow, who was a surprise win in the primary and a bit of a lightning rod, was defeated there.
In North Dakota and Washington, we are still waiting on results.
There's some key ballot referenda that we'll talk about.
There was, I think, 15, but we've laid out five key ones.
The Colorado Amendment 80 is a little too close to call, but it established that all K-12 children would have a right to school choice in the state constitution.
It doesn't look like it's going to win, and it has to get 55% to do so.
In Kentucky, Amendment 2, another school choice that would authorize the state to provide funding to non-public schools, roundly defeated.
I think by about 2 to 1 in that neighborhood.
In Nebraska, a similar amendment, or not a similar amendment, but one that would maintain a scholarship program for students attending private schools.
Also roundly defended or defeated.
In Kentucky and Nebraska, it's interesting that those were both on the two against to one for in states where Trump ran about two four to one against.
So really worth talking about with our panel.
In Florida, there was a amendment that would make school board elections partisan, and that looks to not have reached the 60% threshold.
And in Massachusetts, a question that would repeal the MCAS scores as requirements from graduation.
That has been repealed despite folks in the state, many of them arguing against it.
And then I think that's the last slide I have.
Just two more things to look at.
One is the LA school boards race.
This is local, but it's the second largest in the nation.
And it's really on a knife's edge.
It was sort of a 4-3 split prior, controlled by union-backed candidates, and it's very up in the air as we speak.
And then the most exciting district in the nation for all kinds of politics would be Chicago.
Now, I'm going to have to look at my notes here.
This is the first time Chicagoans have voted for school board members and only portioned 10 out of 21.
The other 11 are appointed by the mayor.
In October, that's last month, the entire school board resigned en masse.
Of the seven races that have been called, they've been evenly split, three union-backed, three not, and one who's unaffiliated.
Three are outstanding.
And just to add to the complexity, Mayor Johnson appointed a president of the school board, also named Johnson, who has already resigned.
This is after the initial slate of appointments.
So a lot to unpack in Chicago.
So that is the rundown.
I'm going to catch my breath with my first question to Rick Hess here.
Rick, what will the 2024 election mean for education?
And let's start at the top of the ticket.
I mean, it's Trump 2.0.
Is this a huge deal?
How do you handicap it?
So let's not try to get all of it in one bite.
Starting with what Trump means, it means a lot for higher education, where Washington has a very direct role, covers a lot of the funding.
Preston will talk about this more depth, I imagine.
If I was a college president this morning, I would be feeling very stressed.
I think where you have seen Republicans frustrated with how the department has dealt with anti-Semitism on campus, I think those colleges are very much going to find their feet being held to the fire.
Where you have found colleges that feel like they are suppressing free inquiry or engaging in ideological agendas, I think you're going to see folks at the Department of Ed very aggressively asking whether or not they are complying with federal statute and potentially putting funding eligibility at risk.
Federal role is less direct in K-12, so it's going to matter less directly.
But what I've just talked about are things that you can do through the executive branch.
That's where the change in administration is going to matter most, partly because I think after a relatively constrained and very traditionally Reagan approach under Betsy DeVos, I think Republicans have grown frustrated.
And so I think you're going to see a much more aggressive Department of Ed and a Trump 2.0.
How much that matters in Congress is obviously going to matter on how the House comes out.
It's going to matter on what the Senate numbers ultimately are.
The bottom line is you'll probably be able to see Republicans do some legislating through reconciliation.
For instance, you can imagine in the next year's tax bill a big federal tax credit to promote school choice.
It's much harder to see them passing legislation like a parental bill of rights, which is going to require either dismantling the filibuster or else getting 60 votes in the Senate.
So for the rest of my panel, how's Rick wrong?
Is he underplaying it?
Does it matter more or less?
Jenny, you were first.
Well, I just want to say on the parental rights thing, I think we've got some acronyms to throw out, and that's FERPA and PPRA.
So sure, maybe getting to a parent's Bill of Rights, getting that through Congress, that's a longer-term project, but probably a priority from a Trump administration.
But I would see a Trump administration quickly moving towards sending a clear message that parental rights are fundamental.
And one way to do that would be to strengthen privacy and to strengthen parents' ability to access information, surveys, curricula that are presented to their children, and to perhaps look into ways to legislatively but through other means provide some kind of private right of action so that parents can't just be told no, you can't see what we're teaching your children.
No, we won't tell you if we are transitioning your child to another gender identity.
We will keep secrets.
If that does happen, rather than just being able to complain to the department, they will have some kind of tool and be able to sue and have a cost.
Just to clarify for folks who are watching at home, these are things that the department could do under its existing authority under legislation?
Well, the private right of action is something down the road that they would be needing to work with Congress.
But I would think that we're going to see a very clear message about the protection of parental rights being a priority in the next administration.
And then, like you said, advocacy for school choice, education freedom, that's been part of the campaign.
He promised to sign what is now called the Educational Choice for Children Act, likely seeing something through reconciliation.
But I think we'll see a cleanup of the charter school program and some other things that the federal government can do without legislation.
Heather, you were.
Both of you keep saying the department as if there is not a threat to the department.
And while there may not be a direct path to just get rid of the Department of Education, we're likely to see a severe neutering.
So I'm wondering how we think that the department is going to function if there are some echoes of this Project 2025 notion that we get rid of it.
Yeah, because they do protect, provide federal protection for protected classes.
And I think one of the things that you'll get to in these split votes where people are not supporting privatization in schools because most Americans like public schools.
They want to have access.
They like neighborhood schools.
But still, we've got to think about how the protected classes, and that's generally the job of the Fed.
So I'm worried about those things in not maybe actual legislation or getting rid of departments, but in how people behave and for civic servants.
