Chapter 29: Education Policy and the Federal Role

"We cannot all become Lincoln, but we can all become educated. The question for a republic is not whether the ablest will be educated, but whether everyone else will be." — Horace Mann, 1846 (paraphrase)

"Education is fundamentally a state and local function. The federal role is to support, not to direct." — Ronald Reagan, 1983

"Without high-quality public education, equal opportunity is a myth. The federal government has a constitutional duty to pursue it." — Linda Darling-Hammond, 2010

These three quotes mark the boundaries of the American education debate. Mann's nineteenth-century vision of the common school as the engine of self-government. Reagan's twentieth-century insistence that education belongs to states and localities. Darling-Hammond's twenty-first-century insistence that the federal government must guarantee opportunity even where states will not. All three positions are alive today. All three have constituencies. All three appear in the law.

This chapter examines education as a policy domain — how it is funded, who controls it, what the federal government does and does not do, and why it has become one of the most politically charged areas of American government in the 2020s. We will be concrete about numbers and structures. We will be honest about the genuinely contested questions. And we will be careful to distinguish what the evidence shows from what people argue about what the evidence shows.

Education is, to a degree underappreciated by most Americans, a state-and-local function. The Constitution does not mention education. The federal government provides a substantial but minority share of K-12 funding. Most decisions about what is taught, who teaches, and how schools are run happen at the state, district, and school-board level. This federalism reality is both the source of American educational diversity (50 different systems, each adapting to local conditions) and the source of American educational inequality (children's life chances depend heavily on the ZIP code they happen to live in).

When the federal government does act, it acts through specific levers: Title I (high-poverty schools), IDEA (special education), school nutrition, civil-rights enforcement, and — for higher education — Pell Grants, federal student loans, and research funding. Each of these levers has expanded and contracted across administrations. Each has generated argument. None has produced consensus.

We begin with the federalism reality.

29.1 The Federalism Reality

K-12 education in the United States is a roughly $870 billion annual enterprise. Of that, approximately 91% is state and local money. About 9% is federal money. The federal share has fluctuated between 7% and 14% across recent decades — rising during recessions when federal stimulus dollars flowed into schools, falling as those funds expired.

This is the central fact about American education policy: the federal government is a junior partner in K-12. That statement is not a normative claim about whether the federal share should be higher or lower. It is an empirical description of the current arrangement.

The constitutional foundation for this arrangement is the silence of the Constitution on education. The Framers did not include education among the enumerated powers of Congress (Article I, Section 8). The Tenth Amendment reserves to the states (or to the people) the powers not delegated to the federal government. From this combination, the legal default emerged: education is a state function, and the federal government may participate only through its other powers — chiefly the spending power (offering grants on conditions states accept), the commerce power (regulating interstate aspects of education), and the enforcement clauses of the Reconstruction Amendments (prohibiting state-sponsored discrimination).

State constitutions, by contrast, almost universally make education a state responsibility. Most state constitutions contain an "education clause" — language obligating the state to provide a system of free public schools. The specific wording varies: some states promise "a thorough and efficient system" (the language litigated in Abbott v. Burke in New Jersey), some promise "an adequate education" (litigated in many states), some promise simply "free common schools." These clauses have been the basis for school-funding litigation since the 1970s, with state supreme courts ordering legislatures to equalize funding across districts.

The state-level structure is itself layered. States set graduation requirements, teacher-licensing rules, and (in most cases) academic standards. Local school districts — there are approximately 13,000 of them, varying in size from a few hundred students to the New York City Department of Education's roughly one million — operate the schools, hire most teachers, and set curriculum within state guidelines. School boards at the district level are typically elected by local voters, though governance structures vary (some boards are appointed by mayors; some large districts have moved to appointed governance after persistent dysfunction). About 50 million students attend public K-12 schools, plus roughly 5 million in private schools and 2-3 million in homeschool settings.

This three-layer structure (federal, state, local) means that the same policy question can have wildly different answers in different places. A high-school graduation requirement, a curriculum framework, a discipline policy, a school-choice arrangement — all of these are determined primarily by state and local actors. When you read national education news, ask: at which level is the decision being made?

A useful exercise: pick any educational policy debate you have heard about — book removals, math curriculum, gender-identity policies, school discipline, charter school expansion, religious displays in schools — and ask "at what level is this actually being decided?" In almost every case, the answer is "at the state legislature or the local school board, not in Congress or the White House." National political debate often obscures this. A presidential candidate's position on K-12 curriculum is largely symbolic; the candidate has little authority to enact it. A state legislative race or a school-board race has more practical effect on what is actually taught in a classroom than a presidential race does. This is one of the reasons participation in school-board elections — typically held in low-turnout off-cycle elections, often with a few percent of eligible voters showing up — has become a focus of political mobilization on both the right and the left in the 2020s.

The federalism reality also produces sharp regional differences in educational outcomes that are difficult to attribute to any single national-policy lever. Average per-pupil spending differs dramatically across states (from approximately $9,000 in Idaho and Utah to over $25,000 in New York and the District of Columbia). Teacher salaries differ by a factor of two or more. Average class sizes vary. Graduation requirements differ in the number of years of math, science, and history required; in foreign-language requirements; in physical-education and health-education requirements. The result is that an American student's educational experience — what counts as "12th grade" — varies materially with which state and district they happened to grow up in.

Defenders of the federalism reality argue that this variation is a feature, not a bug: it allows experimentation, accommodation to local values and preferences, and policy diversity that uniform national rules would foreclose. Critics argue that it produces unconscionable inequality of opportunity — that whether a child has access to AP courses, qualified teachers, well-resourced libraries, or even functioning HVAC systems should not depend so heavily on geographic accident. Both arguments have force. The current structure embodies a compromise between them.

