The 79-page “Family Insights” report found LAUSD families saw improvements in their schools in the past year, with support for leadership of the nation’s second-largest district increasing significantly.

The 2025 version of the annual poll, published by the L.A.-based nonprofit education advocacy group , found nearly three-quarters of families approve of both Superintendent Alberto Carvalho and the LAUSD school board, ratings that exceeded those of last year. 

Its findings were based on surveys of more than 500 LAUSD families conducted in the fall and again in February.

Most families gave their schools a “B” grade overall, GPSN Executive Vice President Ana Teresa Dahan said in an interview, acknowledging the positive direction of their kids’ education, while also seeing the need for more growth in certain areas.

“We have had some big crises happening, and I think families are generally happy with how the district has responded to those crises,” said Dahan of the poll’s results. 

“Families think that their kids are doing well in school,” she added. 

A published earlier this year by GPSN found LAUSD at a critical turning point, with fresh obstacles from the , changes in federal aid and new policies under the Trump administration, including immigration crackdowns, causing stiff headwinds for the district.

The GPSN poll found 63% of families thought LAUSD students and their own children were performing at the right level or above in reading and math, up from 54% last year.  

Almost 90% of parents rated instruction at their child’s school positively on this year’s report. 

Just over half of families surveyed in the poll said kids’ emotional and mental health needs have become the top priority in public education. Parents said they want schools to provide mental health services, such as counseling, both during and outside the instructional day.

More than half of families surveyed — 55% — said they did not feel adequately represented in district policy decisions, although that figure improved from last year when just 34% felt well-represented.

The poll found a majority of LAUSD families value high-quality teaching and instruction, and nearly half of parents also identify free home internet and high-quality tutoring as their top three priorities.

LAUSD students made gains in their scores on the district’s most recent state reading and math exams, but most kids in the district still . LAUSD made progress on federal assessments released this year but .  

In a written response to the GPSN report, a LAUSD spokesperson said the district is receiving good feedback from parents, and school officials are committed to better listening to families.

“Los Angeles Unified is proud that a majority of parents in a recent GPSN survey expressed satisfaction with their schools,” a district spokesperson said in a statement. “This continued growth in parent confidence affirms the hard work of our educators and staff.” 

The latest casualty in President Donald Trump’s war on diversity, equity and inclusion is a $1 billion federal grant program to train school counselors and thwart mass shootings.

The U.S. Department of Education notified grant recipients this week it was ending funds to train and hire K-12 school mental health professionals included in a 2022 law that passed with bipartisan support following the mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas, which led to the deaths of 19 elementary school students and two teachers. 

The grants, which were included in a bipartisan gun control law approved by then-President Joe Biden, don’t align with the Trump administration’s goals, according to sent to grant recipients Tuesday evening and obtained by ����Ӱ��. Grantees include local school districts, state education agencies and colleges tasked with training some 14,000 mental health professionals and placing them in K-12 schools in virtually every state. 

“Those receiving these notices reflect the prior Administration’s priorities and policy preferences and conflict with those of the current administration,” Murray Bessette, a senior advisor in the Education Department’s Office of Planning, Evaluation and Policy Development, wrote in the letter. Affected programs, Bessette wrote, “violate the letter or purpose” of federal civil rights laws, run counter to the department’s priority on “excellence in education” and “undermine the well-being of the students these programs are intended to help.”

Proponents of the grant program said they were caught off guard by the move, especially since , have attributed the unprecedented surge in school shootings to a student mental health crisis.

“Ending these mental health investments will hurt students and families and make our schools less safe,” Mary Wall, who was the Education Department’s deputy assistant secretary for P-12 education during the Biden administration, told ����Ӱ��. “It’s not an exaggeration to say that mental health supports save lives.”

An Education Department spokesperson confirmed it would not renew $1 billion in grants, a move that appears to impact the entirety of the largest-ever federal effort to train school mental health professionals included in the 2022 Bipartisan Safer Communities Act. The law also created the first significant federal gun control measures in decades, including background checks on firearm purchases for anyone younger than 21 years old. 

Spokesperson Madi Biedermann said in a statement the grants didn’t live up to their goal of improving schools’ mental health support services — and suggested the cuts were part of a broader Trump administration effort to derail programs that support diversity, equity and inclusion in education. 

“Under the deeply flawed priorities of the Biden Administration, grant recipients used the funding to implement race-based actions like recruiting quotas in ways that have nothing to do with mental health and could hurt the very students the grants are supposed to help,” Biedermann said. 

Biedermann’s statement echoed by conservative pundit Christoper Rufo, who turned to X this week to accuse the Biden administration of using the grants “to advance left-wing racialism and discrimination.” 

“No more slush fund for activists under the guise of mental health,” wrote Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Rufo didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from ����Ӱ��. 

Wall said the Education Department during the Biden administration “offered a voluntary competitive priority” to applicants who worked to ensure mental health professionals reflected the school communities they serve, but rejected the idea that the grants were a DEI initiative. Instead of creating a plan to support students’ well-being, she said the Trump administration has sought to “rob school districts who have made important groundwork to have clinical services available to children and interrupt them midstream.”

“We in no way required any of this to be focused on race or gender or sexuality or anything,” Wall said. “We were deliberately looking to set these up to be long-lasting, high-impact programs, where we would get the maximum amount of benefit.”

