Trump’s Win Is a Wake-Up Call for Educators. Here’s Why

Now that we’ve had a few days to digest last week’s election results, let’s talk about what they mean for education. Rather than wade into policy wonkery, though, I want to discuss the implications for the zeitgeist that’s shaped K–12 schooling over the past half-decade or more—one that’s featured an embrace of progressive nostrums regarding racial identity, diversity, equity, social justice, gender, and inclusion. My bottom line is that Donald Trump is, in important ways, a vehicle for a cross-section of Americans to push back against the kinds of out-of-touch dogmas that I believe have fueled so many culture clashes over the past half-decade, especially around schools.

I want to be straight about where I’m coming from. Unlike most in the realms of education leadership, research, and advocacy, I’m firmly on the right. While I’m no great fan of President-elect Trump, I was heartened by Tuesday’s results, which included Republican victories in the Senate and, as I write, likely the House. I believe they hold big opportunities for educators across the board. Given that perspective, I’ll share a few thoughts that may (or may not) be useful to those in our field who feel very differently about what to make of those outcomes.

While the reaction to last week’s election in schools and colleges has been far more muted than in 2016, I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin spoke for many in education when she seethed, “Our fellow Americans voted for him” because they embraced Trump’s “racism, misogyny, willful ignorance, cruelty [and] contempt for democracy.” Rubin appeared to have shared talking points with the president of Families in Schools, who blasted out an email declaring that she was “heartbroken” by the election results but insisted that “there is no denying that half the nation had aspirations for a more inclusive and promising future for all.” The obvious implication is that the majority who voted for Trump oppose an inclusive and promising future for all.

Despite such accusations, the polls make clear that Trump won millions of votes from those who say they disapprove of him personally. Keep in mind that large (sometimes surprising) swaths of people who did not vote for Trump in 2016 or 2020 opted to so in 2024. Trump improved on his 2020 performance in Chicago, New York, Detroit, and El Paso by double digits. Trump won Miami-Dade County, long a Democratic stronghold in red Florida (that Clinton carried by 29 points in 2016). Nationally, he claimed 46 percent of the Hispanic vote, including winning Starr County, Texas—the most Hispanic county in the country—in the process becoming the first Republican presidential candidate to win there in 132 years. Trump appears to have won the national popular vote and has swept all seven of the major swing states while running far better in states like New Jersey, New York, and Virginia than in 2016 or 2020. Compared to 2020, Trump boosted his vote share among Asian Americans by nearly 20 points. He also took 16 percent of the African American vote, a notable increase from the 6 percent he won in 2016 and the best performance by a Republican presidential candidate in a half-century.

It’s pretty remarkable.

After all, during the Biden-Harris era, Democrats have been ardent proponents of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Meanwhile, the right has mobilized against DEI, successfully eliminated race-based college admissions, and fought efforts supposedly designed to render American history more inclusive. Trump is routinely pilloried as a racist and a xenophobe. And, yet, Trump fared better with Black and Latino voters than any Republican nominee in memory.

What’s going on? Immigration and inflation played a big role, of course. But, given that Trump fared so much better despite being the same guy he was in 2016 or 2020, the postmortems also suggest that Democrats suffered from being seen as increasingly hostile to widely shared notions of patriotism, merit, fairness, and parental authority.

That tension maps onto so many of the recent culture clashes in education, which have been marked by emphatic pushback against freshly minted progressive doctrines, like the insistence that the slogan “work hard, be nice” is a product of white supremacy culture, that race-segregated affinity groups are a way to promote inclusion, or that schools advance equity by eliminating honors classes or graduation requirements.

As I’ve argued for years, these exotic doctrines may predominate in schools of education and across the broad swath of K–12 associations, advocates, activists, and funders, but they are received very differently by many outside the charmed circle. In recent years, my inbox has featured a steady stream of missives from teachers, school leaders, and college faculty who want to quietly vent about various dogmas but are hesitant to speak up for fear of being branded a reactionary or a racist.