29.2 K-12 Funding and Structure

The funding base

K-12 schools are funded from three sources, in roughly descending order:

• Local property taxes — historically the dominant source, providing about 36% of K-12 revenue nationally (varies widely by state, from under 20% to over 60%).
• State general funds — approximately 47% of K-12 revenue nationally, drawn primarily from state income and sales taxes.
• Federal funds — approximately 9-10% of K-12 revenue nationally, concentrated in specific programs targeting high-poverty schools, special education, and school nutrition.

The local-property-tax base is the source of the system's most persistent inequity. Districts with more valuable property — typically wealthier suburbs — generate more revenue per pupil from the same property-tax rate than do districts with less valuable property. A district with $1 million in taxable property per pupil at a 1% tax rate generates $10,000 per pupil. A district with $250,000 in taxable property per pupil at the same rate generates $2,500 per pupil. The difference is structural.

State governments attempt to mitigate this through equalization formulas — distribution rules that send more state dollars to districts with lower local capacity. The mathematical sophistication of these formulas varies. Some states (Texas's "Robin Hood" recapture provisions, struck down and re-enacted multiple times) require wealthier districts to share property-tax revenue with poorer ones. Some (New Jersey, after Abbott v. Burke, the long-running 1985-2011 litigation) have been ordered by their supreme courts to provide intensive supplemental funding to identified high-poverty districts. Some (Kentucky, after Rose v. Council for Better Education, 1989) have been ordered to redesign their entire school-finance system. The Kentucky court's language — that the state had to provide "an efficient system of common schools throughout the State" — became influential in school-finance litigation nationally.

Even with equalization, per-pupil spending varies dramatically across the United States. National averages obscure the variation. The U.S. average per-pupil spending in 2022 was approximately $15,600. But the range across districts ran from roughly $8,000 in some low-spending rural and southern districts to $30,000 or more in some high-spending suburban and urban districts (notably in New York, New Jersey, and the District of Columbia). Within-state variation is often as large as between-state variation. A high-spending suburban district in Connecticut and a low-spending rural district in the same state can differ by a factor of two.

What does this variation buy? The honest answer is: it buys a mix of things, and the marginal return on additional spending is contested. Higher spending typically buys smaller class sizes, better-paid teachers (which improves teacher retention and quality at the margin), more counselors and support staff, better facilities, and more extracurricular and AP/IB offerings. Studies finding that increased spending improves student outcomes (Jackson, Johnson, and Persico 2016, examining court-ordered increases in school finance reform states) have become more credible since 2015. Studies finding little or no relationship between spending and outcomes (Hanushek, in a long line of work) emphasize that how money is spent matters more than how much. Both lines of evidence are real. The current consensus among education economists is roughly: money matters when it is spent on instructional quality, but the relationship is not linear and depends heavily on management and accountability.

Charter schools

Charter schools are public schools — funded with public dollars, free to attend, generally subject to state academic standards — that operate under a "charter" granting them more autonomy than traditional district schools. They are typically managed by a non-profit (or in some states, a for-profit) organization rather than the local school district. The first charter law was passed in Minnesota in 1991. Today approximately 7-8% of public-school students in the United States attend charter schools, though the share varies enormously by city and state — exceeding 40% in cities like Detroit, New Orleans (post-Katrina, where the district was effectively rebuilt as charters), and Washington D.C., while remaining under 5% in many states.

The empirical literature on charter outcomes is mixed but more nuanced than political debate suggests. The most cited body of research is from the Stanford Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO), which has produced multiple national studies. The 2009 CREDO report found that charter students on average performed roughly equivalently to demographically similar district students — about 17% of charter schools outperformed comparable district schools, 37% performed worse, and the rest performed similarly. The 2013 update found charter performance had improved on average. The 2023 update found further improvement, with charter students gaining the equivalent of roughly 16 days of additional learning in reading and 6 days in math compared to demographically matched district peers — small but statistically significant.

The averages, however, mask important variation. Some urban charter sectors (Boston, New York City, Newark, Denver, New Orleans) have shown strong positive effects on student achievement, particularly for low-income students of color, in randomized lottery-based studies. Some sectors — particularly online/virtual charters — have shown consistently negative effects. Critics (Diane Ravitch, the National Education Association) emphasize the variability and argue that charter expansion drains resources from district schools without consistently improving outcomes. Defenders (Stanford CREDO researchers, AEI's Frederick Hess and Nat Malkus) emphasize the strong urban results and argue that charter schools provide options for families whose district schools are failing.

Vouchers and Education Savings Accounts

Vouchers are public payments to families that can be used to pay private-school tuition (or, in the broader Education Savings Account / ESA model, can be used for tutoring, homeschool curriculum, therapy, and other educational expenses). Voucher and ESA programs have expanded sharply in the 2020s, particularly in Republican-led states. Arizona enacted universal ESA eligibility in 2022. Florida followed in 2023, Iowa in 2023, Oklahoma in 2024, and Texas in 2025 after multiple legislative attempts. As of 2026, more than a dozen states have universal or near-universal voucher/ESA eligibility, and total enrollment in such programs has exceeded one million students nationally.

The empirical record on vouchers is, like charters, mixed and politically charged. Earlier voucher programs (Milwaukee, Cleveland, D.C. Opportunity Scholarship) showed modest positive or neutral effects on student outcomes in most studies. More recent statewide programs (Indiana, Ohio, Louisiana) have shown more concerning results — multiple studies of Louisiana's voucher program in particular found negative effects on academic outcomes for participating students, particularly in the program's early years. The Louisiana findings prompted significant rethinking among voucher advocates about quality control in the receiving schools.

The most recent universal-ESA programs are too new for rigorous outcome studies. Early data on enrollment patterns shows that a substantial share of recipients in Arizona, Florida, and Iowa were already attending private schools or homeschooling before the program — meaning the public dollars partially substituted for what families were already paying. Whether this is a feature (the program is offering equal treatment to families who chose private options) or a bug (the program is a transfer to wealthier families) depends on the framing. Both framings are honest descriptions of the empirical pattern.