Sen. Chris Murphy, a Democrat from Connecticut who introduced the 2022 law, accused the Trump administration Thursday of killing the grant program “in order to fund a giant tax cut for the crazy wealthy.”

“I thought we had a bipartisan consensus around trying to support kids with really serious traumas and mental illnesses with support services in our schools,” Murphy said in a statement to ����Ӱ��. “But there’s not consensus on anything that helps people in this administration.”

Lauren Levin, the chief advocacy officer at the nonprofit Sandy Hook Promise, said the cuts hinder students’ access to those services in schools that are already under-resourced. Though the has been long debated, student rates of depression, anxiety and loneliness. 

Nationally, there is an average of about , significantly lower than the 250-to-1 recommended by the American School Counselor Association. School psychologists are , with a national average of 1 for every 1,127 K-12 students, according to the American Psychological Association.  

“After school shootings, we hear a lot of important conversations about the mental health needs and gaps in this country for youth,” including from Republican lawmakers, Levin told ����Ӱ��. “In many of these cases with these grants, it means children who are currently receiving mental health services in schools are going to stop getting that help.”

In the first few months of the Trump administration, several federal initiatives designed to prevent mass school shootings have faced a similar fate. A 26-person committee of violence prevention experts — also approved as part of the Bipartisan Safer Communities Axe — was gutted. 

Levin said Sandy Hook Promise, founded after the 2012 mass shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, has also begun to track cuts to grants authorized under the federal Trump approved that law in 2018 in response to the high school shooting in Parkland, Florida, which resulted in the deaths of 17 people. So far, Levin said they’ve documented cuts to about a dozen grant recipients totaling nearly $20 million, including funding designed to help schools address social isolation among students and prevent bullying.  

“One of the reasons that students or any of these shooters are not getting the help that they need is that we have a gap in access to mental health care,” said Levin, who noted that schools are among the most consistent places for young people to get help. 

“If someone is showing signs of wanting to hurt themselves or others, if they are socially isolated, if we see changes in behavior and if there is a school counselor, that school can be their lifeline,” Levin said. “That could make all the difference.” 

President Donald Trump said Friday that the U.S. Small Business Administration would handle the student loan portfolio for the slated-for-elimination Education Department, and that the Department of Health and Human Services would handle special education services and nutrition programs.

The announcement — which raises myriad questions over the logistics to carry out these transfers of authority — came a day after  a sweeping executive order that directs Education Secretary Linda McMahon to “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure” of the department to the extent she is permitted to by law.

“I do want to say that I’ve decided that the SBA, the Small Business Administration, headed by Kelly Loeffler — terrific person — will handle all of the student loan portfolio,” Trump said Friday morning.

The White House did not provide advance notice of the announcement, which Trump made at the opening of an Oval Office appearance with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

The Education Department manages student loans for millions of Americans, with a portfolio of more than $1.6 trillion, according to the White House.

In his  Trump said the federal student aid program is “roughly the size of one of the Nation’s largest banks, Wells Fargo,” adding that “although Wells Fargo has more than 200,000 employees, the Department of Education has fewer than 1,500 in its Office of Federal Student Aid.”

‘Everything else’ to HHS

Meanwhile, Trump also said that the Department of Health and Human Services “will be handling special needs and all of the nutrition programs and everything else.”

It is unclear what nutrition programs Trump was referencing, as the U.S. Department of Agriculture manages  and other major nutrition programs.

One of the Education Department’s core functions includes supporting students with special needs. The department is also tasked with carrying out the federal guarantee of a free public education for children with disabilities Congress approved in the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, or IDEA.

Trump added that the transfers will “work out very well.”

“Those two elements will be taken out of the Department of Education,” he said Friday. “And then all we have to do is get the students to get guidance from the people that love them and cherish them, including their parents, by the way, who will be totally involved in their education, along with the boards and the governors and the states.”

Trump’s Thursday order also directs McMahon to “return authority over education to the States and local communities while ensuring the effective and uninterrupted delivery of services, programs, and benefits on which Americans rely.”

SBA, HHS heads welcome extra programs

Asked for clarification on the announcement, a White House spokesperson on Friday referred States Newsroom to comments from White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt and heads of the Small Business Administration and Health and Human Services Department.

Leavitt noted the move was consistent with Trump’s promise to return education policy decisions to states.

“President Trump is doing everything within his executive authority to dismantle the Department of Education and return education back to the states while safeguarding critical functions for students and families such as student loans, special needs programs, and nutrition programs,” Leavitt said. “The President has always said Congress has a role to play in this effort, and we expect them to help the President deliver.”

Loeffler and HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said their agencies were prepared to take on the Education Department programs.

“As the government’s largest guarantor of business loans, the SBA stands ready to deploy its resources and expertise on behalf of America’s taxpayers and students,” Loeffler said.

Kennedy, on the  X, said his department was “fully prepared to take on the responsibility of supporting individuals with special needs and overseeing nutrition programs that were run by @usedgov.”

The Education Department directed States Newsroom to McMahon’s , where she said the department was discussing with other federal agencies where its programs may end up, noting she had a “good conversation” with Loeffler and that the two are “going to work on the strategic plan together.” 

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Maine Morning Star maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Lauren McCauley for questions: info@mainemorningstar.com.

Notable Trump surrogates Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, each promised seats on a proposed commission to eliminate government waste, the idea, while Sen. Mike Rounds of South Dakota to initiate a shutdown process before the new Congress was even seated.