The odd thing is how far these dogmas have spread given how antithetical they are to the shared views of most Americans. For instance, Black and white Americans sound an awful lot alike when asked about some of the values that have been judged “white supremacist” by DEI trainers. A hefty majority of Hispanics say that, in the United States, “most can get ahead with hard work” and that, by a more than 3 to 1 margin, they’d “rather be a citizen of the United States than any other country.” Indeed, back in 2020, shortly after Biden won, Politico interviewed moderate and left-leaning voters in swing states, reporting, “They are up in arms over their school systems’ new equity initiatives, which they argue are costly and divisive, encouraging students to group themselves by race and take pro-activist stances.”

The real mystery here, for me, is less about Trump’s appeal than how Democrats wound up embracing a weird, unpopular liturgy that resonates with few outside out a heavily pedigreed coastal elite. As Brianna Wu, the executive director of the progressive Rebellion PAC, observed recently on X, “I’m sure the Republicans are about to do a whole host of horrific stuff I will politically oppose. But it’s also true that a lot of our loss on Tuesday was because ordinary Americans are tired of being called racist, sexist, and transphobic at every single step.”

Plenty of people get this. They’re just not in schools of education, education associations, education consultancies, or traditional education advocacy organizations. They’re in Moms for Liberty or Parents Defending Education, organizations whose leaders are invariably dismissed as “right wingers” or “culture warriors” (while their counterparts on the left are celebrated as impassioned champions of social justice). If you want to get a sense of how this asymmetry feels to those on the right, you can check it out here, here, or here.

Now, in education today, one response to all I’ve said thus far is, “That’s what I’d expect an old, straight, white guy to say.” So, in the spirit of trying to bridge that divide, let me note just a few of the Black and Latino thinkers who’ve made similar points: Columbia University’s John McWhorter skewered social justice dogma at length in Woke Racism. Coleman Hughes, author of The End of Race Politics, has argued that race-conscious advocates sow racial distrust by teaching that society is “a zero-sum power struggle between oppressed groups and oppressor groups—and that a win for the former requires a loss for the latter.” Virginia’s lieutenant governor, Winsome Sears, says, “When are we going to say ‘we can make it, we are making it.’ . . . Say that to Black and brown children and all other children. Say that to them instead of constantly being divisive.” Ruy Teixeira, who decamped from the Center for American Progress in 2022 because of the “chilling effect” of CAP’s progressive orthodoxy on “race and gender and trans issues,” has warned that Democrats are suffering for the tendency to view “all issues through the lens of identity politics.”

I could go on, but you get the point. So, what does this all mean for educators and those in education trying to find their way forward?

First, there’s an extraordinary opportunity here for those in and around K–12 to reset the zeitgeist in a way that reflects shared values and turns down the heat. One of the things I’ve been struck by over the past five or 10 years is how much more measured most practitioners are about all this when compared with the consultants, academics, DEI professionals, advocates, and funders. Time after time, I’ve heard from teachers and school leaders who haven’t embraced the extreme stuff but have felt pressured (or bullied) to just go along with it, or superintendents who’ve just entrusted this stuff to the equity “pros.” Here’s a chance for school and district leaders to step back and ask whether all these programs, workshops, and instructional materials are actually promoting the shared values and mutual respect they’re seeking. In many cases, I suspect the answer is no. Transparently and professionally addressing that disconnect is a terrific opportunity to build community trust, reassure policymakers, and lower the temperature.

Second, while racial identity played a much reduced role in voting, education loomed large. Harris won college graduates by double digits while Trump won the (much larger and historically Democratic) population of high school graduates by a similar margin. And that “education gap” is playing a huge role in our culture clashes as well as in our political ones. Education faces a problem similar to that in journalism—which is that pretty much everyone (aside from custodians, bus drivers, paraprofessionals, and secretaries) has a four-year college degree, and often a graduate degree. This means that everyone in positions of authority, whatever their personal politics, is part of the “educated elite” that’s viewed by populists with such suspicion. (For anyone wondering, “What about highly educated right wingers like you, Rick?” I’d say, yep, folks like me are viewed with suspicion, too—unless we take great pains to embrace performative populism.)