Public-school choice within districts

Beyond charters and vouchers, most large urban districts offer public-school choice within the district — magnet schools (typically themed around academics, arts, or career-and-technical education), International Baccalaureate (IB) programs, dual-language programs, and inter-district transfer arrangements. About 25% of public-school students attend a school other than their geographically assigned one through some form of choice mechanism. The politics of this within-district choice tends to be less polarized than the politics of charters or vouchers.

Within-district choice raises its own equity questions. Magnet programs and selective-enrollment schools are typically over-represented in their enrollment of students from higher-income families, partly because the application process requires informed and engaged parents who can navigate it, and partly because the application criteria (test scores, prior grades, sometimes auditions or interviews) advantage students who have had stronger prior preparation. Some districts have responded by reserving seats for low-income students or eliminating selective entry criteria; others have not. The same districts often see the most heated school-board conflicts over admissions to elite high schools — recent examples include New York City's Specialized High Schools (Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, Brooklyn Tech, where the SHSAT examination has been a focus of controversy), San Francisco's Lowell High School, Boston's "exam schools" (Boston Latin, Boston Latin Academy, John D. O'Bryant), and Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Fairfax County, Virginia. Each of these debates has involved questions about the relative weight of academic merit, racial diversity, socioeconomic representation, and parental choice, and each has split along complicated political lines that do not map cleanly onto national partisan divisions.

Homeschooling and microschools

Beyond traditional and charter schools, homeschooling has grown substantially in recent decades. Approximately 3-4% of school-age children were homeschooled before COVID-19; the figure spiked above 5% during pandemic disruptions and remained elevated thereafter. Homeschooling regulations vary dramatically by state — some states (Texas, Idaho, Michigan) have minimal regulation; others (New York, Pennsylvania) require curricula, attendance records, and standardized testing. The political profile of homeschooling has shifted: historically associated with religious-conservative and rural families, the movement has diversified to include secular families dissatisfied with school quality, families of children with special needs, and families dissatisfied with school responses to COVID-19 or to particular curricular decisions.

Microschools and learning pods — small, often private, often parent-organized educational arrangements serving a handful of families — have grown since 2020. They occupy ambiguous regulatory ground, sometimes treated as homeschools, sometimes as private schools, sometimes as unregulated educational arrangements. State responses have varied. The expansion of universal-eligibility ESA programs in several states has provided public funding for some microschool models, raising new regulatory questions about quality control and student-protection requirements.

29.3 The Federal K-12 Role

The federal government's K-12 footprint, though minority in dollars, is consequential in specific domains.

Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA, 1965) is the largest federal K-12 program — approximately $18 billion annually in 2024. Title I dollars flow to school districts based on poverty levels, intended to supplement (not replace) state and local resources serving low-income students. The program has been continuously reauthorized since 1965.

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA, 1975) requires public schools to provide a "free appropriate public education" (FAPE) to all students with disabilities, including those with intellectual, physical, learning, and behavioral disabilities. IDEA appropriations are approximately $14 billion annually. The original 1975 statute promised the federal government would fund 40% of the additional cost of educating students with disabilities. Actual federal funding has been around 13% — a long-running source of frustration among local school administrators, who argue Congress has perpetually underfunded what is effectively an unfunded mandate.

School nutrition programs — primarily the National School Lunch Program and the School Breakfast Program — provide approximately $28 billion annually for free and reduced-price meals. About 30 million students receive free or reduced-price school meals on a typical school day. These programs are administered through the USDA, not the Department of Education.

Civil rights enforcement flows through the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights (OCR), which investigates complaints alleging that schools and colleges have violated federal civil-rights statutes (Title VI on race, Title IX on sex, Section 504 and the ADA on disability, and the Age Discrimination Act). OCR's enforcement priorities have shifted across administrations. The Obama-era OCR (2009-2017) emphasized racial-disparity investigations of school discipline (the 2014 "Dear Colleague letter" on disproportionate discipline) and Title IX investigations of campus sexual misconduct. The first Trump administration OCR (2017-2021) rescinded the discipline guidance and revised the Title IX rules. The Biden OCR (2021-2025) restored and expanded prior priorities, particularly on gender-identity protections. The second Trump administration OCR (2025-) has begun another reversal. The pendulum is real.

The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA, 2015) replaced the Bush-era No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB, 2001). NCLB had imposed federal accountability requirements — annual testing in grades 3-8 and once in high school, school-improvement requirements for schools failing to meet "adequate yearly progress" benchmarks, and sanctions on persistently failing schools. By the early 2010s, NCLB had become unpopular across the political spectrum: the political right objected to federal intrusion into state educational decisions, while the political left objected to over-reliance on standardized testing and the labeling of high-poverty schools as failures. ESSA preserved annual testing but devolved most accountability decisions back to states. It is the current legal framework for federal K-12 policy.

The recent politics of federal K-12 has included significant friction. The first Trump administration proposed substantial cuts to the Department of Education and championed federal voucher proposals that did not pass Congress. The Biden administration expanded federal pandemic-recovery funding (the $190 billion Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief / ESSER fund), most of which expired in 2024. The second Trump administration in 2025 announced plans to substantially restructure the Department of Education, including transferring some functions to other agencies and proposing legislation to abolish the Department entirely (a long-standing conservative priority dating to Reagan). The legal and political fate of these proposals is unsettled as of this writing.

