|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
In President-elect Donald Trump’s announcement of Linda McMahon as his nominee for secretary of education, he boasted that “Linda will fight tirelessly to expand ‘Choice’ to every State in America, and empower parents to make the best Education decisions for their families.”
With Alabama currently in the middle of rolling out its school choice program, the CHOOSE Act, exactly how McMahon is going to “fight tirelessly” will affect tens of thousands of school-age children in the state.
Trump’s education policy proposals remained rather light on details during the campaign, but are likely quite ambitious. The preface to Project 2025 called universal school choice “a goal all conservatives and conservative Presidents must pursue” — Trump disavowed the document earlier this year but has drawn heavily from the list of contributors while staffing his second administration.
Recent comments on what support for school choice in Trump’s second term will actually mean may remain elusive, but in 2016, he publicly supported a $20 billion federal program. And in 2019, then-secretary of education Betsy DeVos pitched a less ambitious $5 billion in tax credits.
By comparison, the CHOOSE Act was appropriated “not less than $100 million” a year by the state legislature, with the bill declaring the “intent of the Legislature” to increase appropriations if “necessary to satisfy consumer demand for the program.”
Supplemental federal funding could significantly increase the program’s potential scope. At the current funding level, only 14,000 of the estimated 85,000 Alabama children already not in public schools would be able to participate. Federal money might also prevent Alabama from repeating the mistakes of other states where school choice programs kindled serious budget crises.
A spokesperson for the Alabama Department of Revenue told APR that they “couldn’t say what the impact of any federal initiatives pertaining to the CHOOSE Act would be” yet.
In addition to supporting school choice programs, Trump has repeatedly signaled he supports abolishing the Department of Education, although what that would entail is even more opaque. Back in 2023, he said he planned on “closing up the Department of Education in Washington, DC, and sending all education and education work it needs back to the states.”
State superintendent Dr. Eric Mackey told APR he feels the state Department of Education will be ready for life without a federal counterpart and that the change could be a welcome reversion to the pre-1950s status quo.
“The proper lead role for education is at the state, not federal, level as it has been throughout the history of our country,” Mackey wrote.
He recounted a brief history of the growing involvement of the federal government in public education. Attributing the initial explosion in federal involvement to Cold War fears during the Eisenhower administration, he said the “federal role in education continued to grow – along with federal funding – in almost every administration since that time.”
Mackey specifically mentioned “Title I, Special Education, Title IX, and ADA” as examples of this expansion, and said “the U.S. Department of Education did not appear on the scene until decades later.” (The Department of Education was created in 1979 by President Jimmy Carter when he split up the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, now the Department of Health and Human Services.)
“President-elect Trump will certainly have his own education agenda and initiatives, as all presidents since Eisenhower have,” the state superintendent opined. “However he organizes or reorganizes the federal bureaucracy, we will adapt as we focus on teaching young Alabamians the skills they need to be successful in the future.”
Editor’s Note: This piece was updated to include a statement from the Alabama Department of Revenue.