That's a great question.
I mean, shockingly, Donald Trump suggested he would abolish the Department of Education.
Never heard that before.
And you can say, well, don't take him seriously, not literally.
How do we take that seriously?
What do we think will be the effect of Trump on the department over the next several years?
I think this is a fig leaf because, frankly, you can't do any of the things that he wants to do without the department in play.
And I would just, you know, big up to glacial bureaucracy.
I think it's basically almost impossible to get the department to behave differently than it behaves, ask Betsy.
So I do think to Dr. Harding's point, and I'm lifting this from our friend Lindsay Fryer, it is possible that they will take a different take on how the Office of Civil Rights acts, and there'll be some controversy over that.
You know, I happen to be a great fan of single-sex schools.
I went to one, you know, so like obviously the department could have a role in that.
It could make it easier or harder for charter schools to open or scale or use CSP money more flexibly.
There's a lot of that there.
But if you want to accomplish all of these things, you actually have to have the department.
So I think the story is that the USDOE is not going away despite the campaign protestations.
You know, the Trump campaign really made kind of higher education an issue on the campaign trail in a way I've never seen from a Republican presidential candidate in generations.
I mean, I've only been alive for about 30 years, but at least in my lifetime, I've really never seen so much emphasis on things like accreditation reform, an endowment tax, something he called for many times, creating a national university.
Regardless of whether he goes after trying to accomplish those specific things, I do think that higher education is going to be a priority for the second Trump administration in a way it really was not for the first.
And so that's why I would be looking closer at what potential avenues might they have through the Department of Education to sort of achieve some of those goals.
I would say that we saw under the Obama and Biden administrations, there are actually a lot of avenues open to a Department of Education that wants to go after particular colleges.
Obama and Biden against for-profit colleges.
But if you had a more disciplined Department of Education in the second Trump administration, there are a lot of potential ways that you could try to hold colleges accountable.
And just on this abolishing the Department point, because I think Heather's right to put it on the table, a couple of things.
One, when you look at Republicans, Republicans are deeply mixed on whether they want to abolish it, much less when you get to Independence Democrats.
There's no way you can even get to 50 Republican senators today who want to abolish it.
So you can't abolish a department by fiat.
You'd have to go through Congress.
It would be a heavy lift when they have other priorities.
And the reality is that when you talk to people in the MAGA orbit, there's actually a deep split between those who embrace kind of the Project 2025 philosophy of let's dismantle the department and kind of JD Vance-style national conservatives who say, you know what, it's crazy to talk about dismantling it.
We need to go in and use it the exact same way that the other side has during the past four years.
And I think what we're going to see is that that second camp is going to emerge triumphant.
You know, you never know for sure, but that'd be the way I'd.
Let me follow up with that, Rick.
Just to ask on the higher ed level versus the K-12 level, if you use the department in the way that you're saying, where do you have more room to run?
Because I think a lot of times we associate it with K-12 schools, right?
That's what the Department of Education is for.
But maybe there's more room to run in higher ed?
You know, in K-12, federal government picks up about 10 cents on the dollar normally of what we spend.
In higher ed, it's a lion's share of spending, depending how you calculate it.
So one, it's just a much bigger financial player in higher ed.
Two, because of the financial role and because of the way the laws are written, it has a much more direct relationship.
When you're looking at Ivy League institutions, they're pocketing billions a year in federal research funds.
Their students are collecting billions a year in federal guaranteed student loans.
This is money that taxpayers are putting on the table, even for nominally private entities.
When you get to school districts, what we have seen is the federal government can play a large role in exactly the way Ginny's talking about.
Guidance relating to things like student privacy, Title IX, K-12 sports participation, school discipline.
You will absolutely, I think, see a Trump administration sharply change direction from what you've seen the last four years there.
But ultimately, it has a much bigger footprint when it does that in higher ed.
I think if there's something to like, if we're looking about common ground places, it seems very important to me that if there's going to be much more action at the higher ed level, that we bring together the federal agencies that focus on workforce and higher ed and create better pathways.
And if we're concerned about what parents care about, they care about safety.
So this will go across K-12 on up.
But they also care about their child's ability to engage in the career and post-secondary.
And we haven't really talked about that as an opportunity.
We need to really move away from some of the culture war stuff, the polarization stuff, the telling other people what they need to do, and really focus on what government can offer.
Good government.
And I would add, you know, this is probably one of the top opportunities for bipartisan collaboration is fixing workforce development.
I mean, I wrote a piece in advance of this, potentially anticipating a Kamala Harris win, that was talking about how she has virtually no mention of free college or student loan forgiveness or doubling the Pell Grant in her, you know, in her stated policy positions, at least the 2024 version of her does not.
But there's a lot of talk about expanding apprenticeships, creating more opportunities for workers without college degrees, implementing skills-based hiring throughout the federal government.
This is an issue where Democrats have really realized they need to tack to the center.
And if there's kind of one area where we might see a divided Congress kind of work together to fix, it would probably be workforce development.
Wait, one quip on this, not on the K-12 thing.
So if you talk to any long-suffering or recovering superintendent someplace, they'll say that even though they only get 10% of their money from the USDA or threat, they get 90% of the regulation.
So there is an opportunity to lift a burden there that could have a big effect at the local level.
Right.
And before we jump to like, well, let's focus on workforce, like we do need to address what's going on with K-12 education.
So I do think a strong message from DC, from Congress, from the Trump administration, that it matters what's happened with learning loss.
It matters what's happened with chronic absenteeism.
It matters that we had $190 billion in federal emergency COVID-era funding that I believe at the last event like this you said was essentially lit on fire, and sometimes I say flesh down the toilet like we.