The proposal to abolish the Department of Education is politically perennial — Reagan campaigned on it in 1980, included it in his platform, and ultimately did not pursue it. Successive Republican administrations have proposed restructurings short of abolition. The argument for abolition emphasizes the constitutional silence on education and the federalism principle: that an agency Congress created in 1979 (consolidating prior education functions of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare) embodies a federal role that the Constitution does not authorize and that practical experience has not vindicated. The argument against abolition emphasizes that the Department's core functions — administering Title I, IDEA, Pell Grants, federal student loans, and civil-rights enforcement — would not disappear with the Department; they would simply be reassigned to other agencies (Treasury for student loans, perhaps; Justice for civil-rights enforcement; HHS for Title I and IDEA), with attendant transition costs and likely no meaningful improvement in efficiency. Recent academic analyses (Rick Hess at AEI, on the right; Linda Darling-Hammond and others on the left) have largely converged on the view that abolition without substantive policy change is symbolic; abolition with substantive policy change is achievable through restructuring without abolition. The politics, however, runs ahead of the policy analysis.

29.4 Curriculum Debates

What students are taught, and how, is determined primarily at the state and district level. The federal government does not have authority to impose a national curriculum — and Congress has explicitly prohibited the Department of Education from "directing, supervising, or controlling" curriculum (Section 103 of the Department of Education Organization Act, 1979). What the federal government can do is fund state and local efforts (which it does), set conditions on those funds, and enforce civil-rights protections related to curriculum (e.g., racial discrimination, disability accommodation).

This means curriculum debates play out across thousands of districts and fifty state legislatures. We highlight the debates that have most defined American education politics in the 2010s and 2020s.

Common Core

The Common Core State Standards Initiative, launched in 2009 and adopted by 45 states by 2012, was a state-led effort coordinated through the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers to develop common K-12 standards in mathematics and English language arts. Supporters argued common standards would allow easier comparison of student progress across states and reduce the variation in expectations that disadvantaged students moving between states.

Common Core began with broad bipartisan support — endorsed by the National Governors Association (whose Republican and Democratic governors collaborated on the project), the Obama administration (which incentivized adoption through Race to the Top grants), and major business groups (which had long argued American educational standards were too low for global competitiveness).

The bipartisan support did not last. From the political right, opposition emerged that the standards represented federal overreach (technically inaccurate — they were a state-led initiative — but the federal incentives blurred the line); that the content reflected progressive educational philosophies (a contested claim, particularly for the math standards); and that the implementation had displaced more rigorous state standards in some places (true in some specific cases, e.g., Massachusetts, which had previously had some of the country's most rigorous standards). From the political left, opposition emerged that the standards drove an over-emphasis on standardized testing; that the linkage to teacher evaluations (which the Obama administration had encouraged through grants) was unfair; and that the implementation had been rushed.

By 2015, multiple states had formally withdrawn or substantially revised Common Core. By 2020, the term "Common Core" had become so politically toxic that some states quietly retained substantively similar standards under new names. The actual academic content of the standards remained, in modified form, in most states — but the brand was dead. The episode is a case study in how federal influence (even without direct authority) can produce backlash that ultimately undermines the influence.

The reading-instruction debate ("the science of reading")

Among the most consequential curriculum debates of the 2020s has been the renewed argument over how children should be taught to read. The dispute is technical but the stakes are high — only about a third of American fourth-graders read at "proficient" levels on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), and reading proficiency is foundational for everything else in school.

The two main approaches: systematic phonics (explicit instruction in letter-sound correspondences, building from individual sounds to blends to words) and balanced literacy (an approach that combines some phonics with reading-aloud, guided reading of authentic texts, and writing — typically with less explicit phonics instruction). For decades, balanced literacy (and its cousin "whole language") was dominant in American teacher-education programs and in many of the most-used commercial curricula.

Beginning in the late 2010s and accelerating after journalist Emily Hanford's 2019 reporting and the 2022 American Public Media podcast "Sold a Story," a substantial body of evidence — much of it from cognitive science research dating back decades — became more widely known. The evidence indicated that systematic phonics instruction produced better outcomes, particularly for students at risk of reading difficulty (including students with dyslexia and many low-income students), than balanced-literacy approaches.

The political response has been notably bipartisan. By 2024, more than 30 states — Republican-led, Democratic-led, and divided — had passed legislation requiring evidence-based reading instruction, mandating teacher training in the science of reading, or restricting curricula deemed to be inadequate in phonics instruction. This is one of the few major curricular reforms of the 2020s with broad cross-partisan support.

Math curriculum

Math curriculum has been the subject of multiple reform attempts since the 1980s, none of which has produced consensus. Recent debates have included controversy over the California Mathematics Framework (2023 final version, which delayed algebra for some students in earlier drafts and was substantially revised after backlash), New York City's elimination of gifted-and-talented testing for entry to selective programs (later partially reversed), and continuing argument over when and how to teach algebra.

The recurring debate is between approaches that emphasize procedural fluency and algorithmic mastery (drilling standard algorithms, memorizing math facts, mastering computational techniques before applying them) and approaches that emphasize conceptual understanding and problem-solving (teaching multiple solution methods, emphasizing word problems and "real-world" applications, integrating mathematical reasoning with other subjects). Periodic "math wars" have erupted around specific reform curricula — the 1990s NCTM standards, the 2010s Common Core math, and most recently the California Mathematics Framework. Critics of reform-oriented approaches argue that students need solid procedural foundations before they can engage in conceptual work and that the reforms have correlated with declining performance. Defenders argue that conceptual understanding is what allows mathematical knowledge to transfer beyond the immediate context of memorized procedures. The empirical evidence supports a both-and answer that does not satisfy either polarized camp.

The persistent achievement-gap problem is unresolved. NAEP math scores have shown widening gaps between the top and bottom of the distribution since the early 2000s, with the COVID-19 pandemic substantially worsening outcomes especially for low-income students. The 2024 NAEP results showed continued declines in fourth-grade and eighth-grade math compared to pre-pandemic, with no clear signs of recovery in most states. The most disadvantaged students lost the most ground during pandemic disruptions and have been slowest to recover. The implications for higher education and workforce readiness are substantial: if the bottom third of the distribution has not recovered to pre-pandemic levels by the time the affected cohorts reach college and the workforce, the educational and economic consequences will compound for years.

