President Donald Trump’s wrecking ball has already smashed decades of corrupt educational bureaucracy, and he has boldly planted the flag for school choice in his second term. But if he is to succeed in sending education back to the states and away from the federal government, he should swap out the strategy of former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and others calling for a blanket federal school choice tax credit program and instead take a more shrewd approach — one that puts our military, not progressives, first.
Don’t Bail Out Failing Blue State Governors
Families in Los Angeles or Chicago deserve access to a better education. But they also deserve access to better, more competent local governments in general — those that can ensure their neighborhoods aren’t burned to the ground by wildfires or BLM radicals.
Families sick of their states’ failed policies across the board will either begin flexing their political muscle (as they did in Virginia’s gubernatorial race in 2021) or will continue filling U-Haul fleets out of California and Illinois to school choice havens like Florida. The more that families migrate, the more census-based power will shift in the U.S. House of Representatives to states that are pro-family/education.
Both constitutionally and electorally, it is not President Trump’s duty to absolve blue state governors of the pressure they’re increasingly facing (and the defeats they’re suffering) from pro-school choice challengers and neighbors over this issue.
Empower Red States, not Federal Busybodies
The federal government provides barely ten cents of each dollar going to public K-12 schools, and yet it has slowly smothered our public schools in regulation. It’s a small share of funding, but enough to give D.C. do-gooders a permanent front row seat in the operation of our children’s classrooms.
Having worked to pass universal school choice programs around the country, I respect but disagree with homeschool families who oppose state-level school choice programs due to the threat of government encroachment. States can remain solidly conservative over time.
On the other hand, control of the federal government will ping pong back and forth. With a mere majority vote, Congress could start piling on burdensome requirements. Stacking a federal layer on top of states’ own choice programs would create a new choke point for the left to target.
As an example of the lunacy of the left in this regard, in Arizona, an illegal new decree by the state’s attorney general currently forces families to submit a permission slip explaining why they need to buy pencils for their own children if enrolled in the state ESA program:
The parent must submit the underlying curriculum…along with a reasonable explanation of how the item is connected to the curriculum… (e.g., “These pencils support my student’s second-grade math curriculum because they will allow him to practice writing out fractions.”)
Yet even as my colleagues at the Goldwater Institute are suing to free this program from such ludicrous “accountability” measures and align it once more with statute, Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs has proposed takeovers of private schools’ tuition rates, admissions standards, teaching certification requirements, and financial oversight — knowing that the program cannot be eliminated, but that it can be choked out through enough regulation. All of these same attempts will be made at the federal level at the first opportunity, threatening the massive progress recently made by many states.
A Solution
President Trump should continue pounding the bully pulpit to advance school choice at the state level, but he should also supercharge school choice and the military in one fell swoop.
Trump can leverage existing federal authority over our military to establish national school choice for the men and women of our armed services. Not only would this reinforce the surge in recruiting numbers prioritized by the president and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, it would also give the more than 1 million families who actually do not have the geographic flexibility to control their deployments the ability to regain control of their children’s educational options.
Education expert Lindsey Burke outlined a similar proposal to U.S. House members this past month, and congressional leaders would have little plausible excuse for opposing it.
Such a plan also would avoid stretching the feds any further past their constitutionally enumerated — and ideally limited — footprint across our nation.
From abolishing unconstitutional affirmative action mandates, to pledging the dismantling (or at least downsizing) of the Department of Education, President Trump has already established himself as the most iconoclastic president in American education policy. Now, his legacy in education will depend on whether he can help steer the ship toward truly sending education back to the states and away from the federal government.
Matt Beienburg is the director of education policy at the Goldwater Institute. He also serves as director of the institute’s Van Sittert Center for Constitutional Advocacy.
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