On a January webinar for Chalkbeat, Lindsey Burke, a senior education official in the Trump administration, faced an audience question about the administration’s rationale for moving K-12 programs to the Department of Labor — part of its ongoing effort to dismantle the Education Department.
“Arguably schools have broader purposes — civic, moral, and social — rather than just preparation for employment,” read Chalkbeat national editor Erica Meltzer. “Can you speak to some of these broader purposes of education and how they might be safeguarded?”
“You know, I actually couldn’t agree with that more,” Burke, who authored Project 2025’s education section, replied with a smiling glance at the ceiling. “Education really is about forming human souls, right? And about preparing individuals to inherit the blessings and liberties of a free society.”
You’d be hard-pressed to find a Democratic analog to this exalted vision for K-12 schooling. Liberal education punditry is instead relentlessly negative, painting a grim picture of deluded parents who refuse to admit that our dumb kids can’t read or do math. Coddled by “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI), the chorus of columnists laments, American students are hopelessly unprepared for today’s job market. Their solution? A full return to the punishing high stakes of No Child Left Behind — the apparent raison d’être of Rahm Emanuel’s 2028 presidential flirtations.
The idea that school should mainly aim to boost human capital (by raising test scores) dominated bipartisan education reform efforts from Ronald Reagan through Barack Obama. Those days of neoliberal bipartisanship feel like a distant daydream now, but the centrist intelligentsia is increasingly eager to reimpose that version of accountability on our public schools, perhaps forgetting the profound, bipartisan unpopularity of standardized curriculum and test-obsessed schooling.
Meanwhile, the Right has graduated from…
Auteur: Nora De La Cour
