President Donald Trump laid out his agenda for education in no uncertain terms in the first days of his second term: expand private school choice and scale back the federal role in education.
A handful of early executive orders illustrated this message. He directed agency leaders to investigate how they could dispense public dollars for school choice, and he called for the secretary of education to facilitate the dismantling of her own department.
In roughly eight months, the U.S. Department of Education under Trump has issued several pieces of guidance telling states how to use existing federal funds and provisions to promote public and private school choice. It has infused hundreds of millions of dollars into charter schools and related programs, and pledged more money to them even as the department proposes to slash its bottom line just about everywhere else.
And Republicans in Congress in July passed the first federal tax credit scholarship program, which could send an unprecedented amount of taxpayer funding to private schools.
Altogether, it represents the federal government’s most aggressive push into school choice—an area where the federal reach has traditionally been limited.
“This is a change in approach, using the power of the federal government to basically incentivize states to jump on board with this,” said Christopher Lubienski, a professor of education policy at Indiana University Bloomington. “So it’s pretty big.”
The statement of priorities from the Trump administration has also been clear.
“They’re prioritizing the expansion of private school choice programs [over] the improvement of public schools,” said Jon Valant, the director of the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution, a nonpartisan research organization.
What the department has done for private schools within existing law
School choice has long been a prominent plank in Republican campaigns, and it has proliferated in Republican-led states, particularly in the last few years. Today, 19 states have at least one private school choice program that’s universally accessible to K-12 students or on track to be, up from zero in early 2022, according to an Education Week analysis.
But although Trump and then-Education Secretary Betsy DeVos championed the policy in the president’s first administration, it remained mostly a state-level issue—until Trump returned to the White House in January.
In his first few weeks, he directed a number of federal agency leaders—including the education secretary, who wasn’t even confirmed to her post yet—to develop ways to expand school choice. The order was, all told, fairly limited in scope. But it led to the Education Department combing through existing provisions in federal law, and, to date, issuing six pieces of guidance detailing how states can use flexibility within the Elementary and Secondary Education Act to shift funding to private schools or services outside of traditional public schools and help families transfer their kids to different schools.
Through memos to state education leaders, the department provided a roadmap for utilizing funds from Title I—the federal program that supports students from low-income families and communities—to allow students to take courses not offered at the public schools they attend or gain college credit. It urged states to loosen standards for labeling schools “persistently dangerous”—a designation that triggers a requirement that families be offered the option of transferring to another public school. It reminded states that students in private schools are entitled to “equitable services,” such as tutoring, counseling, and summer school, paid for with Title I funds. States, the department said in another letter, can also use those dollars to promote school choice to families that wish to leave schools identified as low-performing.
Most recently, the department detailed how states could participate in the Education Flexibility program, which allows them to waive certain requirements under federal law for schools and districts without waiting for the federal department’s review and approval.
The memos encapsulate two of the Education Department’s stated priorities: scaling up school choice options while scaling back the federal government’s hand in education, Valant said.
“A lot of the approach right now, when it comes to implementation, seems to be to figure out, ‘How can we press the existing law as hard as we possibly can in the direction that we want to bend?’” Valant said.
The reach of the memos—particularly among Democratic state leaders, who are largely reluctant to engage with school choice and have aligned themselves with public schools—remains to be seen, Lubienski said.
But the efforts signal the department is “trying to do everything possible that they can to give education back to the states,” said Tommy Schultz, the CEO of the American Federation for Children, an organization that supports school choice.
“All these moves that they’ve been making to enable families and to enable states and local communities to actually have more power over their education decisions, especially when it comes from needing a lever to be pulled from the federal government—this administration has done more than ever to actually provide more freedom in that regard,” he said.
School choice gets a supercharge from congressional Republicans
At the end of the day, the Education Department letters are limited to the confines of existing law and who wants to heed their advice.
But the administration’s school choice actions have stretched far beyond memos to state leaders.
After slashing scores of contracts and grants on anything that seemed to brush up against diversity, equity, and inclusion, the Education Department in May immediately made an additional $60 million available to charter schools. That surge of funding mirrored what Trump proposed in his budget, in which the independently operated public schools were the only K-12 category for which he favored increasing funding.
In September, the department announced it had sent $500 million to charter schools and charter school programs.
And over the summer, with the GOP controlling both chambers of Congress, lawmakers added a provision to Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act that created a private school scholarship program, through which individual taxpayers can receive dollar-for-dollar tax credits for donations to organizations that grant the scholarships.
The legislation, which takes effect in time for taxpayers to claim credits for the 2027 tax year, allows states to decide whether to opt in to the choice provision. Whether Democratic governors choose to participate remains an open question.
“If that grows to the size it could potentially grow to, that is a major change in the federal role in education, and potentially a major expansion both of private school choice programs and also of the federal government’s engagement with private school choice,” Valant said.
Schultz credits the pandemic, during which parents became increasingly dissatisfied with public schools, with giving the Trump administration “a safe landing zone … to make some really bold policy moves.”
“This is in total—in just eight months—probably the biggest expansion, from a federal standpoint, of giving more and more funding to local entities or to parents to control for their children in K-12 in history,” he said.
The school choice push “illuminates unprecedented federal involvement” in education, Lubienski said, at a time when the Trump administration is pledging to scale it back.
And it’s accompanied by an open hostility toward public schools, Valant said. The Education Department under Trump has used its civil rights enforcement arm to threaten funding for schools that allow transgender students access to athletic teams and facilities that align with their gender identity and don’t get rid of classes and programs that the administration labels “illegal DEI.”
“That is different from anything we’ve had in the past,” Valant said. “A lot of the initiatives that we’ve seen coming from the department and from this administration are more focused on fighting culture war battles than improving outcomes in public schools.”