We showed that fully funding schools does not magically solve the the academic struggles that so many of our our schools have right now, and so I do think a Trump administration can't immediately just move to let's let's address workforce issues, let's let's fix Title IX.
They need to, but they need to immediately move to fixing the Title IX stuff and and skip over the fact that we just had the COVID era expose what was already happening, which is severely declining academic results in our schools, and we need to take that seriously.
The federal government can't fix that, but the federal government can maybe redirect what's going on with Title I funding, which also has increased significantly, like pay attention to how the the federal funds are allocated rather than just continuing to increase the funds and and hope it works out this time.
President, I want to pull on one thing that you mentioned and then get back to the k-12 stuff.
But on the skills-based hiring, that is something that's sort of bipartisan, but I don't necessarily know that our audience is going to understand that.
So can you just build that out a little bit?
Sure, when we talk about skills-based hiring, basically what we mean by that is jobs that you know nominally require a bachelor's degree on the job posting.
Getting rid of that bachelor's degree requirement and instead looking at sort of what sort of skills do people have?
You know what sorts of alternative credentials or work experience might they have that might equivalently qualify them for that job.
And this was an executive order that actually President Trump in his first term did back in 2020 to try and implement this throughout the federal government.
Kamala Harris said on the campaign trail she wanted to do it again, but I guess harder this time.
I don't know.
But it is an issue that we have seen implemented a lot at the state level.
I think it's where up to 20 states now have announced their governors have said we're going to get rid of degree requirements for most jobs in the state executive branch.
That's Republicans and Democrats.
We're seeing a lot of private employers jump on this train as well.
So that's something where there's some alignment potentially between the parties.
One where there's not a whole lot of alignment or doesn't seem to have been student loan forgiveness, which we've talked about more than once.
Can you just tell us what's the recent action there and how different a turn are we taking?
So, you know, the Biden administration, student loan forgiveness was one of the signature issues that they tried to enact via executive order.
They have done, I think, four major student loan cancellation plans, most of which have been either completely struck down or stalled, blocked in the court system.
Kamala Harris, I'm not sure whether she was going to continue with that.
She really didn't mention this on the campaign trail.
I think they kind of figured this out that this was going to be sort of a losing issue for them.
And I think President Trump will probably put the gabosh on all the loan cancellation plans that are kind of currently working their way through the Department of Education.
I think the big challenge, though, will be available.
Although, President, what's that comment?
Because it was under Trump during COVID that we started the loan repayment pause, which then snowballed into kind of the forgiveness plans.
How confident are you that Trump 2.0 will actually say, you know what, we're going to pull the plug on all the loan forgiveness activity versus keeping some version of it?
Well, so I think the original decision to first enact the student loan payment pause and then extend it past January 20th, 2021, you know, I think that was a decision made from an administrative standpoint where they said, you know, it's just going to be too complicated for us to transition everybody back into repayment right now.
Let's just make it the next administration's problem.
Then, of course, you saw the Biden administration extend that payment pause again and again until people were not paying their student loans for about three and a half years.
So I don't know if there's a whole lot of energy within Trump world to try and do that again, but I do think that they are going to face a major challenge in January when a whole bunch of people who are not necessarily paying their student loans right now, which is about 60% of borrowers are still not making payments after the pause expired.
A lot of them are going to start becoming severely delinquent on their loans.
A lot of them are going to head into default.
And that could be a major, you know, a major headache that the next Trump administration kind of has to deal with.
And it's something that's kind of underrated right now in the discussion.
Let me ask quickly, do a little jiu-jitsu with our name here.
What will the 2024 elections mean for education?
Look, if you look at how education impacted the 2024 elections, there's a huge split by college-educated voters and non-college-educated voters.
I think it intersects with the student loan cancellation part of this and also just the contests we've had on college campuses that have really been poorly perceived.
What does this sort of nexus mean, especially when we have a Trump administration for just the respect for higher ed in America moving forward?
Rick, can you take that one off?
Yeah, I mean, you know, as has been widely commented, the biggest fault line at this point in American politics is not race, it's education.
College-educated voters have migrated steadily to the left over the last 10, 15 years, and folks who have not gone to college have migrated steadily right.
This plays out certainly in some of these value debates that Heather just alluded to, which I'm sure we'll come back to, and how do we think about the role values play in this?
And it also has played, I think, into things like distrust of elite institutions, distrust of the media, in which there's a sense, and those of you who spent any time looking at social media last night, you saw just the extraordinary frustration from, I think, Trump world at the way they are perceived and described in so much of the mainstream media and in the mainstream media outlets,
this huge difficulty comprehending how all of these people could engage in behavior which is seen as just fundamentally illegitimate.
So I think that's the backdrop.
And the problem for colleges, I think, is that they have very directly steered into that.
I mean, I remember in 2016 when the president at the University of Michigan spoke to thousands on campus, lamenting how we are all disheartened by last night, as if it was just obvious that every member of 60 or 70,000 in the University of Michigan community was obviously obviously had pulled the lever for Hillary Clinton.
There was just a mindset, I think, that took place.
This accelerated in 2020, both between the pandemic and then during, you know, after the killing of George Floyd.
And I think what higher ed finds itself at now is this point, where it has steered so far to the left, not only of the new administration, but of the media and voter and certainly of kind of working class Americans, that there's just this fundamental disconnect.
And so I think what you have seen with the embrace of neutrality and institutional neutrality, what you've seen with campuses trying to put new guardrails in place regarding protest, what you've seen with some of these efforts around efforts to create new campus centers is both an effort from the outside, from the right, to drag campuses back to a place that's more reflective of the whole state community, but also I think you see the part on a lot of college leaders who feel like they're stumbling at the edge of the cliff.
