VCU news

By VCU News staff

Public education and politics have long been in the electoral spotlight – often at the state and local levels, where legislatures and school boards wield considerable influence. But presidential elections can bring the two together as well.

With Tim Walz, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, having worked as a schoolteacher; with cultural debates touching on topics such as school bathrooms and library books; and with the COVID pandemic casting a long shadow over issues including student test scores and absenteeism, public education and politics can become a combustible mix, even at the national level.

At Virginia Commonwealth University’s School of Education, associate professor of educational leadership Jonathan Becker, J.D., Ph.D., has taught courses on politics and education. VCU News touched base with him for some context on the intersection of those subjects.

Give us an overall sense of how education tends to become – or not become – an issue in a national election.

Education is much more of a state and local issue than it is a federal issue. Of all of the funding for public education in the U.S., only roughly 10% comes from the federal government. As a result, national elections tend to focus more on other issues – and educational policy issues are raised largely for symbolic or rhetorical purposes.

For example, in the coming days and weeks, you might hear campaign speeches that mention school library books or classroom materials. That is rhetoric that the candidates may believe will energize their base or potential voters, but the truth is that decisions about curriculum or school libraries are made at the state and local levels.

At the national level, though, a familiar idea has gotten some fresh attention, right?

In recent campaign rally speeches, Donald Trump has put education front and center by  promising to eliminate the U.S. Department of Education. This is not a new idea, however. In 1980, Ronald Reagan campaigned on eliminating the department, which had been started only one year earlier. And in 1996, Sen. Bob Dole, then the Republican nominee for president, made a campaign promise to eliminate four federal agencies, including the Department of Education.

Eliminating the department would have profound implications. The agency oversees the implementation of major federal education programs and serves a critical role in enforcing anti-discrimination laws and ensuring compliance with crucial laws that provide educational opportunities for all students, including students of varying abilities.

How else might we overestimate education as a political issue at the national level – but also, how might we underestimate it?

Beyond the small percentage of federal funding for public education, a decreasing percentage of U.S. households include school-age children. According to the Census Bureau, in 2002, 48% of all families lived with their own children under 18. Twenty years later, in 2022, that figure dropped to 40%. So, assuming people are frequently self-interested, a smaller percentage of Americans living with school-age children means fewer potential voters who care much about education policy issues.

Also, in recent polls on the top issues facing Americans, the quality of K-12 public schools does not rank as highly as many other issues.

And in terms of underestimation?

There are some education policy issues that could really resonate with large swaths of voters that we should not underestimate, because they are as much economic issues as they are education issues. For example, the cost of living is top of mind for many Americans right now, and intertwined with that is the cost of childcare.

The Harris/Walz campaign recently populated a page on its campaign website with 10 high-level policy priorities. One is to “Provide a Pathway to the Middle Class Through Quality, Affordable Education.” On the other hand, if you believe that a second Trump administration would be guided by Project 2025, that policy document explicitly calls for the elimination of the federal Head Start program, which serves huge numbers of low-income families. In fiscal year 2023, there were over 800,000 seats in nearly 50,000 Head Start classrooms in the U.S. Eliminating Head Start would leave many families in need of child care if not early childhood education.

From either recent or distant history, can you highlight a surprising or overlooked instance when the intersection of politics and education proved to be impactful or lasting?

Perhaps surprising to some, history tells us that we should not overlook the potential impact of global politics on U.S. educational policy.

Certainly, the tragic events of Oct. 7 last year in Israel set off a chain of events that put campus expressive activity policies in the national spotlight in this country. But that’s a very recent example, and it remains to be seen if the policy changes we have seen across college campuses this semester will last.

Those events arguably pale in comparison to the impact of the Cold War on U.S. education policy. In 1983, the National Commission on Excellence in Education issued a report called “A Nation at Risk.” The report, unequivocally framed in the language of the Cold War, used dire language to assert that without significant education reforms, we would be vulnerable and unable to compete with countries like Russia and Japan.

That report inarguably resulted in a decades-long educational policy agenda dominated by standards and accountability, an agenda that continues to this day. In other words, our public schools are still enacting policies that are the direct result of the global politics of the 1980s.

Whether big or small, what are some of the takeaways you want your students to learn from your courses on politics and education?

I am currently teaching a course in our Ph.D. program in education called The Politics of Education. For the course, we define politics as the authoritative allocation of values. The “authoritative” part of that definition has us exploring issues of power in education: Who has the power? How is power distributed? Etc. On values, we examine concepts such as choice, quality, equity, etc. and when and where those sorts of values are privileged. The politics of education live at the intersection of power and value judgments in education.

I also try to distinguish between the politics OF education (framed above) and politics AND education (the intersection of education and partisanship). Politics and education is certainly a part of our discussions, particularly when current events are raised. However, my goal is to help us understand politics and education by using the politics of education frameworks mentioned above. For any educational policy issue, instead of just thinking about where, say, Democrats and Republicans stand on the issue, I encourage us to think about the power dynamics at play as well as what values are on the table. This is what the study of the politics of education is about.