Trump's Education Agenda is Unpopular

Pay attention to the backlash among Trump's own supporters

When I want help making sense of the world these days, I pick up the phone and call one of my friends who supported Donald Trump. If you’re suprised that I count Trump backers among my pals, consider what I do for a living—I talk to people. And inevitably I end up liking some of them, including some people with whom I have vehement disagreements on all sorts of political issues.

One of my new friends is a welding teacher in Houston named Brett Guillory. He and I met on the site formerly known as Twitter a few months ago. He’s part of the growing movement of conservatives in Texas who are vocally opposed to school vouchers. After he responded to something I’d posted by pronouncing that “vouchers aren’t MAGA. Not even close,” I had to know more. One conversation led to another and today I feel comfortable counting Brett, who felt so strongly that the 2020 election was stolen that he wanted to challenge his congressman, as a new friend.

When I interviewed Brett for my recent podcast episode on conservative opposition to vouchers in Texas, he told me that Trump’s vocal support for school choice was a major red flag for him, leading him to conclude that Trump has been ‘bought’ by billionaires. Since then, the debate over vouchers in Texas has gotten even hotter, and both Trump and Elon Musk have weighed in, urging legislators to drag the controversial voucher bill over the finish line. The message here is obvious: fall in line, Trump backers.

As we saw in Kentucky, Trump’s endorsement of vouchers was not effective. His own supporters voted overwhelmingly against a ballot question that would have OK’d sending taxpayer dollars to private religious schools. Et tu Texas? I put that question to Brett.

“I no longer considers myself a Trump supporter,” Brett told me. *I voted for him multiple times. I am now convinced that he is just another rich guy that the wealthy want in that spot so that they can stay wealthy.” Nor is Brett keeping his opinoin to himself. “I’m educating friends and family to just look at the signs.” And there is no clearer sign, says Brett, than Trump’s support for school vouchers.

Billionaire backlash

As I wrote here a few weeks ago, the spector of billionaires-gone-wild is spurring a bipartisan backlash. If you want to see what that looks like, just head to the Lonestar State, where the billionaire-backed pressure to enact school vouchers has reached a frenzy. Individual billionaires, including Jeff Yass, Betsy DeVos, along with homegrown oligarchs, have drenched the state in money in an effort to get their prized policy adopted. So when voters who are already concerned that their state legislature has been ‘bought’ see Trump and Musk weigh in, the effect is likely the opposite of what voucher proponents intended. Instead of their supporters falling in line behind vouchers, it’s causing them to question who precisely is calling the shots.

Questionable choices

And it’s not just vouchers that have Trump’s own supporters seeing red. As I wrote for Jacobin last month, his selection of Penny Schwinn for #2 at the not-yet-abolished Department of Education triggered a furious response among right-wing culture warriors.

President Trump needs the full story on Penny Schwinn’s education history” in Tennessee, conservative activist Robby Starbuck posted on X, citing Schwinn’s controversial tenure as the state’s schools chief. “Anytime someone claims their desired outcome is equity, understand they’re pushing a communist agenda,” anti-trans-athlete crusader Riley Gaines chimed in: “NO to Penny Schwinn.” Even country star John Rich, best known for being half of the duo behind “Save a Horse (Ride a Cowboy),” weighed in, describing a meeting he’d had with Schwinn about porn in Tennessee schools. “She refused to abolish it. She is not our friend.

Last week, Trump made another highly questionable pick for the department known as ED, plucking Kristen Baesler from North Dakota, where she has been the elected state superintendent of schools, beginning in 2012. The longest serving chief state school officer in the nation, Baesler pledged to help deliver on Trump’s education agenda, including ‘returning education to the states.’ Which is what makes her selection so, well, odd. You see, as the top education official in North Dakota, Baesler was tasked with implementing the controversial Common Core standards, a source of outrage among conservatives and the exact opposite of ‘returning education to the states.’

In fact, when Baesler ran for office most recently she did so without the backing of the North Dakota GOP, which threw its backing behind a conservative Christian homeschooling advocate. And while she’s a supporter of school choice, she prefers the kind with ‘strings’—the view that tax dollars should come with accountability that has fallen out of favor among so many in the GOP these days.

While the selection of Schwinn and Baesler has reassured the center-right school reform crew that, say, Trump really does care about the achievement gap, literacy, etc, it’s also a thumb in the eye of his base. In fact, I can only think of a single other nominee who has attracted this kind of ire: Florida sheriff Chad Chronister, who was tapped to lead the Drug Enforcement Agency, prompting an uproar on the right over his handling of COVID.

Back to the Core

More than a decade ago, the effort to create federal standards known as the Common Core or ‘Obamacore,’ supercharged the Tea Party movement. Opposition to the standards was bipartisan—critics on the right and the left saw the Common Core, which was funded by Bill Gates, as a federal takeover of education. But it was the grassroots right that really rallied around the cause.

By 2016, conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly was celebrating the end of the Bush dynasty, as evidenced by the “shellacking” of Jeb Bush by Donald Trump in the South Carolina primary. Schlafly attributed Bush’s loss to his support of the Common Core. “Hopefully, the Republican party has returned to its pre-Bush position against any federal role in public or private education.”

Talk to today’s grassroots conservatives—the ones who are opposing school vouchers in Texas and the sort of corporate education reform represented by Jeb Bush, Penny Schwinn and Kristen Baesler—and it’s hard to miss just how much they echo the Tea Party activists who brought down the Common Core. Last time around, they succeeded in bringing down the GOP establishment and ushering in the reign of Donald Trump.

Will they do it again?