How do they figure out how to backpedal in a way that's credible and where they can actually maintain the respect of the campus community?
And I think we're going to see a lot of this playing out over the next few years.
I think one of the challenges though is that we're conflating political ideology with civility and our nation's identity as Americans and in democracy.
And so it's not just that people are concerned.
You even questioned the dark, the way the New York Times described the Trump campaign.
I think when you talk to parents and everyday families, they want their kids to be nice, to have treat each other with civility, and to treat each other fairly.
And the rhetoric is so high and negative that it's very easy to say, politicians should be out of the schoolhouse, right?
It's very easy.
Lots of people agree with that.
We also want to have sort of a sense of like our rights and values and public institutions respect those.
And so I wonder, like, is it just an ideological divide, or is it that we actually would just like to have more respect and civility in the way we debate these things?
So, I mean, I think, I mean, A, that's a completely valid distinction.
And look, even those of us who, you know, were happy with the way last night's elections generally came out, I'm the first to concede that I think Trump, you know, even in his victory remarks, kept detouring into things which were both uncivil and unproductive.
So sure, absolutely.
And it's not just, oh, Rick, you're a snowflake.
I mean, the way that we talk and engage matters.
So I totally agree.
On the other hand, I think part of the problem on the right is that we saw colleges that in 2016 were bringing students before biased response teams for chalking a Trump for president on the sidewalk.
That this was something for which you could be reported to campus.
This was problematic behavior.
We saw campuses lecturing about microaggressions repeatedly.
Students were brought up.
Lauren Kitness at Northwestern University was brought up on Title IX charges because she wrote a scholarly article critiquing Title IX.
And then suddenly, after October 7th, when we saw campus protests burning flags, when we saw Jewish students barred from campus at UCLA, when we saw students threatened and bullied on video that went viral, suddenly higher ed was saying, well, no, no, it's complicated.
We have to have a great deal of respect for these strong points of view.
All of that talk of microaggression turned out to feel extraordinarily insincere and hypocritical.
And so I think what you see on the right, and again, this is complicated, I don't want to speak, there's absolutely a civility problem in much of American life right now.
But I think what, you know, for somebody like me, and I'll only speak for myself, the problem is not that campuses are being civil.
It is a problem, is that campuses are using talk of civility as an ideological weapon to silence certain perspectives, to advance certain viewpoints.
And that is the problem that I'd like to see campuses address.
And I think that's what you're going to see a Trump 2.0 potentially aggressively moving the counter.
Can I jump on this?
Because I think there were two points that got kind of raised there.
And one is totally agree on the civility point.
You know, we run a fellowship that's about political civility, left, right-center people together.
It's like you, it's hard to hate up close, and that is like a very important thing to me.
So on the one hand, I think there is like a fallacy to the way that people are thinking about schools, like all schools, and in particular K-12 schools, which is that there is some magical world in which there is no politics, no culture.
There are culture wars, which I just use as a shorthand, because there is consistently a war for the culture, right?
Like who we are as Americans, our institutions, in particular our schooling institutions, are places that transmit values.
To have a valueless school is kind of like not to have a school, right?
So instead of accepting that, instead of thinking, oh, how do we extricate this?
Maybe we should just accept that this is like a core part of it.
And that's a different conversation, I think.
So I just want to put that out there.
The second thing, though, and here I will shiv my party, is like you can't be the party of college-educated people and not have a K-12 strategy to make more college-educated people.
Like if you were at the RISE summit last year at the Reagan Institute, where Dr. Joe Biden showed up to give remarks on the president's behalf, it was very clear what the agenda was.
Pre-K and college and loan forgiveness.
That was it.
Pre-K and loan forgiveness.
Everything that goes on in between, like we don't know what that is, right?
And so I feel like there's just like such a this is such a drop ball.
This is so outrageous.
And at least you can disagree with it, but you know, Kay Brumley, Kirsten Baszler, Amy Gudera, these are state superintendents.
These are red state state superintendents.
They have K-12 agendas.
Science of reading, improved teacher pay, expand school choice, like no charter caps, all of these things.
Like there is at least something in the vacuum.
So I don't want to skip over this.
This would have been a great opportunity for presidential leadership to be like, here's what we care about on K-12.
And at least on, you know, Democrats still need to answer that problem right now.
Jerelle, let's be honest as to why the party does not have a K-12 agenda.
And you mentioned.
Would you like a softball?
Yeah.
Thank you very much for that.
And you mentioned Joe Biden, who is a very proud union member.
So the union NEA and AFT likely made it very clear to the party, we got this.
We got you.
We take dues from our members and we spend millions of dollars to elect you.
You'll do what we want.
So the union-controlled politicians kept their hands off of K-12.
The AFT, the American Federations of Teachers, is a bit of a misnomer because there are actually something like six AFL-CIO bargaining units within that entity.
Only one is K-12 teachers.
The other are early childhood providers, graduate students, and individuals who work in higher ed, and then a rapidly growing health care unit.
So anything that you see in which is why growing pre-K makes so much sense.
Yes, that is my point.
So you're saying that they were addressing things on the other side of K-12 because they're like, no, no, no, we've got this, but we want more unionized jobs.
So please grow these other entities through an agenda so that we can have more unionized workers, Senina Stews.
I want to say one thing as the K-12 girl and maybe the Democrat on the stage, but I think that, oh, that's you too.
You too?
Oh, I didn't even know.
And there is a real art and skill today.
Well, I think growing jobs is probably a good thing at this point in our country.
And in fact, we need more men, to speak of the gender gap, in these care work and in these education jobs.
And for a long time, 30, 40, 50 years, we've seen a feminization of the profession.
We also need more diversity in our teaching ranks.
And attacks on DEI, however poorly done, won't get us there.
