Public schools developed as an institution unique to the United States, an institution providing free schooling in every city, suburb, town, and rural area. The purpose of public schooling has long been defined as preparing students to participate in our democratic system and at the same time serving the unique educational needs of each particular child and adolescent. Public schools have historically been required by law to protect the rights of all students and to protect religious liberty under the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment and the provisions of many state constitutions. At times when our society has failed to fulfill these promises, our laws and the system we have collectively established have represented the challenge to which we have been called to respond.

Today these values are under attack as never before—threatened by racism, xenophobia, homophobia, and the investment of billions of dollars by oligarchs in school privatization to provide escapes for families from the institution that has historically brought us and our children together.  Today all of this anger and rancor are part of the campaign for President of the United States.

We all know that with the partisan dysfunction in Congress, no President can easily enact all of any candidate’s priorities, but the differences in the core values represented by the two candidates and their political parties matter profoundly.  Today the two political parties in their Presidential campaigns represent entirely different understandings of the future of public schooling itself.  While the press continues to cover the November election as a horse race, it is urgently important to examine and regularly keep informed about the candidates’ positions on foundational issues that are too seldom being explored.  Here are some examples of what we have learned about the candidates and their positions on public schooling.

Who Is Kamala Harris and What Does She Believe about Public Schooling?

California blogger, Tom Ultican examined Kamala Harris’s ideas about public education at the end of July, even before Harris was formally nominated at the Democratic Convention. In 2020, she declared, “You can judge a society by the way it treats its children and one of the greatest expressions of love that a society can give to its children is educating those children with resources they need.” She has highlighted the need for an investment in better pay for teachers, and before COVID, in the “Red for Ed” days when teachers were striking not only for pay but also for reforms to better support children in need, she endorsed their efforts. As California’s attorney general, Kamala Harris cracked down on predatory for-profit higher education, and “won a $1 billion judgment against the California-based Corinthian Colleges.”

Who is Tim Walz, and Will His Understanding of Public Schooling Matter?

Once nominated, Harris chose Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her vice presidential running mate. As Minnesota’s governor, Walz has worked with his legislature for all sorts of major reforms including a significant school funding increase. And just as important, he was described by The Washington Post‘s Laura Meckler and Hannah Natanson as understanding how broader economic inequality results in serious opportunity gaps that affect school achievement among students living where family poverty is concentrated: “Walz … won funding to provide free meals to all schoolchildren, regardless of income, and free college tuition for students—including undocumented immigrants—whose families earn less than $80,000 per year.  He also called out racial… gaps in achievement and discipline in schools and tried to address them… The final (Minnesota) budget agreement in 2023 increased education spending by nearly $2.3 billion, including a significant boost to the per-pupil funding formula that would be tied to inflation, ensuring growth in the coming years… The budget also included targeted money for special education, pre-K  programs, mental health and community schools.”

How Do the Democratic and Republican Platforms Differ?

Education Week‘s Libby Stanford contrasts the education platforms passed by the political parties at their respective conventions: “Vice President Kamala Harris and other Democratic candidates would push for universal prekindergarten, expanded career and technical education, a reduced emphasis on standardized testing, and efforts to improve teachers’ working conditions if elected later this year… The DNC platform calls on Democrats to oppose private school choice..”  Stanford covers one urgently important Democratic platform commitment: addressing the federal government’s persistent failure to fulfill its promise on helping to fund special education: “The platform also calls for full funding of the Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act.  When the federal government first mandated special education services in K-12 schools with the 1975 Individuals for All Handicapped Children Act, Congress promised to gradually increase investments to ultimately cover 40 percent of the nation’s average per-pupil expenditure for public schools to pay for special education. Congress has never met that benchmark… Since Biden took office, IDEA funding has increased by 10 percent,” a significant boost.

In her report on the Republican platform and the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, Stanford emphasizes their differences and agrees with a report from staff at the Brookings Brown Center that while Project 2o25 prescribes the radical destruction of public schooling, adoption of its proposals would require, at least in many cases, Congressional approval.  In their brief, the Brookings Brown Center’s staff list eight federal education initiatives targeted by Project 2025:

1. “Dismantle the U.S. Department of Education;
2. “Eliminate the Head Start program for young children in poverty;
3. “Discontinue the Title I program that provides federal funding to schools serving low-income children;
4. “Rescind federal civil rights protections for LGBTQ+ students;
5. “Undercut federal capacity to enforce civil rights law;
6. “Reduce federal funding for students with disabilities and remove guardrails designed to ensure these children are adequately served by schools;
7. “Promote universal private school choice; (and)
8. “Privatize the federal student loan portfolio.”