This means that in huge swaths of the country, school officials are working in a culture of general distrust. In highly educated, blue-bubble communities, this isn’t much of an issue. And there are certainly school and system leaders who have strong local roots or a lot of success defusing some of these tensions. But for plenty of other practitioners and leaders wondering why their communities are rebelling against professionally endorsed, expert-derived strategies to promote opportunity and inclusion, this is a huge opportunity to reevaluate assumptions and find new ways to engage parents, critics, and community members.

Third, don’t use shame as a cudgel in debates over library books, youth sports, trans identification, social and emotional learning, and other parental concerns. Parents are justifiably concerned about who decides what happens to their children during the school day, whether it’s what they’re reading, whom they’re playing sports with, or who’s sharing the locker room with them. When parents express concerns about inappropriate materials in a middle school library or one’s daughter being at risk when playing field hockey, it’s ludicrous that so many find themselves archly dismissed as book banners or transphobes. There’s an excellent chance they’re actually just … concerned parents.

The same holds when parents insist they have a right to know how teachers are addressing the gender of their child or whether schools are counseling their student for gender dysphoria (especially given that these parents would be routinely informed if the school gave their kid an aspirin, for heaven’s sake). And it shouldn’t surprise anyone that parents might support SEL instruction that emphasizes self-control, collaboration, or mutual respect while rejecting lessons that wade into microaggressions and privilege walks. Yet, these straightforward distinctions are routinely ignored, with sensible concerns dismissed as bigotry and ignorance. The refusal to have honest, open debates has justifiably infuriated parents and fueled the kind of frustration that resulted in ugly public disputes.

Fourth, I think the tension is elegantly captured by the controversies around American history. In private conversation, I find that thoughtful progressives readily acknowledge our nation’s remarkable accomplishments and contributions. They insist only that we also take care to offer students the complete picture, one that doesn’t shy away from discussion of America’s sins and stumbles. That strikes me as a sensible and popular stance. (And, by the way, it’s one that massive, bipartisan majorities endorse).

The problem is that, in practice, far too many PD seminars, ed. schools, and curricula seem bent on promoting a mindset that regards pride in the American story as evidence of ignorance and simple-mindedness. The result is that the “America sucks” view has garnered the luster of sophistication. That may have something to do with why less than a third of U.S. high school seniors think their nation is the best country in the world. Meanwhile, most Americans think their nation is a grand place and that most Americans are good people. (Tellingly, 90 percent of white conservatives, 70 percent of Latinos, and nearly 60 percent of Black respondents say they think the United States is the greatest country in the world. Among white progressives? The figure is 30 percent.) Americans pay for and send their kids to the nation’s public schools. Those schools should honor their shared views and values.

If you’re feeling betrayed by voters and find yourself tempted to insist that the only explanation is that most of the nation is racist, misogynist, xenophobic, and transphobic, you risk getting stuck. For one thing, it’s really hard to engage with or understand someone who you’ve decided is a racist, misogynist, transphobe, or apologist for fascism. But, more fundamentally, public schools are charged with serving all Americans. This means according respect to all students and families, even those you regard as apologists for fascism. If you’re thinking, “Well, I may think or only say those things in private conversation, but it has no impact on how I do my job or engage with my community”—I’d encourage you to think again.

But I want to end on a more positive note. The great opportunity here is that I tend to think lots of the toxic stuff that’s so evident in schools isn’t actually very popular. I think Trump’s 2016 victory and then the 2020 murder of George Floyd—combined with the pandemic—created a sense that educators needed to do something. And a lot of this stuff flooded in, promoted by the ed. school professoriate, funders, consultants, and advocates who inhabit a very particular bubble. As the shock of those events has receded, schools have nonetheless been burdened with the consequences of a lot of decisions made at a very peculiar moment. This is a chance to reexamine those decisions with fresh eyes and proceed accordingly. I hope we seize it.

Frederick M. Hess is a senior fellow, the director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), and an affiliate of AEI’s James Q. Wilson Program in K–12 Education Studies, where he works on K–12 and higher education issues.

Reprinted with Permission from AEI – By Frederick M. Hess

The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of AMAC or AMAC Action.