History and social studies — the contested terrain

History and social studies curriculum has been the most politically contested curricular area of the 2020s. We will be careful here.

In August 2019, the New York Times Magazine published the 1619 Project, a series of essays reframing American history around the centrality of slavery and its legacies. The project argued, among other things, that 1619 (the year the first enslaved Africans were brought to colonial Virginia) should be understood as a foundational date for the American project. The framing generated substantial scholarly debate, with prominent historians both supporting the broader argument about the centrality of slavery and disputing specific historical claims (notably about the role of slavery in motivating the American Revolution).

In September 2020, the first Trump administration established the President's Advisory 1776 Commission, which issued a report in January 2021 framed in part as a response to the 1619 Project. The 1776 Commission report was disbanded by President Biden on his first day in office. Republican-led states subsequently incorporated some of its themes into state-level legislation.

Beginning in 2021, multiple states passed legislation restricting how race, racism, and related concepts could be taught in K-12 schools. Florida's "Stop WOKE Act" (HB 7, 2022) prohibited K-12 instruction that promoted any of eight specified concepts (e.g., that one race is morally superior to another; that an individual is inherently privileged or oppressed because of race or sex; that meritocracy is racist). Federal courts struck down the higher-education provisions of the Florida law in 2024 as unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination, but K-12 provisions remained partially in effect after appellate proceedings. Texas (HB 3979, 2021, and SB 3, 2021) restricted teaching of specific concepts and required certain content be taught with "deference and contextualization." Tennessee, Iowa, Oklahoma, North Dakota, Arkansas, and Idaho passed broadly similar legislation. Roughly 18 states had passed some form of restriction by 2024.

The substance of the debate involves real disagreement and significant rhetorical inflation, on both sides. The empirically defensible characterization is something like the following:

• In some specific districts, specific instructional materials and trainings drew on academic frameworks (often associated with critical race theory, though usage of the term varies) that some parents found objectionable. The most-cited examples, when traced, generally involved materials drawn from anti-bias curricula or diversity-equity-and-inclusion training rather than the academic legal-studies framework called "critical race theory" in its 1980s-90s scholarly usage. The conflation of multiple distinct things under the label "CRT" is one of the durable features of the debate.

• The actual incidence of these specific materials in K-12 classrooms was relatively limited — far less common than political rhetoric suggested. Most K-12 history curricula in 2020-2021 were not, by any meaningful metric, "teaching CRT."

• Some of the state legislation in response was relatively narrow (prohibiting compelled assent to specific propositions about race) and would have been uncontroversial under most prior understandings of education policy. Some was broader (prohibiting instruction that might cause "discomfort" or that addressed racial disparities at all in certain framings) and raised serious First Amendment concerns, particularly in higher education.

• Implementation has been uneven. Some teachers in restricted states have reported chilling effects (avoiding topics covered in their professional training out of caution about what is now permissible). Some districts have responded with detailed guidance; others have provided little. Some legislation has been substantially revised or partially struck down by courts.

A reader trying to understand this domain should consult the specific text of specific state laws, court rulings, and district guidance, rather than rely on national political coverage from any source. The underlying disagreement — over what role discussion of race, slavery, and structural inequality should play in K-12 history — is real and serious, and not all advocates on either side are operating in bad faith.

Sex education

Sex education has been long-contested terrain. Approaches range from comprehensive sex education (which addresses contraception, consent, sexual orientation, and gender identity alongside abstinence) to abstinence-only-until-marriage education (which emphasizes abstinence and typically does not provide detailed information on contraception). Federal funding has flowed at various times to both approaches — abstinence-only programs received approximately $1.5 billion in federal funding from 1996 to 2009, and comprehensive programs received increased funding from 2010 onward.

The empirical literature generally finds that comprehensive programs are associated with better outcomes (later sexual initiation, increased contraceptive use among sexually active youth, lower rates of teen pregnancy and STIs) than abstinence-only programs. Critics of comprehensive programs argue that the parental-choice question — whether sex education is the role of schools at all, and what specific values should be taught — is a legitimate domain of parental authority that shouldn't be settled by reference to outcome studies alone.

Gender identity in schools

The set of questions around gender identity in K-12 schools sharpened politically after 2020. The relevant policy questions include:

• Names and pronouns. When a student requests to be called by a name and pronouns different from those associated with their birth sex, what should the school do? Should the school inform parents? Should teachers be required to use the requested terms?
• Bathroom and locker-room access. Should students have access to facilities corresponding to their gender identity, or to those corresponding to their birth sex?
• Athletics. Should transgender students compete on teams corresponding to their gender identity, or those corresponding to their birth sex? The question is sharper for trans-girl participation in girls' sports than for the reverse.
• Curriculum content. What gender-related content should be included in K-12 instruction, and at what grade levels?

State responses have diverged sharply. Some states (California, New Jersey, Maryland) have adopted policies broadly affirming student-identified gender identity. Some states (Florida, Texas, Tennessee, Alabama) have restricted school recognition of transgender identity, parental notification, athletic participation, or specific instruction. A growing number of cases have been litigated in federal courts, with mixed outcomes.

The honest assessment is that both progressive and conservative concerns are substantive. Progressives emphasize student safety, mental-health implications of non-recognition (which the empirical literature generally supports as a real concern), and the significance of identity recognition for adolescents. Conservatives emphasize parental rights to be informed about and shape their children's gender-related decisions, single-sex spaces (particularly in athletics, where competitive fairness questions have empirical content), and concerns about the appropriateness of certain instructional content in early grades. Neither concern is invented, and neither side's full position can be fairly characterized as bad-faith. The disagreement is substantive.