Those moves are the first rumblings of a struggle that could last well into Trump’s second term, and possibly beyond. The drive to abolish the department hasn’t been this salient, or plausible, . Yet any effort to meaningfully reduce Washington’s role in funding and regulating America’s schools would face a swell of resistance, as transformative changes in politics . Several experts agreed that the combination of political and administrative hurdles is likely to prove so intractable that a more incremental approach, possibly focused on slashing the department’s workforce, may prevail instead.

Whatever course the administration adopts will, at least in part, depend upon the outlook of Linda McMahon, the president-elect’s nominee to serve as education secretary. Despite previously serving in the first Trump administration and leading the conservative America First Policy Institute, McMahon’s own views on K–12 schools remain mostly opaque. In a statement announcing her nomination, that she would be charged with sending education governance “back to the states.”

David Houston, a professor of education at George Mason University, said that Republicans had good reason to be cautious about taking decisive action against an entity whose functions — which largely consist of subsidies to both K–12 and higher education, as well as civil rights enforcement and data collection — are little understood outside the capital.

“People generally don’t have a precise understanding of what exactly the U.S. Department of Education does, but saying you’ll get rid of it reads generically as being anti-education,” he said. “That strikes me as a very heavy albatross to hang around your neck come the midterms.”

Public opinion research appears to support Houston’s skepticism. When the polling organization YouGov in July asking voters their views on assorted proposals from the controversial Project 2025 policy document for Trump’s second term, respondents rejected the notion of unwinding the Department of Education by a 63-26 margin; their numbers were much smaller than those who said they would favor a ban on pornography or returning to the use of the gold standard. (In response to its unpopularity, Trump’s campaign Project 2025 at arm’s length.)

Still, perceptions of any government office can be moved. A showed that the percentage of Americans who viewed the department positively had fallen from 53 percent in 2018 to just 45 percent this summer, with 46 percent holding a negative view; in all, it was tied with the Justice Department as the second-least-popular federal agency polled, behind only the IRS. Meanwhile, a majority of respondents polled by CBS News about what Trump would do as president.

Chris Edwards, a tax and budget analyst at the libertarian Cato Institute who maintains of plans to shrink virtually every government department and major expenditure, said the Education Department stood out as a particularly viable target.

“It has only been around for 40 years, so people walking around today remember when there wasn’t one,” he said. “The patron saint of the Republican Party, Ronald Reagan, promised to eliminate it years ago. So if any agency is vulnerable to substantial cuts, I’d say it’s the one.” ​​

‘A decline in trust’

In all likelihood, the department will be one of several facing some level of belt-tightening. Musk has said he wants to reduce government spending by , a figure that raised eyebrows inside of Washington and out. But regardless of whether succeeds in making a real dent in the budget, voters have indicated in recent years that they want to on a .

Martin West, an economist at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, agreed that Pew’s long-running surveys revealed that the Department of Education sat on the “low end of support” among government bureaus. But drops in support over the last half-decade have occurred across the board, affecting even well-liked offices like the and the Centers for Disease Control. The swoon reflects an electorate that the country is on the wrong track, he added. 

“There’s been a decline in trust in large institutions generally, and I would interpret that change as a broader phenomenon rather than anything specific to education,” said West. “But it does shift the lay of the land.”

It’s impossible to say, however, where the ground will settle — particularly when any ambitious initiative led by Trump will very likely disturb it further. 

Political science research has long suggested that the political views of Americans tend to , moving in the opposite direction of the party in power. Hence, voters became more welcoming of immigration after Trump was first elected in 2016, after he was succeeded by Joe Biden. 

Similar patterns play out with respect to education. A study co-authored by Houston found that U.S. presidents every time they take a highly publicized stand on issues like standardized testing or school vouchers. Though few voters hold strong opinions on such questions, they quickly take cues based on their appraisal of the president; only in cases when the president’s position cut against the traditional views associated with his party — such as Barack Obama’s support for and — did his endorsement drive support for a given policy.

If Trump launches a substantive attack on the K–12 bureaucracy, “I would expect Republican support for eliminating the Department of Education to shoot through the roof, and Democratic opposition to do the same,” Houston predicted. “It’s an obviously polarizing dynamic because Trump is laying out a position that has always historically fallen within the Republican camp.”

‘Enough juice’

The idea of abolishing the department already splits voters deeply. According to from earlier this year, 53 percent of Republicans were open to the proposal, compared with 28 percent of independents and just 8 percent of Democrats. 

The divide would probably open even wider if Republicans in Congress chose the simplest means of abolition and simply voted the agency out of existence. But that course, while direct, is uncertain: It would rely on the Senate majority’s ability to summon 60 votes in favor to overcome a sure Democratic filibuster. Most observers believe that to be an insurmountable obstacle. 

By contrast, a more plodding approach could be more achievable, while potentially veering further from the risk of publicity and voter outrage. A combination of legislation — permitted through the reconciliation process, which allows budgetary bills to pass with only 51 votes — and executive action could be used to distribute the department’s various responsibilities and resources to other cabinet offices. A future administration might, for example, see the Department of Justice deciding Title IX claims and the Department of the Interior presiding over schools on American Indian territory. 

