The Education Revolution Is Here and Parents and Children Are Winning

The weak job market is accelerating a reevaluation of American education. Nearly 40 percent of recent college graduates surveyed in July indicated that they are currently working in or seeking a career in a blue-collar trade.  

The reckoning that’s come for the legacy education model is long overdue. Its overarching goal is to produce college graduates who obtain managerial jobs. Yet entry-level jobs in marketing, programming, human resources, and other white-collar fields are scarce as companies lean into AI and adopt a “flatter is faster” approach. 

This year, a shift toward a new model that returns power to parents and educational consumers has been visible across the three branches of the federal government. The megabill that Congress passed this summer allows taxpayers to write off up to $1,700 annually on their federal tax bills if they give money to “scholarship granting organizations,” which use the donations to help students afford private schools. The new law also vastly expands the allowable uses of 529 plans, tax-free investment accounts that were created three decades ago to allow families to save for college. 

These two measures are gamechangers. The school choice tax credit helps families afford private schools in the 31 states that do not have ESA programs. The states need to opt into the scholarship program, but by doing so, they are not creating a school-choice program that directs state taxpayer funds to ESA accounts. The money for the scholarship programs comes from private donations. 

The states, moreover, can put their own mandates on the “scholarship granting organizations,” requiring means-testing or the administration of standardized tests to track the efficacy of the scholarships. The generous on-ramp to education choice presents a dilemma for governors in non-ESA states. They must either stand up to their powerful public teachers unions or disappoint the families who would otherwise line up for the scholarship dollars. 

Under the new tax law, 529 accounts can be used for much more than college or K-12 school tuition. Tutoring, vocational education, job-training, professional licensing, credential programs, and continuing education are covered. Like the school choice tax credit, the states must also opt into the 529 expansion. For roughly 20 states, this is a non-issue—they either have no state income taxes or their laws automatically conform to the allowable uses for 529s under federal law. The remaining states now have a policy choice between the legacy model and the emerging model that puts parents and education consumers back in control. 

Education freedom was the central issue in two Supreme Court cases argued a week apart from each other in April: Mahmoud v. Taylor and Oklahoma Statewide Charter School Board v. Drummond. The two cases illustrate that the politics around parental rights in education do not neatly fall into the traditional red versus blue paradigm. 

In Drummond, the justices considered whether to allow St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School to become the nation’s first religious charter school. Oklahoma’s charter school board approved the school before the state’s attorney general, Gentner Drummond, stepped in and convinced the state’s supreme court that allowing religious charters violated the “Blaine” provision in the state’s constitution. Named after their proponent, a 19th-century Maine politician, Blaine laws prohibit public aid from being given to religious organizations. Whereas the proponents of the original Blaine amendments were animated by anti-Catholic bias, Drummond, a law-and-order Republican, feared that allowing religiously-affiliated charter schools would mean that “extreme sects of the Muslim faith” could launch charters to teach “Sharia Law.”

When the justices heard the case, it was the progressive justices who advanced the right-wing attorney general’s doomsday scenario that religious charter schools would lead to the indoctrination of America’s school children. Justice Sotomayor fretted that St. Isidore students would be forced to attend Mass and “accept the teachings” of the Catholic Church. Per the school’s handbook, Mass attendance is optional and students are not required to affirm Church teachings, but Sotomayor and the other progressives on the court remained skeptical. The justices deadlocked four to four—Justice Barrett recused herself —which left intact the lower court’s ruling against the school.  

Dogmatism was back in front of the Supreme Court in Mahmoud, but this time the indoctrination shoe was on the secular foot. The plaintiffs in the case were a coalition of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish parents, who were looking for an accommodation from public school instruction in Montgomery County, Maryland,  on “LGBTQ+-inclusive” texts. 

Unlike the Oklahoma charter school, the public school district in Mahmoud offered no accommodations for the challenged instruction. Anyone could opt out of Mass at St. Isidore but the administrators of Montgomery County’s schools were unwilling to provide the same grace to parents concerned with their elementary school children being required to discuss books like Born Ready: The True Story of a Boy Named Penelope.

By a 6-3 vote, the justices maintained that the “unmistakably normative” requirements of the public school district violated the First Amendment’s free exercise guarantees. Perhaps as important as the Court’s ruling were the contradictions within progressive orthodoxy that the case exposed. Exhibiting a remarkable inability to read the room, Montgomery County officials compared the racially, ethnically, and religiously diverse collection of parents who sought accommodations to “white supremacists” and “xenophobes” opposed to “‘stories about immigrant families.” In ruling against Montgomery County, the justices vindicated the freedom of conscience. 