We have to be committed.
Also, an unbundling of the system, to use your word, is also not going to get us there.
Because the vast majority of kids are in public schools.
And your point about funding is, I think, still an open question about whether we're actually fully funding our public schools.
So go get a voucher in Arizona.
You can afford a trampoline.
Can you afford a high-quality education with that voucher?
And I think that's really important before we just settle that because we've got a lot of pandemic.
Let's get there.
Before we jump in, I got to do this one thing now, because this is really important.
And the research on diverse teachers is really good, totally there for that, right?
But this whole thing about bundled, unbundled, and diversity, I think is worth taking on.
What we have organized is the best way to segregate education in America.
And it is assigning kids to school based on where they live.
And that is giving, like, the schools today are more segregated than they were before Brown.
So I think the argument that trying another way, maybe open enrollment, maybe like other ways to bring kids, like we should try that because we know what we have right now, which is like the most brilliant way to make sure that a black kid never sees a white student in the classroom with them.
Adjust their moments.
But before we do, it seemed like we talked about the Harris campaign not really having a K-12 agenda.
Does the Trump campaign have a stated K-12 agenda that I missed?
I mean, there's the to, I think it's the Republican platform that basically dropped in the summer.
That's what I've been attributing to.
It was a little bit more on that.
Well, I mean, there was a compendium of Trump tweets.
So social.
But, you know, I mean, it's interesting.
Folks should also keep in mind that President-elect Trump has also repeatedly disavowed anything to do with Project 2025.
And so in reading these tea leaves, there's, you know, certainly the Harris campaign tried to promote the notion that Trump was running on Project 25.
Trump consistently said he was not.
So what relationship that will have to whatever comes out as a strategy?
Let me bring it back actually to something Heather just said about the DEI piece.
I think, you know, Heather, I heard you say in the last week or two, I thought a point which I found really compelling, was you said, look, well, if we're going to make the case for publicly funded or public education, it's because there are certain values we have in common.
And I heard you talk at that point, I think you mentioned the Pledge of Allegiance, my country, you know, all the children knowing my country, Tissavy, as it kind of shared touchstones.
And I would argue, if you look at the crosstabs last night on the election, that Trump has done historically well for Republican among Latino voters, that he did extraordinarily well.
Best Republican has done with black voters in half a century or more, and particularly well with black men.
That part of that appeal was that the Democratic Party is nervous about those traditional markers of shared American identity.
That the 1619 project, which was promoted by the Biden Department of Education, talks about America as a slaveocracy.
In San Francisco during the pandemic, they were trying to strip Abraham Lincoln's name off of schools.
Forget Thomas Jefferson and George Washington.
That there has been this disdain for popular shared culture.
And I think one of the opportunities here is to the extent that as Democrats are asking themselves what happened with the Latino vote last night, how do they kind of recapture kind of a feel for the working class coalition that so famously carried them for decades?
Part of it is I think they need to ask whether this Oberlin sociology professorial kind of faculty set has taken them into a place on culture, on traditional markers, on patriotism that is anathema to a huge share of Americans, however they feel about tax policy, however they feel about abortion.
And that seems to me a real opportunity for us to get back to a conversation which is grounded in we can all agree on these things, even if there's some extremists on either end who are uncomfortable with them.
And that provides a foundation for moving into a conversation about the science of reading, about math instruction where we don't, you know, California is disdained eighth grade algebra because it's racist.
Oregon has said asking students to show their work in math is racist.
I think we have an opportunity to get back to shared values that starts to shove aside some of the excesses that I think have distorted our conversations over the last five or ten years.
The distortion that we're seeing, not just in society, but in K-12 on into college campuses, I think could probably be traced back to the education schools, right?
So if you're training up teachers to think the way that you're describing, and then those teachers aren't learning the science of reading and are ignoring other aspects of like good quality teaching, but being programmed, and then they're going into the K-12 system, you're making society sicker.
So there is an opportunity that the Trump administration maybe has not addressed in this articulated K-12 agenda that you were alluding to to really tackle the ed schools and figure out what's going on there, trace the federal funding that's going to those and find out how some levers can be tweaked to change the culture and to improve the quality of instruction that budding teachers are getting.
But as far as the K-12 agenda from the Trump administration, he's made it very clear that he supports universal school choice, that he'll sign what's now called the Educational Choice for Children Act, which is a federal tax credit.
And he's made it very clear that there won't be men in women's sports, which we can interpret as plans to address the Biden administration's Title IX regulation.
Those two things are huge, and I think a robust agenda right there.
And then there's other things that we've seen.
I did hear him articulated as I want them to teach arithmetic and reading, but not woke.
So I did hear that articulation, which fits in there.
Jenny, let me ask you about school choice.
Really interesting results last night.
On the one hand, Republicans did very well.
This is definitely a Republican issue.
We've seen it sweep red states in terms of ESAs over the past five or six years.
And in two states where Trump took the vote two to one, essentially, we had these referenda on school choice that went down two to one.
Help me understand that.
Yeah, absolutely not surprised.
I think any school choice advocate who's been around for a little while would be like, yeah, of course that was going to happen.
The unions are very good at throwing a lot of money at these ballot initiatives.
They always have.
They always will.
It's not the way to move something that should be handled through the legislative process and is very effectively being handled through the legislative process.
Over 30 states have private scholarship programs or what's called education savings counts or ESAs.
12 states now have nearing approaching universal school choice.
Legislative process is fine.
For those ballot initiatives in Nebraska, Colorado, and Kentucky, you're talking about over $7 million in Little Nebraska that the NEA, the National Education Association, and then their Nebraska affiliate put into an organization to oppose.
That's a lot of ad buys right there.