Cato’s Edwards analogized the opportunity before Trump to the brief period in the 1990s when President Bill Clinton teamed with the GOP to . But that dramatic stroke, he argued, came only after the public discourse around cash benefits had played out in both parties. While the Republican Party first vowed to eliminate federal interventions in schools over 40 years ago, its plans have yet to make headway with the broader public. 

“It’s doable, but the president has got to make the argument for it,” Edwards said. “Welfare reform happened in 1996 because conservatives and even centrists spent over a decade making a case about why traditional welfare was harmful and in need of reform. Whether Trump is up for doing something like that, we don’t know.”

Kevin Kosar, a senior fellow at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute who focuses on Congress and the federal bureaucracy, noted that government programs, once introduced, tend to be sticky. Even if big-ticket items like Title I aid for high-poverty schools and IDEA grants for students with special needs are devolved to states, or elsewhere within the federal government, it won’t necessarily diminish the prominence of government in K–12 schooling.

“Go ahead, abolish the Department of Education,” Kosar said. “But if you scatter all of its programs to other departments, you’ve gotten rid of 4,100 people, and you have to hire people in other departments to process those grants and aid applications anyway. So how much juice are you getting from that?”

President-elect Donald Trump hasn’t yet laid out a detailed plan for his administration’s education policy. But a review of his first term and his , as well as the details contained in the 2025 Presidential Transition Project, gives some indication of what might be coming in New York.

Trump, who has that the US last in education, has repeatedly vowed to eliminate the US Department of Education. “I’m dying to get back to do this,” in September. Whether he succeeds will depend on whether he has congressional support.

Late Tuesday, Trump his pick for Secretary of Education: Linda McMahon, who oversaw the Small Business Administration during Trump’s first term and co-founded the WWE wrestling empire.

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McMahon is the chair of the America First Policy Institute, which has assisted Trump’s transition team. The think tank’s policy proposals for education center on school choice, allowing parents to evaluate curriculum materials, teaching life skills like financial and digital literacy, and prohibiting the teaching of Critical Race Theory

While education advocates wait for Trump to take office, they are bracing for changes in how public education is administered.

“We don’t know yet what will happen,” said Randi Levine, the policy director of Advocates for Children of New York, “but many of the policy proposals raised would be devastating for the students we serve.”

Cuts to federal school funding

Regardless of whether the Department of Education closes, Trump can seek to limit federal aid to schools — something he repeatedly tried to do during his first term.

His administration proposed a number of cuts to the education budget, including appropriations for , which to help states and districts pay for teacher development and reduce class size; , which administers postsecondary federal student aid; and funding for and summer programs for low-income students. Congress these cuts.

This time, Trump’s allies have had more time to lay the groundwork for their proposals. The nearly 900-page , published by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, lays out ideas for downsizing and reshaping federal agencies — including the elimination of the Education Department. While Trump has sought to distance himself from the playbook, at least 140 people who worked within his first administration were involved in the project,

The Heritage Foundation that budget cuts would help transition control over education back to states and localities.

The federal government also pays for about 10 percent of the US Special Olympics budget, which the first Trump administration . Former Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos defended that move to , .

Michael Rebell, the executive director of the Center for Educational Equity, said he is skeptical that Congress will agree to shutter the Department of Education, since the agency is federally mandated to distribute funding to low-income schools and students with disabilities.

“That’s easier said than done on the campaign trail, and whether Congress is going to go along with that is another question,” Rebell said.

The proposed federal cuts are coming just as New York begins to , the formula used to distribute most state funding to public schools. Federal budget cuts would increase pressure on the state and local school districts to make up for any shortfalls.

Compared to the the state spends on school aid, federal funds account for a much smaller amount – $8.6 billion during the 2024 fiscal year, the Division of the Budget. For New York City, 5 percent of its budget, or $2 billion, comes from the federal government, according to the . An additional $1.5 billion goes toward the CUNY system and early childhood programs.

State education funding is a reliably heated battle during each budget cycle. Last year, Governor Kathy Hochul’s proposed cuts to education were roundly rejected by the state legislature. But many observers expect that she may try again.

Levine’s organization is calling for the new formula to create funding for homeless students, and increase it for students with disabilities and English Language Learners.

“We think this is a key moment for the state to commit to providing the resources necessary for all students to get the excellent education that they deserve,” she said.

David Little, the executive director of the Rural Schools Association, pointed to the state education department’s current effort to as a program that will be harder for districts to implement if their budgets are cut.

“The only thing that can derail that is money,” Little said. “If the governor is in the process of trying to figure out how we alter state education aid — with an eye toward trying to ratchet that back — and the federal government is proposing to also diminish federal funding, then you immediately go into survival mode.”

Trump has also pledged to withhold funds to schools that recognize transgender students or teach critical race theory, an academic framework that seeks to understand history and society through the lens of historical and systemic racism.

The deportation of newly arrived students

Trump, who has called immigrants “criminals, drug dealers and rapists,” has made tightening US immigration policy a signature part of his platform. ( between an increase in immigrant populations and a rise in crime.) He has promised the mass deportation of millions of undocumented immigrants living in the US, an effort that would be both .

The number of unauthorized immigrants in the United States grew by about 800,000 to 11 million between 2019 and 2022, according to the . That number peaked in 2007 at 12.2 million.

new immigrants and asylum seekers have entered New York State in the last two years, prompting school districts statewide to find ways to respond to the unexpected jump in student enrollment.