Book "banning" and removal debates

The phrase "book banning" has become contested. The advocacy organization PEN America has documented thousands of instances of school book "bans" since 2021 — defined broadly to include any restriction of access to a book in a school library, classroom, or curriculum. Critics argue the count includes many cases that are better described as "removal of inappropriate-content books from K-3 or 4-6 sections" rather than "bans" in the sense of full prohibition. Both characterizations contain truth: the number of removals has substantially increased, and the substance of many removals involves age-appropriateness judgments rather than viewpoint suppression.

Conservative-coded removal efforts have most often targeted books with explicit sexual content (particularly LGBTQ-themed content, in some cases) and books on race-related themes. Progressive-coded removal efforts have most often targeted books seen as racially insensitive (including some classics — Huckleberry Finn, To Kill a Mockingbird — though removals have been modest). The political asymmetry — most current removal efforts come from the political right, though both sides do this — is part of the empirical picture, not a partisan claim.

29.5 Higher Education

American higher education is a $700+ billion enterprise serving approximately 19 million students at roughly 4,000 degree-granting institutions. The sector is highly diverse:

• Public four-year institutions (state universities and their branch campuses) enroll approximately 8 million students. State funding per student has declined approximately 10-15% in real terms since 2008, with significant variation by state. This decline has been a major driver of tuition increases at public universities.
• Public community colleges (typically two-year, open-enrollment institutions) enroll approximately 5 million students. Community colleges play a critical role in workforce training, transfer pipelines to four-year institutions, and access for first-generation and low-income students.
• Private nonprofit institutions range from small liberal-arts colleges to research universities. They enroll approximately 5 million students. The most selective private universities have endowments enabling them to offer substantial financial aid to low- and middle-income students, but the majority of private institutions have far smaller endowments and rely on tuition revenue.
• For-profit institutions enroll approximately 1 million students. The for-profit sector grew rapidly in the 2000s, then contracted sharply in the 2010s after federal investigations of misleading recruitment practices and high student-loan default rates. Several large for-profit chains (Corinthian Colleges, ITT Tech) collapsed.
• Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) — approximately 100 institutions — enroll approximately 300,000 students and continue to play a disproportionate role in producing Black professionals (including disproportionate shares of Black doctors, judges, and STEM PhDs).
• Tribal colleges and universities — about 35 institutions — serve Native American communities, often in remote locations.

The federal government's role in higher education is more substantial than in K-12, both in dollars and policy reach. Federal Pell Grants (need-based grants to low-income students, maximum approximately $7,400 per year in 2024) flow to roughly 6.5 million students annually at a total cost of approximately $30 billion. Federal student loans account for the great majority of student lending — total outstanding federal student debt is approximately $1.7 trillion, held by roughly 43 million borrowers. Federal research funding (NIH, NSF, DOE, DARPA, and many others) flows primarily to research universities and supports the bulk of basic research conducted in the United States.

Federal policy operates through these levers — particularly the conditions placed on Title IV student aid eligibility. Institutions that wish to enroll federally-aided students must be accredited by an accrediting agency recognized by the Secretary of Education, must meet specific requirements on student-loan default rates and gainful employment, and must comply with federal civil-rights laws including Title IX.

The accreditation system itself has become a focus of political attention. American higher-education accreditation is administered by private, non-governmental accrediting agencies (regional and specialized) recognized by the Department of Education. Critics on the political right have argued that this self-regulatory system has produced a kind of cartel — that accreditation requirements include ideological commitments (DEI offices, certain hiring practices, certain curricular components) that constrain institutional diversity. The 2025 Trump administration moved to revise the federal recognition criteria for accrediting agencies in ways intended to reduce these requirements; the changes are contested in court. Critics on the political left have argued that any weakening of accreditation oversight risks the kinds of consumer-protection failures that the for-profit sector demonstrated in the 2010s. The underlying debate — what accountability mechanisms apply to institutions enrolling federally-aided students — is substantive.

29.6 The Higher-Education Cost Crisis

Tuition at American colleges has risen far faster than overall inflation since the 1980s. Average sticker-price tuition at public four-year institutions, in inflation-adjusted dollars, is roughly four times what it was in 1980. At private nonprofit institutions, sticker-price tuition has roughly tripled in real terms over the same period. The actual price paid (net of financial aid) has risen more slowly but still substantially.

Multiple causes have been identified, with disagreement over their relative weight:

• State funding decline. Per-student state appropriations to public higher education have declined approximately 10-15% in real terms since 2008. As state funding has fallen, public universities have shifted costs to students through tuition increases. This is the largest single empirical driver of public-university tuition increases.

• Administrative growth. The number of administrators per student at four-year institutions has grown faster than the number of faculty per student over recent decades. The share of university budgets going to administration, student services, and non-instructional functions has grown. Critics call this "administrative bloat." Defenders argue much of the growth reflects required compliance work (Title IX, ADA, financial-aid administration), expanded mental-health and student-services demand, and changing expectations about what universities should provide.

• Facilities and amenities. Universities have invested heavily in facilities — including residence halls, dining halls, recreation centers, and athletic facilities — partly in response to competition for students. Critics call this an "amenities arms race." Defenders argue that students and parents demand these facilities and that universities providing them are responding to consumer preferences.

• Financial-aid feedback (the "Bennett hypothesis"). Then-Education Secretary William Bennett argued in 1987 that federal student aid programs allowed universities to raise tuition without losing enrollment because the aid absorbed the increases. Empirical work since then has produced mixed results. Most rigorous studies find some pass-through (some share of increased federal aid is captured by the institution as higher tuition), but the size of the pass-through is disputed and varies substantially by sector — relatively low at public institutions, higher at for-profits, highest in graduate programs and at less-selective institutions.

The total federal student-loan portfolio has risen from approximately $300 billion in 2000 to approximately $1.7 trillion in 2024. Approximately 13% of borrowers are in default, and a substantially larger share are in some form of distressed status (forbearance, deferment, or income-driven repayment).