That's a lot of money, $7 million in Nebraska.
And that is not even accounting for them flipping the switch and telling their members how to vote.
Jimmy, let me push back a little because I'm curious how you'll respond.
I mean, one thing is it seems to me part of the momentum by the pro-choice side in the abortion debate has been just remarkable success at initiatives, which has intimidated their opponents.
And this is kind of the opposite of that.
And the second is, I was in Kentucky last week, and one of the things that folks were telling me was that, I mean, Harris just outspent Trump two to one, and that didn't seem to kind of turn the tide there.
But, you know, they were telling me that a lot of the pro-school choice referenda stuff came down to, you know, Rand Paul talking to the camera, talking about how markets work, and folks talking about how your local public schools stink.
And it seems to me that if there are any messages that generally don't work for the school choice advocates, it's market theory as swell, your local schools.
And I thought we had learned that after 2020, after 30 years, and moving into, look, everybody should have options to make sure their kids.
And I mean, you're closer to these referenda than I am.
Is that actually how these things got argued?
And why didn't it?
And if so, why was this not driven by more effective messaging, fueled by what we've seen folks learn over the last three or four years?
Okay, so specific to Kentucky, I followed his wife, Kelly Paul, more, and I felt like she messaged it very effectively.
But you're up against a machine.
You're up against a political juggernaut, directly spending and being very clear about how to vote on this one thing, or else all public schools will be closed.
You're killing public education.
The fear-mongering is always going to turn off people's critical thinking to any sort of alternative.
But they call Trump a fascist, and he won the state two to one.
That's fear-mongering, too.
Why was that?
It's a very narrow issue, though, versus a complex issue or a complex vote that involves like how much my groceries cost or how inflation's in fact.
And Trump doesn't go to your neighborhood school.
I mean, here's the one thing I would say: because it's like, think about, let's book in Massachusetts, right?
So when they did question.
Talk about what they did.
So when they did question two, which would have like I can't even come up with an adjective that would describe how small the increase in the number of charter schools would have been, right?
This was 10 years ago.
Yeah, that's right.
Statewide referendum when Charlie Baker was governor.
They spent a ton of money on it.
I think, you know, for folks watching not here, the charter schools in Massachusetts have been studied in great detail.
They're highly effective.
They're wonderful at closing the achievement gaps for low-income kids of color.
They've done everything.
Mount Holyoke was like, nah.
So that went down two to one.
There you go.
Again, right?
And the teachers union in Massachusetts was like, they're going to put one in your place.
They're going to disrupt your local schooling, whatever, right?
So I do, so that happened then.
And yesterday, Massachusetts, right, puritanical shining light on the hill of high standards, also voted basically two to one to nuke its college, its high school exit exam, right?
Which we get, and we have another conversation about standards.
I would just talk about the exit exam.
Yeah, no, which I actually think is very important because a lot of people think that, well, if you're talking about a more open system, that you don't want accountability.
And I'm like, no, this is being eroded from the left right now in very significant ways.
And I think the Massachusetts referendum is super important.
That's right, that's right.
I just highlight those two things to say that, like, whenever you're doing a referendum change on an existing thing, it's incredibly hard.
And this is why Arizona worked because they had the program already.
The Arizona ESA was universal.
There were people using it.
It was basically a positive right at the time that you couldn't take away.
And then when people are like, yo, we're going to take it away, they're like, no, I'm not having that.
And that's very different than Colorado, Nebraska, and Kentucky.
And just on Massachusetts, the union spent $14 million to kill the exit exams.
Just want to put that.
So unions are political and spend money, y'all.
There's another lesson in this MCAS defeat, which I support the MCAS, which I think I'm still in love with accountability.
Local control won.
Not only did teachers' unions or any unions spend money, local control won.
And unfortunately, we still have communities that have a lot of just disparate outcomes.
And local control won in Massachusetts.
Well, we've been seeing this as ASDs too, though.
There's an important distinction here, too.
We're talking about MCAS accountability.
So this is the Massachusetts school reform, which was done 30 years ago, 1993, Briscoe, et cetera.
Bipartisan, they adopted an exit exam for high schoolers in 2001.
10 years later, Massachusetts was scoring highest in the country in reading and math, fourth and eighth grade, international at the level of South Korea and Japan, the top of the class.
Here's the thing: accountability has got a bad name, both because we made a hash out of No Child Left Behind when given an opportunity, and also because we have backed away from kind of eat your vegetables education.
I just love teachers.
But the other part of this is that I would argue that MCAS graduation requirements are not K-12 accountability.
That's about testing kids every year and giving schools A's or F's and rating teachers.
This is about: should kids know how to do English, math, and science at a high school level before you give them a high school diploma?
That strikes me as different from accountability.
This is about making sure we're not just passing kids along because it's easier.
And Massachusetts voters, after having this stuff work for them for 30 years, said, nah, 59-41.
Let me ask you about the eat your vegetables question because I really like it when politicians ask our schools to like.
And I didn't see much of it.
Is there, I mean, we have pandemic learning laws.
We have, don't get me started on chronic absenteeism.
We also have a sort of, you know, no one seems to care that much about rigor.
Is there somebody somewhere in election night that took a stand for eat your vegetables?
No.
And can I drop two things on this?
Because I think they're very important.
So one is we should not ignore that part of this is symptomatic of something else.
I just think, Excuse the term of art.
We screwed so many kids over so hard by keeping schools long closed longer than they needed to that when the news started to come out about how bad that was, people like, I don't want to see this information anymore.
And so one of our EDs, he said to me, it's like the national debt now when you talk to people about what's going on with student performance and learning loss, which really stuck with me.
So that's like living here on one side.
At the same time, you could argue we've almost never really had a system of accountability.