During the last Trump presidency, the New York City Department of Education to schools and families to protect students from federal immigration action.

“We certainly hope that the city will step up again and do all it can to protect immigrant students and families and keep their records confidential as well,” Levine said.

A rollback of civil rights protections

Trump’s return also poses a risk to the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, the arm of the agency responsible for investigating claims of discrimination at schools and universities
across the country.

That office handled last year – a record for the 44-year old department. In New York state alone, there are currently at elementary and secondary schools and another 207 at colleges and universities. The office is also tasked with collecting about access to education.

Under DeVos, the agency’s arm became more lenient, limiting the time and scope of investigations in an effort to clear a backlog of old cases, . DeVos also for transgender students issued under former President Barack Obama while expanding rights afforded to accused of campus sexual harassment and assault.

Project 2025 recommends moving the Office for Civil Rights under the Department of Justice and would require its actions against violators to take place through litigation, rather than administrative enforcement.

The plan also recommends the government rescind guidance issued during the Obama era that is meant to weed out racial discrimination toward students of color with disabilities.

Education advocates in blue states like New York can expect their state governments to take a more active role in civil rights enforcement, Rebell predicted.

“The more so-called progressive states will probably pick up at least some of the slack,” Rebell said. “The ones who are going to get clobbered are going to be the kids in states that are going to be happy to see civil rights enforcement go by the wayside.”

School meals

Previously, Trump tried to tighten requirements around who qualified for free school lunches, which would have caused students to lose access to the program, according to an analysis by the US Department of Agriculture. He also sought to loosen Obama-era nutrition standards.

Project 2025 refers to the federal free lunch program as an “entitlement program” that represents “an example of the ever-expanding federal footprint in local school operations.” The plan would do away with a provision that eases access to free meals in high-poverty areas and recommends cutting summer meals for students who are not enrolled in summer programs.

Throughout New York, 57 percent of students were eligible for the federal free or reduced-price lunch program during the 2022–23 school year, slightly higher than the national average, .

A few cities — New York City, Albany, Rochester and Yonkers — have their own universal free school meal programs to help fill in gaps where the federal program does not cover all students. State legislators have successfully expanded access to free meals in other regions, but efforts to pass a statewide universal program .

New York City’s program, which receives , could face restrictions in the wake of budget cuts, according to the city comptroller.

A push for school choice incentives

Trump has championed charter and private schools, a win for school choice proponents in New York. for federal funding to go toward charter schools, voucher programs and tax credits for private school tuition, as a means to empower parents and give them educational options that better suit their children.

“For too long, countless American children have been trapped in failing government schools,” he said in his 2020 State of the Union address.

A from the Stanford University Center for Research on Educational Outcomes found that charter schools have begun to outperform public schools. Critics say school choice is an effort to privatize schools and that charter schools are a on public school districts.

Though New York has , there is a statewide cap on the number of schools that can open. New York’s public education community is largely opposed to using public funding for private schools, noted Little of the Rural Schools Association.

“There might be proposals to make inroads,” he said. “But our governor and our legislative houses are so overwhelmingly Democratic that it would be really hard for them to try and advance a prospective agenda like that.”

Update 11/20: This story was updated to reflect the nomination of Linda McMahon to lead the Department of Education.

This story originally appeared in , a nonprofit news publication investigating power in New York. .

But across the country, when it comes to education, voters rejected those policies loudly and firmly. As the founder of Red Wine & Blue, a community of over 600,000 diverse suburban women, I hear from women all the time who don’t want right-wing extremist groups coming into their school districts to impose their vision of so-called parents’ rights. The vast majority of moms believe in America’s public schools, want to work with their children’s teachers to make education better and are sick of a vocal minority wasting time and resources on culture war chaos. 

But I don’t just say this because it’s what I see in my group chats and hear in conversations at the bus stop. Of the common-sense candidates — those standing up to attacks on history lessons about race and age-appropriate sex ed — who were supported by my organization in school board races across the country, 69% won. And in some states, that figure is even higher: 78% of our 45 candidates won in 15 Michigan school districts, and 86% of our 14 candidates won in six Virginia districts — an especially gratifying result given that Virginia became ground zero for the uproar over so-called Critical Race Theory in 2021.

Meanwhile, in North Carolina, Mo Green, a Democrat and former superintendent of Guilford County Schools, won the statewide race for superintendent of public instruction over homeschooler Michele Morrow. Morrow was a Republican Moms for Liberty candidate who has described public schools as “” and urged people not to send their children to them; called for the ; and demanded military intervention to keep then-President Donald Trump in power on Jan. 6, 2021. Trump may have won the presidential race in North Carolina, but Morrow’s slogan, “Make America’s Schools Great Again,” clearly didn’t resonate with the majority of voters who want to build up their public schools, not tear them down.

It’s true that different parents and families have different values and concerns — and that’s okay. If there’s a book you don’t want your kids to read, then don’t let them read it. I believe in providing students with accurate, age-appropriate sex education, but I also believe in allowing parents to opt their kids out if they alone want to have those conversations. But I don’t think one parent should be able to take those opportunities away from everyone else’s kids. American public schools should be, at their core, places where all students should feel supported and safe. And while extremists have come in from outside communities to gain power, divide and control people, most voters want none of it. 