The progressive critique emphasizes that the loan portfolio reflects predatory practices in some sectors (particularly for-profits), produces disproportionate harm to Black borrowers (who borrow at higher rates and carry larger balances after graduation), and constitutes a systemic drag on younger Americans' financial futures. The conservative critique emphasizes that easy federal financing fueled the tuition increases (the Bennett hypothesis variant), that broad cancellation rewards higher-income borrowers (since borrowers with the most debt are typically those with graduate degrees who go on to higher earnings), and that the loans were taken voluntarily.

Both critiques have evidence behind them. They are not mutually exclusive.

29.7 Affirmative Action and Admissions

Race-conscious admissions in higher education was permitted by the Supreme Court from the 1978 Bakke decision through 2023, subject to significant restrictions (no quotas; race could be one factor among many; the institution must demonstrate a compelling interest in diversity).

In Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard / UNC (2023), the Court held 6-3 (with Justice Sotomayor dissenting at length) that race-conscious admissions at Harvard and UNC violated the Equal Protection Clause and Title VI. The decision did not formally overrule Grutter (the 2003 case that had upheld race-conscious admissions at the University of Michigan Law School) but applied strict-scrutiny review in a way that effectively ended race-conscious admissions in selective higher education. (Chapter 6 of this textbook covers the doctrinal evolution in detail.)

Post-SFFA enrollment data, available for the 2024-25 admissions cycle (the first full cycle subject to the new rules), shows mixed effects:

• Black and Hispanic enrollment declined at most highly selective institutions, often by 10-25% relative to prior cohorts. The declines were larger at some elite institutions (Yale, Princeton, MIT) than at others (Harvard's reported figures showed smaller declines, prompting some commentators to question methodology).
• Asian American enrollment increased at most highly selective institutions, though by smaller percentages than the Black/Hispanic declines.
• White enrollment was relatively stable.
• Socioeconomic indicators varied — at some institutions, the share of low-income students increased (as institutions emphasized class-based preferences), while at others it declined.

The institutional response has involved several adaptations. Some institutions emphasized socioeconomic preferences more heavily. Some emphasized geographic diversity (particularly recruiting from rural areas and underrepresented states). Many revised essay prompts to permit students to discuss how their identity (including racial identity) had shaped their experiences — within the bounds the Court's opinion permitted ("nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant's discussion of how race affected his or her life"). Some critics on the right have argued that essay-prompt redesigns and recruitment changes amount to evasion of the SFFA ruling. Some critics on the left have argued that the institutional responses are insufficient to maintain campus racial diversity.

29.8 Federal Student Loans and Forgiveness

The federal student-loan system has been reshaped multiple times in recent years.

Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) was enacted in 2007 with bipartisan support. It promised forgiveness of remaining federal student-loan balances for borrowers who made 120 qualifying monthly payments while working full-time for a qualifying public-service employer (government or non-profit). The first cohort of borrowers became eligible for forgiveness in 2017. Initial implementation was disastrous — early reports from the Department of Education indicated that over 99% of initial PSLF applications were denied, mostly on the basis of plan-type technicalities (borrowers had been on the wrong repayment plan during their qualifying period). The Biden administration implemented a temporary "limited PSLF waiver" that retroactively credited borrowers for past payments, which substantially expanded eligible forgiveness. The second Trump administration has begun a partial rollback of these changes, with final disposition unsettled as of 2026.

Income-driven repayment (IDR) plans tie monthly payments to a percentage of borrower income, typically with forgiveness of remaining balances after 20 or 25 years. The Biden administration created the Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE) plan in 2023, which substantially reduced monthly payments for many borrowers and accelerated forgiveness timelines. SAVE was challenged in court by Republican-led states, and lower courts entered injunctions blocking key provisions. The litigation is ongoing as of this writing.

Mass loan cancellation. In August 2022, the Biden administration announced a plan to cancel up to $10,000 in federal student debt for borrowers earning under $125,000 (with up to $20,000 for Pell Grant recipients). The estimated cost was approximately $400 billion. The Supreme Court struck down this plan in Biden v. Nebraska (2023), holding 6-3 that the HEROES Act (the statutory authority cited by the administration) did not authorize debt cancellation of this scale. Following the decision, the Biden administration pursued narrower forgiveness through alternative legal authorities (including borrower-defense rules and IDR program adjustments), forgiving approximately $180 billion in debt for specific categories of borrowers (fraud victims, public servants, disability discharges, IDR recipients). The second Trump administration has begun rolling back several of these narrower programs.

Steel-manning the broad-cancellation argument: federal student debt is a systemic problem that has accumulated through decades of state-funding decline, predatory practices in some sectors, and inadequate institutional accountability. The debt burden falls disproportionately on Black borrowers and on borrowers from low-income families. Cancellation is a form of consumer protection — the loans were taken at a young age, often before borrowers fully understood their implications, in a system in which institutions had every incentive to encourage borrowing and limited accountability for the outcomes. Cancellation also has macroeconomic benefits (releasing income for consumption, household formation, and small-business investment).

Steel-manning the critique: broad cancellation is regressive — borrowers with the largest balances are disproportionately graduate-degree holders, who are on average higher earners than non-borrowers. It raises a fairness question — borrowers who paid off their loans, or who chose not to attend college, or who attended cheaper institutions, do not benefit. It raises a moral-hazard concern — cancellation precedent encourages future borrowing on the assumption that eventual cancellation is plausible. It also raises a Bennett-hypothesis concern — institutions facing cancellation expectations have less pressure to constrain costs.

Both arguments have empirical support. The aggregate distributional analysis of broad cancellation depends sensitively on the design of the cancellation program (income caps, balance caps, and Pell-Grant supplements all change the distribution).

29.9 Title IX and the Campus

Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 prohibits sex-based discrimination in any education program receiving federal financial assistance. The statutory language is brief: "No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance."

Originally most associated with athletics (the law's broad effect was to substantially expand female participation in school athletic programs), Title IX's reach has expanded to cover sexual-misconduct adjudication, gender-identity protections, and other domains.