At our best, we've had transparency.
School grading, all but like how many, like the act of holding the schools accountable, changing who was in charge, reconfiguring them, whatever, like that almost never happened.
So if you accept that at best we had a system of accountability, then that changes what we think about right now, like substantially.
And I actually think that's probably a good thing.
If we could get to honesty about like, look, we're in the information phase and we're accountability people, like we care about these interventions and stuff.
But if for the next five years, the news is going to be so bad that nobody's actually going to do anything about it, how do you make sure a parent knows how their kid is doing?
Right?
That's a policy question.
Like, let's talk about that.
Should you be able to go any place you want and get a diagnostic to find out where you because the schools don't want to do it.
Let's talk about that.
Should we give you some money?
Let's talk about that.
Let me push back.
The one place I think maybe you see a little bit of eat your vegetables is the science of reading stuff that Durrell and Jenny have talked about.
So Mike Braun last night in Indiana signaled clearly during the campaign that they're going to keep on keeping on with what Governor Holcomb has done.
About, you know, and partly this is about taking it to the schools of education and telling them however you guys would like to teach reading, here's how you're going to teach reading.
Partly it's about telling teachers.
But it's also, there's a larger cultural debate.
There's a solda story piece by Emily Hatterford, which has also worked very hard to say to teachers, you guys are victims of bad advice too.
And I think that's an important part of kind of the shift.
I don't know if in this kind of brittle, angry, very online debate that we're kind of in the middle of, if it's possible to have that kind of multi-layer push done successfully.
This conversation is really interesting to me because this movement away from accountability at the K-12 level, we're seeing the exact opposite in higher ed right now.
That accountability is very much in vogue.
The Republicans' main higher ed reform bill would create this very complex system of carrots and sticks, probably a very effective one to try and get colleges to shape up.
We're seeing movement at the state level too.
I mean, Texas just passed this massive overhaul of community college funding formulas to actually only fund the colleges if they're getting their graduates into good-paying jobs.
And I think if there is a Republican trifecta, we'll see what happens with the House.
That's probably going to be a major push.
And I think it's just very interesting that at higher ed, we're seeing this push for accountability and that we seem to be going almost in the opposite direction.
Mr. President, say more.
So the College Cost Reduction Act.
Yeah.
So Chairman Fox has pushed in the House.
Obviously, one, she's term-limited.
So even if the Republicans keep the House, there's a new chair.
And two, what's been the response from Democrats?
Is it possible to see getting to, say, 60 votes in the Senate or Democrats passing their version of a bill if they take the House?
Yeah.
So she has about, I think, 160, 180 co-sponsors on the College Cost Reduction Act in the House right now, including the folks who will probably be who are the leading contenders to be chair of the Edinburgh Workforce Committee.
So, I mean, I think that, you know, even though Fox is term limited, this or something like this will probably set the agenda on higher education for Republicans going forward.
I think that they might have originally been hoping to get some Democratic co-sponsors on this.
I mean, there were some sweeteners in there.
But honestly, I think the reality is that Democrats in Congress right now are just very captive to the higher education lobby, and they're very going to much resist any kind of form of accountability, which is a shift from a few years ago when you did have Elizabeth Warren and folks like that, you know, pushing accountability for colleges.
You don't see that much.
But you can't do anything like CCRA through reconciliation, right?
You would have to pass legislation out there.
You could do components of it through reconciliation.
But not the accountability pieces, or could you?
You could potentially do the accountability pieces.
I mean, a lot will depend on what the Senate parliamentarian says, but a lot of those accountability pieces are directly affecting revenue in terms of requiring colleges to pay back a portion of unpaid student loans, cutting off aid eligibility to some schools.
I mean, these directly affect the federal budget, so it's possible they would get through on reconciliation, but we'll see.
But to repeat that, for the folks who aren't as expert, that means that just if, in case the House actually goes to the Republicans, that doesn't mean it's a slam dunk to run these things through.
There's going to be someone at the Department of Education who's going to need to fill that post.
Cardona is going to be out before too long.
Who's going to fill it?
And what do you want to see them do?
Is he going to reapply like a charter school rework?
Before we speculate, I just want to call everyone's attention to Rick's piece on Cardona.
I think you have some opinions on the fellowship.
It was paywall.
Yeah, well, and then I interviewed.
I'd like to see the reapply interview.
I think that'd be another thing.
I interviewed Chairwoman Fox for an upcoming podcast, and she shared your sentiment that this has been an extremely poor leadership in a failed Department of Education.
But I don't know.
Darrell mentioned Cade Brumley, Louisiana.
State Superintendent.
State Superintendent and Chief.
And that name gets thrown around a lot.
But we're hearing a lot about higher education here.
And we haven't mentioned the FAFSA debacle and the impact there.
There's a lot of cleanup to do when it comes to FAFSA and when it comes to higher education.
So great if there's leadership with some serious financial experience and higher ed experience.
Yeah.
I mean, the FAFSA for next year has already been delayed by two months.
There are still, I think, GAO identified 20 outstanding technical issues with the form that they just still haven't fixed.
So, I mean, this is going to be a debacle next year as well.
And, you know, Cardona has really done his successor no favors here.
He's leaving them a lot of messes to clean up.
FAFSA is just one, but also, you know, the student loan repayment transition.
He had the on-ramp, kind of this transition period for loan repayment expired a couple months ago, and so people are going to start going into delinquency on their loans.
That's going to hit right around inauguration day, something the next Secretary of Education is going to have to clean up.
You know, on FAFSA, I just want to say, I mean, let's be fair, is it really reasonable to expect somebody to simplify a digital form in just four years?
I mean, yeah, so I think there's, here's my two cents.