If you zoom out and examine other election results, you see similar trends. Republicans spent at least on political ads attacking the trans community — including trans children who attend public schools — on issues ranging from sports to health care. But there is no evidence that these ads swayed voters at the ballot box. In fact, an found that a majority of likely voters (including a plurality of Independents, by a 23-point margin) thought they were “meanspirited and out of hand.” Likewise, a of voters in eight Senate battleground states found that those who saw the ads found them “intensely off-putting” and that they failed to impact candidate support. 

In four states — including three that voted for Trump — voters rejected Republican priorities for education. Ballot measures to expand voucher programs, which shift money from public to private schools, failed in Colorado, Kentucky, Nebraska. In Florida (the home of Moms for Liberty), voters defeated a state constitutional amendment to make school board elections partisan.

MAGA politicians will ignore these rejections at their own peril. Many parents remain concerned about their students and the state of the public schools. And when I sit down and talk to them, we almost always realize that we have far more in common than what separates us. We don’t want a loud minority telling us how to raise our children. We don’t want books about Anne Frank or Martin Luther King Jr. to be banned. We certainly don’t want kids to be bullied just because of who they are. It’s time to tune out the claims of MAGA mandates and get to work with teachers and administrators for the good of all students.

WASHINGTON — During Donald Trump’s first term as president, he was reluctant to speak boldly about school choice.

That’s according to Kellyanne Conway, an aide to the president back then, and one of his former campaign managers. “He would say ‘Aren’t we the ones who say it [education] is local? Why would the president of the United States bigfoot all that?’”

Expect that reticence to be a thing of the past, Conway told the audience  devoted to promoting the benefits of school choice — from  in the style of programs in West Virginia and Arizona to charter schools and . On the campaign trail, Trump already has been vocal about his embrace of parental choice. “We want federal education dollars to follow the student, rather than propping up a bloated and radical bureaucracy in Washington, D.C.,”  at a rally in Wisconsin last month.

(To be sure, Trump did  near the end of his first term offering states the opportunity to use federal money to create school choice programs. When I looked into it a few years ago, I couldn’t find any state that had taken him up on the offer.)

Conway urged participants at the post-Election Day gathering to speak a certain way in their advocacy to lawmakers going forward. “Lead with solutions not problems. The problems can be the second part of the sentence, or maybe the second paragraph.” The panelists — including the founder of a group of charter schools for students with autism in Arizona, the leader of a private school for boys in Alabama and the head of a foundation that supports microschools — were all winners of , fueled by  and run by the Center for Education Reform.

She also urged the crowd not to make school choice about teachers unions, “which is fun to do, especially this week but it doesn’t educate another child.” (The National Education Association, the nation’s largest labor union, generally has opposed private school vouchers and has been celebrating the . “The decisive defeat of vouchers on the ballot across multiple states speaks loudly and clearly: The public knows vouchers harm students and does not want them in any form,” NEA President Becky Pringle said in a statement.) 

Lawmakers who need convincing aren’t holding out just because of union pressure, Conway said. In Texas, for instance, rural lawmakers worried about the effect of vouchers on their schools  or torpedoed plans in that state that would allow parents to use public money for private school tuition. Republican Gov. Greg Abbott helped elect enough new members in place of those rural holdouts, however, that .

The school choice event at the Ronald Reagan Building in D.C. was notable for the range of people it featured, including parents and pastors, people who are white, Black and Latino, and several Democrats, including Colorado Gov. Jared Polis and state Sen. Anthony Hardy Williams of Pennsylvania. Some of the speakers told stories about opening their own charter schools and private schools. They urged the president-elect to take action on choice, including allowing  for children in low-income families to follow those kids to private schools or other settings outside public schools.

In Congress, with Republicans taking hold of the Senate and expected to retain control of the House, lawmakers already have proposed legislation that has, until now, mostly been a nonstarter. Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, who is likely to become chair of the committee that oversees education in his chamber, introduced  this session that would give families and corporations tax credits if they contribute to groups that give scholarships to students to attend private or parochial schools. It would target students whose families earn no more than 300 percent of the area median gross income. Cassidy’s wife, Laura, runs a charter school for children with dyslexia in Baton Rouge.

“I think that there’s going to be a real opportunity to promote innovation in school choice,” Cassidy said. “There is great promise in this administration, and I am looking forward to working with them.”

This story about  was produced by , a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for .

This story was published in collaboration with Headway, a new initiative at The New York Times. Chalkbeat and Headway have been to educators and high school students since February. We have heard from more than 1,000 students and 200 teachers across the nation.

This presidential election year, young Americans are navigating a chaotic world of information, often with limited tools to distinguish what’s credible, what’s questionable, and what’s downright false.

A found that while many young people can detect images generated by artificial intelligence with ease, they struggle to differentiate news from commentary and advertisements and regularly encounter conspiracy theories on social media. Eight in 10 respondents said they believed at least one of those conspiracy theories.

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and their peers told us that they regularly encountered false information online about the election between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald J. Trump. Some teachers have dedicated and fact-checking.

And many students have told us they have gained confidence in spotting falsehoods. We asked more than 1,000 students about what tips them off that a piece of information might be false or misleading, what’s their approach to verifying information, and what advice they have for other teenagers. Here’s what we heard.