The Executive Branch has also been pushing back against ideological dogmatism in the classroom. In a March speech ominously titled “Our Department’s Final Mission,” Education Secretary McMahon promised to reorient American education around three guiding principles:  

1. Parents are the primary decision makers in their children’s education. 
2. Taxpayer-funded education should refocus on meaningful learning in math, reading, science, and history—not divisive DEI programs and gender ideology. 
3. Postsecondary education should be a path to a well-paying career aligned with workforce needs.

The White House followed up with an executive order that corresponds to the first principle: “Improving Education Outcomes by Empowering Parents, States, and Communities.” Less than two weeks after entering office, McMahon eliminated nearly 2,000 employees of the Department of Education, which is now roughly half its former size. 

The second principle was on display when Donald Trump reinstated the executive order “Combatting Race and Sex Stereotyping” which had been rescinded during the Biden administration. Following this executive order, the Trump administration has cut over 4,000 grants to over 600 universities and higher education institutions primarily for violations of DEI-based discrimination. It has also been investigating race-exclusionary practices and anti-semitism at numerous higher education institutions. 

Perhaps the most notorious investigation was of the anti-semitism on Harvard’s campus. In May, an open letter concluding the investigation was sent to Harvard University, detailing the unfortunate facts of the case. A complete map of schools and education departments that the Trump administration is investigating is regularly updated by EdWeek. Furthermore, K-12 agencies are now required to comply with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act to receive federal funding. The department investigated Maine and Oregon for violating Title IX, consistent with Trump’s executive order “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports.” 

In accord with the third of the secretary’s principles, that higher education should be a path to a well-paying career, the education department has taken several steps toward realistic loan repayment. These efforts also corrected the Biden administration's use of zero-interest repayment or loan forgiveness as a political scheme to win votes. The long-term economic stability these changes promise will outweigh the short-term impact on borrowers who will now have more realistic loans for an expensive college degree. 

The efforts of Trump’s Department of Education have met with many obstacles. The beneficiaries of the legacy model of education will not sit idly by as it falls to pieces. The day after Secretary McMahon was sworn in, a coalition of organizations, including the National Education Association (NEA), sued Trump for proposing to dismantle the Department of Education. Around the same time, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) filed suit against the Department of Education for blocking loan repayment programs. This is no surprise for anyone acquainted with the history of the NEA and the Department of Education. Unlike the education reform movement, which began with cities and states, the history of the NEA and the Department of Education is a top-down story.  

The NEA was founded in 1857 as the National Teachers Association, hosting conferences for teachers with speakers like Horace Mann, the Father of American Public Education. Early on in the association’s history, members called on the federal government to establish a Department of Education, including Zalmon Richards, the association’s first president. Congress established a Department of Education in 1867, but the following year voted to abolish it. 

By 1918, the NEA moved its headquarters to Washington, DC, set up the “Legislative Commission” (now the “Legislative Program”), and pushed to re-establish the Department of Education. Congress finally passed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) in 1965 with an initial appropriation of $1.3 billion. This was a massive victory for the NEA, now at over 1 million members, but it was not enough.

In 1975, the NEA officially endorsed a presidential candidate, Jimmy Carter, for the first time in its history. President Jimmy Carter repaid the favor in 1979 by signing a bill to re-establish the Department of Education with cabinet-level status. Today, the NEA and the AFT— the two largest public teachers unions in the country—are political powerhouses, contributing $43.5 million to left-wing groups between 2022 and 2024, as detailed in a recent Defending Education report. Nearly 40% of the NEA budget goes to political advocacy, and in 2024, over 98% of its campaign donations went to Democratic candidates.

The NEA supports the top-down legacy model of education because this model is beneficial to it. For the third Congress in a row, an act has been proposed to revoke the NEA’s federal charter. Though the passage of this act would not dissolve the union, it could send a strong message of disapproval and perhaps encourage teachers to wake up to the reality that the NEA does not represent them, but follows a political agenda.

As Harvard’s Roland Fryer has recently written, America faces “the largest education crisis in a generation.” According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, nearly half of twelfth graders are “below basic” in math. Other dismal numbers in this report include an inability of roughly a third of twelfth graders to comprehend texts at an elementary school level. Many are blaming COVID school shutdowns and mask mandates, but these disastrous policies are only the tip of the iceberg. It’s a welcome sign to see a new model that returns power to parents and students. 

‍Michael Toth is a research fellow at the Civitas Institute.

Daniel Murphy is a teacher at Western Academy in Houston, TX and the author of the Substack, What Schools Forget.