I think one of the things that the Republicans would benefit from immensely is if they have somebody go in the department who is value-aligned and has a track record of being able to run large bureaucracies and actually knowing the law inside out, partly because for Republicans, the Department of Ed isn't away game.
A lot of, you know, if you actually go around and you pull the folks there, they are not going to be generally kind of less.
That's why I went with Glacial earlier.
But away game is better.
So, you know, for me, the obvious call on this is Kate Brumley, who not only is Louisiana's veteran state chief, a career public school educator, a teacher, a principal, a former superintendent, who is, you know, managed remarkably to do science of reading, to do.
Cares about results, cares about results.
And to do kind of shared values.
So that's what another way to go, especially given how central higher ed is going to be, is we mentioned a moment ago that the chair of the House Education and Workforce Committee is going to have to turn over the gavel in a couple months.
She knows all of these issues inside out and has driven legislation.
I think Virginia Fox could be a fascinating appointment.
All right.
Well, it is time to go to audience QA.
We have a couple of rules here for asking questions at events.
Please give your name and then ask a question.
If you don't ask a question, I'll cut you off.
So if you can raise your hands, we have some folks.
There's a question up front here.
Also, just to repeat to those online or on C-SPAN, you can tweet us questions at 2024Election.
Hashtag 2024Election.
Mark Lerner, I've been involved in DC's charter school movement from the beginning, about 30 years ago, and frankly, we haven't seen the results that we thought we would.
There's still, even pre-COVID, probably a 60% gap between affluent and poor kids.
I'm wondering, for those of us in favor of school choice, should we give up on charter schools and just go to ESAs?
I hope not.
No, no.
Although I do think there are lots of ways for them to play well together in states where that's allowed.
I think charter schools have a lot of strategic expertise that can be very beneficial in the ESA world.
And I think in particular, ESAs bring down the cost to try.
So if you want to do something new, you get 10 kids with 10 families in one part of the building instead of having to authorize a whole new thing and get a building and start at 500 kids.
I would just say that charter schools are on a continuum and the continuum is growing.
And the continuum is important.
They used to be the fulcrum between private school choice and open enrollment.
And now there's a whole universe of activity happening over here, which I call like the half bundle, and then there's homeschooling and go your own way and all this other stuff.
And so that has changed where the balance point is.
So I know that's not a particular thing in D.C., but there are things that charter schools specifically do very well, especially those formerly known as no excuses like Prince, which is closed achievement gas for low-income kids of color.
I'm on the board of Success Academy.
I'm ride or die for it.
They are an important feature of the ecosystem and they need to be protected and supported.
Any thoughts on how the charter ecosystem might be affected by this election or is it cruise control either way?
I would okay.
I think that it's time to go back and revisit all of the concessions of the last 30 years in charter world because particularly at the state level, there are states where people are writing checks to families and saying, you figure it out.
And at the same time, being like, oh, and there are no more caps on charter schools, e.g. Arkansas, for instance.
If that's the risk tolerance for people, all of the unnecessary things that have accreted on how charter schools are regulated that basically make them like the public schools that they're not supposed to be, I think we should revisit that.
I also think it's a really good time to think about revisiting how we talked about school finance overall, a little bit to Heather's point earlier.
The whole, like, hey, you can do this, but you don't get a building, or you choose this option, your education is worth 50% as much as if you choose this option.
Like, I don't think a kid's education should be worth less because of where they live.
So, that's a thing we can revisit, as well as why local property taxes are so ensconced in how we fund schools.
Like, there are all kinds of negative incentives that are sort of built into that that dissuade open enrollment and a whole bunch of other stuff.
So, with a million fewer kids in the system and fiscal cliffs coming all over the place, like, there's never been a better time to revisit how we support all of America's kids so they can become the best version of themselves.
Jenny, I just want to follow up with you.
Have charters sort of sunset in the Trump coalition?
Is it the sort of dusk for them and it's private school choice, or is there a major play there?
I can't speak for the Trump coalition.
I don't think, again, I heard keep men out of women's sports, but I didn't hear revise the charter school program restrictions.
But I am fairly certain that we will see a revision to the federal charter school program funding mechanism because the Biden administration put on a lot of restrictions that will hurt the growth of the charter movement.
And I think we're going to see support from Senator Cassidy, likely help committee chair, and for innovation and expanding options.
And I think charters still have a role.
Got a question right here in the center?
Is that the political center or the you'll see?
Hi, Ethan Pollock with Jobs for the Future, and thank you so much for organizing this, especially so quickly, too, and responding to events last night.
I actually have two questions about higher education finance.
So, you know, one is about the federal loan program, which obviously is mired in a lot of legal process.
So, one question is kind of what's the future of the federal loan program?
And the second is then a really wonderful event back in May on private, you know, the role of kind of private lenders in higher education financing.
And so, I'm curious also what's the future role of private financing in higher education?
Sure, I can take that one.
So, we are in 2025 next year.
I mean, I mentioned the College Cost Reduction Act, which would put some limits on federal lending.
Another thing that we're going to see next year is the expiration of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, and it's a bipartisan priority to extend a lot of those tax cuts.
That's going to need to be paid for somehow, you know, potentially limiting.
We could also potentially limit loans to graduate students because that is a huge cost right now.
The graduate student loan program is going to be at about $130 billion net loss over the coming 10 years.
And so, I would expect that, you know, Republicans, if they control Congress, which looks likely, are probably going to take a look at some of those programs as cost savers.
And given the recognition that I think the unlimited loans for graduate students have played a role in tuition inflation, have also led to the proliferation of a lot of very silly master's degrees out there.
And, of course, that's also going to create more of a role for private lending because if you do pull back on the federal lending, well, there might be still some good programs out there that deserve financing.