Responses have been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

How teens know if information is sketchy, made up or manipulated

“If the content I’m seeing is triggering an extreme emotional reaction in me — rage, fear or joy, to name a few — without offering nuanced context, it leads me to think that it might be designed to mislead. When I encounter something that seems absolutely certain about morally and politically complex topics, such as the Israel-Hamas war, without acknowledging alternative views or uncertainties, I suspect it’s oversimplifying reality to push an agenda.”

— Sena Chang, 18

College freshman at Princeton University in New Jersey

“Articles that sound sketchy, made up, or manipulated are a red flag. Some media sources get rid of the bits and pieces of context that make a situation understandable. And media outlets sometimes contradict each other. Check and cross-check media. When a true piece of media spreads like wildfire, some media outlets will try and get attention from the situation and end up spreading lies about the situation. That’s why I find most articles about popular controversies annoyingly eye-rolling.”

— Antonette Davis, 14

Freshman at Central High School in Philadelphia

A single source doesn’t cut it for verifying what’s true

“I verify my information by getting it from multiple sources, not just people online who are crediting the original article I read. I also look at the information presented in the article from the perspective of a person who doesn’t know anything about the topic and see if the article and the ideas presented still make sense.”

— Yoni Zacks, 17

Senior at the Blake School in Minneapolis.

“More often than not I look it up on Google and read about it on a more reliable website. For example, if an article makes a claim about a piece of legislation, I try to find the full text of the cited legislation to better understand what it’s saying.”

— Olivia Garrison, 17

Graduated in 2023 from Davidson Academy in Reno, Nevada

“There’s a tool called Google Reverse Image Search that I use to check the origins of viral images or memes to see where they first appeared and if they’ve been repurposed out of context. During events like the presidential debate, I also looked at multiple websites offering real-time fact-checking like The New York Times to help contextualize what I was hearing and identify when what the candidates were saying was misinformation.”

— Sena Chang

“To verify information, I try to listen directly to candidates or their campaigns. I find this is the easiest way to understand the candidate’s policy plans, opinions on certain issues, and overall decorum. While commentary can be helpful, it often includes opinions that make me perceive certain things a certain way. Therefore, I find it important to directly hear from a political candidate first. Afterward, I listen to and watch video media with commentary. It helps me compare my understanding to someone else’s and clarify things I might not have fully understood.”

— Meghan Pierce, 18

Freshman at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in Champaign, Illinois

How young people navigate a world of misinformation

“As a teenager, I get a lot of my information from social media. I know many other teenagers get their information this way, too, so my word of advice is to be aware of the algorithm and how you’re fed information usually from one side. You’re not getting the complete story, so do your research instead of trusting one source!”

— Emma Luu, 17

Junior at Pine Creek High School in Colorado Springs, Colorado

“Check anything you think is misleading with a quick search and cross-check if it’s legitimate or not.”

— Arnav Goyal, 14

Freshman at Olentangy Liberty High School in Powell, Ohio

“Become aware of media bias, and do your best to consider different perspectives and stay open-minded while being aware of media bias.”

— Lucas Robbins, 17

Senior at Mandela International Magnet School in Santa Fe, New Mexico

“My (unpopular) take is that fact-checking is easier than it seems. … ​Social media serves as an integral egalitarian news source where anyone can create and share primary source information no matter where they live in the world. However, using social media as a sole source of information can be dangerous. Sometimes even recognizing satirical news sources is hard — I have been a victim of thinking The Onion was a real news source. You don’t have to research every single headline you ever see. The internet can be an overload of information at times, and choosing to disconnect is a skill young people need. However, if you see something that raises eyebrows, understanding the context is just a Google search away.”

— Kush Kaur, 17

Freshman at Collin College in McKinney, Texas

Teenagers are inundated daily with a mix of credible information and fake news. Out of necessity, they’re sharpening their instincts to identify misinformation and building skills to verify or debunk it. Their advice is clear: Stay mindful of algorithmic influence, avoid relying on a single source, and remember that it’s OK to step back when it all feels overwhelming.

Need more insights? Explore the resources below.

Caroline Bauman is the deputy managing editor for engagement at Chalkbeat. Reach her at cbauman@chalkbeat.org.

Erica Meltzer is the national editor at Chalkbeat, where she covers education policy and politics. Reach her at emeltzer@chalkbeat.org

This was originally published by . Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. Sign up for their newsletters at .

But research suggests that both men might be wise to play their cards close to the vest. According to , presidents who weighed in on education policy debates between 2009 and 2021 — such as COVID-era school closures or the adoption of Common Core — tended to polarize the public much more than galvanize them. Only when endorsing proposals that cut directly against the traditional position of their parties do they succeed in generating overall public support, the authors write. 

The findings seem to counsel caution in an election year, particularly with attitudes on national politics diverging as widely and consistently as they have in the history of polling. They also raise challenging questions about whether federal leadership on K–12 schools can be viable in the absence of the bipartisan consensus that largely favored school reform in the 1990s and 2000s. If not, state-level actors like governors and legislators may be left in the driver’s seat for the foreseeable future.

David Houston, a professor of education policy at George Mason University and the paper’s lead author, said the gulf separating Democrats and Republicans on education questions resembles some of the biggest divides in the American cultural landscape.  

“We really disagree on a lot of education issues, and that trend has accelerated over the last decade,” he said. “The difference in positive evaluations of teachers’ unions is of approximately the same magnitude as the partisan gap on legal abortion under any circumstances.”

