What will Trump 2.0 mean for education? His supporters have promised to return America’s public schools to the vision of the Founding Fathers. They might succeed, but not in the way they imagine. The results would be disastrous for all of us, including conservative Trump supporters.
With Trump’s Tuesday night announcement of Linda McMahon as his pick for secretary of education, we see some continuities with the president-elect’s first term. Just as the first Trump administration talked about merging the Education and Labor departments, so too McMahon brings together the world of work and school. In the first Trump administration, McMahon ran the Small Business Administration, and she has lauded the idea of “apprenticeships” as a key education reform. Her organization, America First Policy Institute, focuses on education as “workforce innovation.” And just as Trump’s first secretary of education, Betsy DeVos, had no experience in the world of public schools, so McMahon’s experience running World Wrestling Entertainment has rendered her, in her words, an “outsider” in the field of education.
If confirmed, McMahon will likely place an even greater emphasis on two key ideas popular among Trump supporters: shifting funding from public schools to private ones, and guiding more children toward the world of work. In their view, this would align the nation’s education system more closely with the real vision of “the American Founders.”
Here’s the irony, from my perspective as a historian of American public education: The likely results really would move the country toward the educational world of the founding era, but toward the real version of that world, not the cheerful myths of the MAGA imagination. In reality, in the decades between the Revolution and the Civil War, when schools were under local control and highly vulnerable to the market, schooling was chaotic and inadequate; children were often workers first and learners second.
No one was satisfied with their educational options back then. Worst of all, enslaved Black children were often legally barred from any kind of schooling. But even free Black children in the North had trouble finding schools to attend. In 1828, for example, the Rev. Peter Williams warned that only 600 Black children were enrolled in New York City’s public schools, even though there were 2,500 children in the city who Williams thought should be in school.
White children, too, were often out of luck. Horace Mann, the crusading head of Massachusetts’ school system, warned in 1839 that there were just not enough schools. Like a lot of reformers of his time, Mann had the stats to prove it. As part of his campaign to improve Massachusetts’ public schools, Mann gathered attendance data from across his state and around the country. The numbers were not encouraging. There were 177,053 children in the state, Mann showed, but only 94,956 could find schools to go to year-round. In the rural South, things were even worse. In Georgia, for example, by 1844 there were 119,108 white children, but only 15,561 had public schools to attend.
Those numbers were stark enough, but beyond the statistics, the lack of schools made for heartbreaking individual tragedies. As one 9-year-old girl from rural Georgia wrote to her grandmother in 1831, “It is difficult to get an education heare.” She had been able to attend for only “tow yare and a half.” She was panicking because she was aware, even at her tender age, that she was “poor and shall stand in need of something to gain support.” Without public schools, she knew, she could never learn enough to become a schoolteacher herself.
Back then, even the luckiest few had to spend more to get less. In 1844 Georgia, for instance, private-school options were limited. Only 7,878 children attended private schools at the time. Up north, Mann calculated that there were 12,000 children attending private schools in Massachusetts in 1838, but their families had to pay five times as much in tuition as they would pay in taxes to fund high-quality public schools.
When they weren’t in the classroom, children in early America were usually working. As historian Carole Shammas has estimated, at the turn of the 19th century, approximately three out of every four boys between the ages of 10 and 15 were working. It’s difficult to know exact numbers for girls, but given that those girls were often providing unpaid household labor, the proportion was likely even higher. Our best guess is that almost one in every four workers in 1800 was a child between the ages of 10 and 15.
Employers relied on children to power America’s growth, but the abuses of the system were infamous. Reformers like Mann, in Massachusetts, and Henry Barnard, in Connecticut, worked hard to improve educational options for child workers. In 1837 Mann pushed a new law to force factory owners to provide basic literacy education for child workers. Unfortunately, as Barnard would lament in 1839, that law was in practice a “dead letter,” with about two-thirds of children in mill towns left utterly without any education apart from their long hours of drudgery.
Back then, apprenticeships were common. They were sometimes a “pathway to successful careers” (as McMahon recently argued on X, describing a modern apprenticeship program in Switzerland). Affluent families often paid a skilled artisan to train their children in well-paid, rewarding vocations. Other apprentices, however, did not have the same experiences. The archives are full of the records of children like Jacob Howland, a “poor child” bound in 1800 to serve as an “apprentice servant” in Taunton, Massachusetts, to a man named Cowell. Or Hetty Clark, a Black girl from Randolph, New Jersey. She never learned to write, but she was apprenticed in 1815 as a “servant” for “housewifery” to William Reeves until she turned 18. By 1850, as in the contract of John Henry Smith, some employers simply struck out the word apprentice on the preprinted contract form and wrote in the word servant. As historians Ruth Wallis Herndon and John E. Murray have shown, children’s apprenticeship experiences correlated closely with their families’ affluence: poorer and nonwhite children—children like Jacob, Hetty, and John Henry—were often used as mere menials and servants.
Since then, protections for child workers have become far more robust. Rather than being mere “dead letters,” child-labor laws have teeth. In June, for example, the Department of Labor took Hyundai to task for violating child-labor laws. The hunger for more workers is intense, however, just as it was in the time of the Founding Fathers. All too often, children who are on the margins, like immigrant kids, are forced into dangerous jobs by unscrupulous business leaders.
It seems depressingly likely that a McMahon-led Education Department will give employers a freer hand. In too many cases, that will leave vulnerable children at their mercy. Even with the best intentions, businesses are not schools, and business leaders will protect their bottom line, even if it does not protect the interests of their young workforce.
Even more likely, if confirmed, McMahon will promote the America First Policy Institute’s vision of “fund[ing] scholarship awards to cover expenses related to K–12 public and private education.” The experiences of some red states give us a preview of what that would mean nationwide. In Texas, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott recently went all in on a voucher program that would provide families with savings accounts to use at private schools. To Abbott’s surprise, he was faced with stiff opposition from other conservative Republicans. The fight sparked a bitter intraparty conflict, with Abbott running campaigns against several conservatives who had opposed his voucher plan.
Why would so many conservative Republicans fight so hard against school privatization? In essence, the Texas plan threatened to bring back the worst of the educational world of the 1800s. As Texas’ rural conservatives realized, a voucher plan would create education deserts in rural areas. The program would take funding away from their public schools without creating affordable private-school options. Even worse, the amount provided—about $10,000—is not enough to fully pay for most private-school tuition. The result was as unpopular as it was disheartening: Rural Texans would not have adequate schools for their children.
As one anti-voucher Texas Republican explained, if 5 percent of students in their rural district took the vouchers, the district would lose $17.5 million. In the short term, the plan would boost public-school funds to match, but what about the long term? And what about the fact that most private schools in the area could not and would not accept more students? The prospect was grim, and even staunch Trump supporters could not go along. Unfortunately for those Republicans who stood up on this issue and faced the electoral consequences, after the November general election, it looks as if Abbott will likely be able to strong-arm his plan through a new state Legislature.
As the Texas dispute demonstrates, Americans of all political beliefs rely on our public schools. It took many years, and the process was scarred by generations of trial and error, but we Americans learned two fundamental lessons about those schools. First, only public schools with public funding can provide education for all. Offering “choice” is an empty promise if parents can’t find or afford a private school. And second, counting on employers to educate children leads to brutal inequality. Some children might indeed get a leg up on an exciting and rewarding career, but too often, employers will prioritize profits over pedagogy. A McMahon-led Education Department threatens to ignore those lessons—at great cost to all of us.
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Publish date : 2024-11-20 11:27:00
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