The most controversial recent applications involve campus sexual-misconduct adjudication. In April 2011, the Obama-era OCR issued a "Dear Colleague" letter expanding requirements for institutional investigation and adjudication of sexual-misconduct complaints, including a "preponderance of the evidence" standard, restrictions on cross-examination of accusers, and other procedural changes. Critics argued these requirements compromised due process for accused students. Defenders argued they corrected long-standing institutional under-response to sexual misconduct.

The first Trump administration's Department of Education revised Title IX rules in 2018-2020 to require live cross-examination through advisors, narrow the definition of actionable sexual harassment, and restore other procedural protections for accused students. The Biden administration revised the rules again in 2024, broadening the definition of sexual harassment, expanding gender-identity protections, and modifying procedural requirements. The second Trump administration in 2025 began another round of rule revisions, restoring much of the 2018-2020 framework and reversing the gender-identity provisions.

The pendulum is real. The honest characterization is that Title IX involves multiple legitimate concerns that pull in different directions: due process for accused students, support for victims of sexual misconduct, the appropriate jurisdictional scope of institutional adjudication (especially for off-campus conduct), the legal status of gender-identity claims under a statute originally drafted around biological sex. There is no clean answer; reasonable people, in good faith, weight these concerns differently.

The athletics dimension of Title IX deserves separate mention. The statute's most durable application has been to college and high-school athletics — the requirement that schools provide athletic opportunities proportional to enrollment by sex, and the resulting massive expansion of female athletic participation since 1972. Female participation in high-school sports has grown more than tenfold since the 1970s, with corresponding gains at the collegiate level. The Title IX athletics framework, particularly the "three-part test" for compliance, has occasionally produced controversies (most often around men's non-revenue sports cut to maintain proportionality), but on balance is among the more politically settled applications of the law. The recent controversy has narrowed to specific questions about transgender participation in sex-segregated sports, where competitive-fairness questions have empirical content (the average performance differences between post-pubertal biological males and females in many sports are large) and where the legal framework is being actively litigated. Different administrations have taken different positions; multiple federal courts have reached different conclusions; the question is unresolved as of 2026 and likely to remain so for some time.

Title IX's reach also extends to pregnancy and parental status — protections for pregnant and parenting students that have been less politically contested but have become more salient in the post-Dobbs landscape, as state abortion regulations and student health needs intersect in new ways.

29.10 The "Education Realignment"

We close with a structural observation that helps explain why education policy has become so politically charged in the 2020s.

Educational attainment has emerged as the dominant axis of American politics since 2016. Voters with college degrees have moved sharply toward the Democratic Party in recent elections; voters without college degrees have moved sharply toward the Republican Party. This is true across racial groups (though more strongly among white voters in earlier years; the realignment has begun to affect non-white voters as well, particularly Hispanic voters in 2024). It is true across age cohorts. The 2024 election showed the educational gap widening further: among white voters, Trump won non-college voters by 30+ percentage points and lost college-educated voters by ~15 points; among Hispanic voters, Trump made his largest gains among non-college voters.

This educational realignment has cultural correlates. College-educated voters are, on average, more progressive on social issues (race, gender, immigration) and more conservative on certain economic issues. Non-college voters are, on average, more populist on economic issues and more conservative on social issues. The cleavages cross-cut traditional partisan alignments and have reshaped both party coalitions.

The political consequence for education policy is direct: education shapes political demographics, and so the politics of education is also a politics of which Americans get reshaped politically. Conservatives who believe higher education has been ideologically captured see the educational realignment as evidence of indoctrination; the policy response is curricular restriction, institutional defunding, and competing institutions (Hillsdale College, the University of Austin, and similar). Progressives who believe education is a vehicle for opportunity and democratic citizenship see educational restriction as anti-democratic; the policy response is expanded access, federal civil-rights enforcement, and protection of academic freedom.

Neither account is adequate by itself. The educational realignment is real, has cultural sources beyond the formal curriculum (peer networks, geographic concentration of educated workers in metropolitan areas, the politics of the professional class), and is unlikely to be reversed by curricular policy in either direction. Education will remain a battleground — not because the federal government has too much influence over it, but precisely because federal influence is limited and the politics is fragmented across thousands of districts and fifty states. That fragmentation is the federalism reality with which we began this chapter.

A reader trying to navigate this domain should hold several things in mind simultaneously. First, the federal government does some specific things in education well — Pell Grants have substantially expanded college access; Title I has channeled resources to high-poverty schools, however imperfectly; IDEA has guaranteed services to students with disabilities who would have been excluded from school decades ago; civil-rights enforcement has dismantled formal segregation and constrained other forms of discrimination. These are not small achievements. Second, the federal government does some things less well — federal accountability frameworks have repeatedly been over-promised and under-delivered, federal student-loan programs have produced perverse incentives, and federal political attention to education has often been more symbolic than substantive. Third, what happens in classrooms is determined by tens of thousands of teachers, principals, superintendents, school boards, and state legislators acting within constraints set by national policy but largely independent of national politics. The teacher in front of your child's classroom matters more than the Secretary of Education.

Fourth and finally, the politics of education is not separable from the politics of the country more broadly. The educational realignment is part of the same realignment that has reshaped voting coalitions, geographic political clustering, and the cultural politics of class. Education policy debates are sites for working out broader disputes about national identity, the role of public institutions, the legitimacy of expertise, and the relationship between individual achievement and collective opportunity. To engage seriously with education policy is to engage with the deepest fault lines in contemporary American politics. The federalism reality with which the chapter opened is not just a structural fact about how American education is governed — it is also a strategic fact about where political conflict will be channeled.

The next chapter turns to environmental and energy policy — another domain where federal action operates in tension with state authority, with stakes that are potentially much larger and with timelines that extend beyond any administration.