If the politics of education has taken on some of the acrimony surrounding other issues, it represents a break with historical patterns. Schools have traditionally been insulated from national trends by their unique governance structure, with elected boards attracting little public attention as they decide questions of funding and curriculum. When presidents have entered the fray — as in the case of school desegregation in the 1950s, or the push to pass the No Child Left Behind law in the early 2000s — they have encountered resistance, but seldom failed entirely.

Morgan Polikoff, a professor of education at the University of Southern California, agreed that the past decade has brought heightened partisanship. Yet he also voiced hope that future presidents, perhaps including some now occupying state-level office, could notch greater education policy successes than Washington has seen recently.

“I could imagine having national leaders who were charismatic and had powerful views about the role of federal education policy again,” said Polikoff. “We just don’t have them currently, and we didn’t have them in the previous administration.”

The Obama exception

To estimate the influence of high-profile politicians like the current and former presidents, Houston built his study on public opinion research dating back to 2007.

The annual , developed and administered by researchers at Harvard, is one of the only measures that regularly surveys the public on their attitudes toward education topics. The paper relies on responses drawn from five separate editions of the poll, which included questions on topics like school choice, merit pay for teachers, and allowing illegal immigrants to receive in-state tuition to attend public universities. (Houston, who formerly served as Education Next’s survey director, has previously used similar data to show that general opinions on schools with time.)

“I look at questions that have been asked in the exact same way, or nearly the exact same way, over the course of at least 10 years,” he said. “Regardless of the imperfections of the survey questions — and every survey question has imperfections — those are true over time, so we can capture trends.”

Before giving their own views of 18 policy proposals, a random assortment of participants were first primed by hearing the incumbent president’s opinions on them. Because respondents included Democrats, Republicans, and independents, Houston was able to measure their reaction to hearing that a highly visible figure of either the same or opposing party had opined on a particular policy.

The overall result of receiving a partisan cue — effectively becoming aware of the president’s endorsement, regardless of one’s own political preferences — was statistically insignificant, moving respondents’ attitudes by just .02 points on a five-point scale. But that average accounts for larger effects that moved Democrats and Republicans in opposite directions: If someone learned that a president of his own party favored a specific education policy, they warmed to it by an average of .37 points. If a president of the opposite party was revealed to favor a policy, whether school vouchers or universal pre-K, the respondent moved away from that proposal by .32 points. 

In other words, voters carefully weigh what high-profile figures like U.S. presidents say about schools. But their pronouncements tend to be counterproductive, splitting the public along partisan lines. 
Recent history offers some support for the paper’s hypothesis. For example, multiple studies of school districts’ behavior during the pandemic found that their local partisanship, much more so than the prevalence of COVID in the surrounding area, was highly associated with whether they heeded President Trump’s 2020 exhortation to open schools for in-person learning.

Notably, one subset of results actually showed the opposite effect, bringing both sides somewhat closer to one another. When a president backs policies that are not traditionally associated with their party and its backers — the key example being Barack Obama, whose endorsement of charter schools, merit pay and higher academic standards were revealed to partisans in three separate polls — it actually depolarizes responses: Democrats moved .28 points toward the previously unfavored proposals, while Republicans moved in the opposite direction by .14 points.

Charles Barone, the vice president of K–12 policy for the pressure group Democrats for Education Reform, said his own observations of voters during the Obama era largely dovetailed with the study’s conclusions. 

“Obama’s support for education reform, and particularly charter schools, did help with Democrats,” Barone said. “We saw higher poll numbers among Democrats on issues like charters after Obama came out in favor of them.”

Elusive common ground

Education observers generally agreed that polarization around schools has clearly escalated since the Obama administration, and that many everyday voters rely heavily on their party leaders to form judgments on policy initiatives they’re unfamiliar with. 

But while Polikoff agreed that the receding center ground represented a “huge problem” for those attempting to improve the way schools deliver education, he added that President Biden’s most recent predecessors might have been particularly good at exercising partisan energies.

“You wouldn’t necessarily want to extrapolate from these two presidents to all of them,” he said. “Obama and Trump, if nothing else, were very visible and almost ubiquitous in ways that other presidents might not be — and that state and local leaders, who are actually influencing these policies — are not.”

State leadership may provide some cause for optimism as well. While rancorous fights over school closures and contentious classroom material have won headlines in recent years, long-awaited support from both parties has also led to efforts to incorporate the science of reading in early literacy instruction. And in further illustration of Houston’s findings, a slew of Republican governors have taken the opportunity to lift teacher salaries, winning popular approval in part by embracing a stance that is most often associated with Democrats.

Margaret Spellings, formerly the U.S. Secretary of Education under President George W. Bush, now serves as the CEO of the Washington-based . An enthusiastic proponent of No Child Left Behind-style education reform, she said she was struck by the “vacuum of federal leadership and cohesion” that now prevails in Washington.

In her office, she said, she still keeps mementos of the law’s passage, which was supported by mammoth margins in both the U.S. House and Senate. That occurred during the administration of a much more unifying president — Bush was riding sky-high approval ratings in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, and NCLB was seen as a major bipartisan compromise — but the victory reflected what political will and energy could accomplish, she added

“I wish someone would tell me what the Biden K–12 policy is,” Spellings said. “There is none. And the Trump administration was just about vouchers. But I haven’t given up on bipartisanship, period, or I wouldn’t be doing the job I’m doing.”