The National Education Policy Center has begun publishing a series of briefs examining the significance of each of the programs Project 2025 proposes to eliminate. In a late August brief exploring what it would mean for the federal government to abandon the civil rights protections the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights has been providing for LGBTQ+ students, we learn of a stark policy difference between the two political parties’ approaches, and the relative ease by which the first Trump administration undermined civil rights protection for LGBTQ+ students. While it would be difficult for Republicans to impose many of Project 2025’s dangerous reforms, the University of Colorado at Boulder’s Elizabeth Meyer reports that efforts to undermine these civil rights protections could be accomplished in a future Trump administration simply by dismantling  the enforcement of regulations to protect these students just as the regulations were not enforced by Betsy DeVos’s Department of Education during Trump’s first term: “The Office of Civil Rights (OCR) guidance issued in 2010 and again in 2016 was very powerful in helping to educate districts and improve the supports available for LGBTQ+ students—particularly in states that didn’t have nondiscrimination protections for LGBTQ+ students. Starting in 2017, under the Trump administration that approach changed, as the guidance documents mentioned above were rescinded and official statements were issued refusing to hear complaints about anti-transgender discrimination in schools. ” Meyer continues: “We also learned that under Education Secretary DeVos, the OCR rapidly closed many open complaints and was ‘less likely to find wrongdoing by school districts on issues ranging from racial and sexual harassment to meeting educational needs of disabled students.’ This backslide in legal protections for LGBTQ+ people ended in 2021, when President Biden issued his Executive Order, which was then followed by more extensive Title IX updates in 2024.”

Kamala Harris Has Made Addressing Child Poverty a Priority

The National Education Policy Center’s director, Keven Welner, reminds us that schools alone cannot entirely overcome the opportunity gaps caused by child poverty: “(O)pportunity gaps in the U.S arise primarily outside of schools. This should not be a surprise. Poverty, concentrated poverty, and racialized poverty are pervasive features of America… When children are born in the United States, their educational and life outcomes can all be predicted based on their parents’ education, income and wealth… Inequality in the U.S. is stark and enduring.”

Economist Paul Krugman pulled one proposal out of Kamala Harris’s mid-August campaign speech on her economic agenda as her most significant proposal and the one that contrasts most starkly with the priorities of today’s Republican Party:  “The most important and, as I see it, best proposal was for the restoration of an expanded child tax credit, which the Biden administration implemented in 2021 but expired at the beginning of 2022 because Democrats didn’t have a big enough congressional majority. This credit significantly reduced child poverty while it was in effect; Harris would supplement it with an even bigger credit for families with children in their first year. Let’s start by saying that the case for aggressively fighting child poverty is overwhelming, not just on moral grounds — in a rich country, why should children who happen to be born into lower-income households suffer deprivation? — but in terms of the economics: On average, Americans who grow up in poverty have worse health and lower incomes as adults than those who don’t, which makes fighting child poverty an investment in the nation’s future. (Let’s also note that we could have expanded the child tax credit just a few weeks ago — although not as much as Harris wants — but Senate Republicans blocked the bill.)”

The Child Tax Credit today, after the 2021 reforms were allowed to expire in 2022, leaves out millions of America’s poorest children because the tax credit is not fully refundable. The poorest children are left out, even though more comfortable families whose incomes are high enough that they pay sufficient taxes to qualify for the credit, receive the full Child Tax Credit for every one of their children.  Kamala Harris has proposed to rectify this injustice if she is elected President, while Republicans have consistently opposed this reform.  The numbers are stark according to a new publication of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.  Here are the numbers of children in the six states where the greatest number of children are left out of the full credit because their parents are unemployed or because their parents’ incomes are too low to receive the full credit: California, 2,310,000; Texas, 2,120,000;  Florida, 1,176,000; New York, 1,075,000; Georgia, 735,000; and Ohio, 698,000.