Former Democratic presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama’s campaigns were defined by sweeping education reform, improving public K-12 education for students across the nation. By 2024, the Democratic platform had largely abandoned this sentiment, and the education scene has increasingly been shaped by culture war issues that have Republicans winning with parents.
President-elect Donald Trump’s victory over Vice President Kamala Harris On Nov. 6 was due in no small part to the parent vote, winning 53% compared to Harris’ 44%, according to NBC’s exit polling. Only 44% of parents say they are somewhat or completely satisfied with the quality of K-12 education in 2024, an August Gallup poll found.
“[T]he discussion on education has shifted from who wants to throw more money at the problem – the definition of insanity – to who trusts parents to direct the upbringing of their children,” Corey DeAngelis, executive director of the Educational Freedom Institute, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “Too many Democrats are communists who think your kids belong to the government. President Trump believes parents should be in the driver’s seat. The GOP is now the Parents’ Party.”
Clinton closed out his administration in 2000 boasting huge success in solving what was an education crisis in the early 1990s, with only 14 states having standards in core subjects when he took office and 49 when he left, according to White House archives. In 1990, only 38% of graduating high school seniors had completed a full English, math, science and social studies curriculum, a number that rose to 55% by the end of Clinton’s presidency, and the administration additionally worked to increase reading and math scores nationwide.
The Clinton Administration also initiated the establishment of over 2,000 charter schools with his support of school choice, an issue that Trump and Vice-President elect JD Vance have pledged their support to, according to the Republican platform. The 2024 Democratic platform openly opposes school choice programs, which are supported amongst 69% of voters nationwide, an October poll by the Center Square Voters’ Voice shows.
“We oppose the use of private-school vouchers, tuition tax credits, opportunity scholarships, and other schemes that divert taxpayer-funded resources away from public education,” the party’s platform reads.
Democrats’ education policies of the 1990s were so popular that Republicans began taking pages from their book. George W. Bush in 2001 made education a main focus of his campaign, creating the No Child Left Behind Act which intended to raise accountability for schools to uphold education standards and allow parents the right to send their kid to a different school if their performance did not improve.
The 2008 Democratic platform dedicated a large section to education, pledging to close achievement gaps, support public and charter schools and allow parents control over their children’s education. Obama in 2012 continued the trend, creating the Race to the Top initiative that encouraged schools to compete for funds by reforming education standards and improving outcomes for students.
This status quo began to change in 2016 when Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton started openly pandering to teachers unions, telling them “I’m with you” and “when we’re making decisions about education we actually should listen to our educators,” according to U.S. News & World Report.
This move by Clinton shifted the tide for Democrats away from a parents-focused education policy. Where Obama butted heads with teachers unions, Clinton sought to make amends, mirroring her education policy to their demands.
Clinton proposed lowering testing requirements for students, forgiving student loans for educators and raising teachers’ salaries, according to U.S. News.
“The Democratic Party is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the teachers unions,” DeAngelis said. “Over 99% of the campaign contributions from Randi Weingarten’s American Federation of Teachers went to Democrats last election cycle, and it has been that way for decades. It’s an incestuous relationship and a money laundering operation. It ought to be illegal.”
About 94% of teachers unions’ campaign donations have been going towards Democrats since at least 1990, according to Open Secrets. The 2024 election cycle saw millions of dollars from the two largest teachers unions in the country, National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), funnel into Democratic campaigns.
“I think Democrats have forgotten that their voters are parents too and want access to school choice to get around the politics of teachers unions and get back to teaching their kids the basics they need to succeed,” Tiffany Justice, co-founder of Moms for Liberty, told the DCNF. “We need to fix the public education system so parents can trust that their children are not being indoctrinated with toxic ideology like critical race theory and gender ideology at the expense of reading and math. The Nation’s Report Card shows we continue to fail students in these areas all across the US.”
The true tipping point for Democrats on education may have been in 2021, when Covid-19 lockdowns, pushed largely by Democratic leaders, kept kids out of schools during their most formative years, leading to learning losses that are still being combated today. The Biden Administration allowed teachers unions to take the reins and baselessly rewrite policy guidance for their own benefit, according to a report by the House Oversight Committee.
The learning losses suffered from the pandemic continue to plummet years later. The gap with pre-covid results for sixth graders in math and English grew by 40% and 31% respectively between fall 2023 and spring 2024 and the average eighth grader today requires approximately nine months of additional schooling to reach pre-Covid-19 levels in the two subjects, a July study by the Northwest Evaluation Association (NWEA) found.
One of the few education issues Biden has focused on during his presidency has been canceling student debt, an issue that just 39% of Americans feel is important, according to an AP-NORC poll released in June. Despite this, Harris’ 2024 campaign vowed to “continue working to end the unreasonable burden of student loan debt and fight to make higher education more affordable” and made little mention of other education-related plans.
Biden has made increasingly desperate attempts to cancel student debt after one plan was halted by a federal court in Missouri and another was shot down by the Supreme Court. The administration has since attempted to work around these roadblocks using the Department of Education and by creating new parameters.
Meanwhile the education sphere has increasingly been shaped by ongoing culture war issues such as transgenderism, with many parents rallying against calls for boys to play in girls sports and enter girls locker rooms and bathrooms. Trump has vehemently opposed such policies, whereas Biden and Harris, as well as many other Democratic leaders, have advocated in favor of policies that go so far as to allow schools to hide children’s gender identity from their parents.
“PDE has polled parents about gender issues multiple times over the past several years, and each time the results have been crystal clear: concerns about gender issues in school spanned racial and political lines by wide margins, which over time grew as public awareness increased,” Nicole Neily, president of Parents Defending Education (PDE), told the DCNF. “There was (and still is) enormous pressure to humiliate, ostracize, and silence anyone who had the temerity to hold a contrary opinion on gender — which created its own backlash in and of itself, because Americans simply don’t like being coerced, period. This was an entirely predictable outcome, but Democrat party mandarins made a conscious decision to ignore the tea leaves.”
Nearly three-quarters of registered voters oppose schools helping children change their gender identity without parental consent, and 71% believe schools should not be able to withhold information regarding a child’s gender identity from their parents, according to a March poll from CRC Research.
“Democrats have turned schools into culture war battlegrounds, abandoning graduation rates in the process,” Stefano Forte, executive director of 1776 Project PAC, told the DCNF. “Parents are voting for Republicans because we are fighting to restore sanity — prioritizing school safety, higher test scores, and preparing America’s kids to win in life. The Democratic Party is failing the next generation, and parents know it.”
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