The war on public schools is the stealth issue of the 2024 campaign

It became a big political story when presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump abruptly flip-flopped on TikTok, revealing that he no longer supports efforts to ban the popular app if its Chinese owners don’t divest from the company. Eyebrows were raised because Trump had just made peace at a Palm Beach, Fla., fundraiser with billionaire Jeff Yass — Pennsylvania’s richest man, TikTok’s biggest U.S. investor, and the nation’s largest political donor.

But Trump later told CNBC that when he met Yass and his wife, Janine, at the Club for Growth fundraiser, they talked about something completely different.

The ex-president insisted that Yass “never mentioned TikTok. She [Janine Yass] did mention her school choice and that’s what her whole ... in fact, she said, ‘My whole life is based around school choice.’ [It] was a very important thing to her, and I agree with it.”

Voters shouldn’t be reassured by Trump’s explanation. They should be very, very alarmed.

That’s because whatever you think about TikTok’s wild popularity with teenagers and its impact on their state of mind, the portfolio of education strategies that right-wingers brand as “school choice” — vouchers or tax credits to aid kids to attend private or even religious schools, or public charter school alternatives — is actually more dangerous for your child. Not to mention its impact on declining public schools in your community. Or on your rising taxes.

The mounting evidence that so-called school choice doesn’t lead to better student outcomes, even as these programs devastate the traditional public schools that — dare I say it — made America great well into the 20th century, hasn’t deterred the cartoon-villain alliance of the super-superrich like Yass from accelerating their effort to impose their will on U.S. education.

The latest salvo came this month in the blood-red state of Texas, where six incumbent Republican state lawmakers were ousted by primary voters and four others were forced into a runoff — almost all for the sin of opposing vouchers. At issue was a plan by their fellow GOP Gov. Greg Abbott for a universal voucher program that would have paid up to $10,000 per student to attend private schools. Some 21 GOP lawmakers ultimately bucked Abbott’s plan because they understood losing students and dollars could devastate their rural public schools. So Yass gave Abbott a whopping $6 million campaign donation to spend on crushing their political careers.

The Machiavellian hardball Yass and Abbott just played in Texas ought to be seen as a warning: Vouchers and other measures that proponents call school choice are the stealth issue of the 2024 campaign. While the electorate focuses on issues that range from the silly, like TikTok, to the deadly serious, like the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, there’s been too little focus on education policy — even though a Trump victory would bring major changes that would please the billionaire class.

A Trump spokesman recently told Reuters what the candidate presumedly told Janine Yass: that Trump wants to “liberate students from failing schools and raise the quality of education across the board.” You might not hear it at his grievance-filled rallies, but the would-be 47th president backs federal tax relief to corporations and individuals who provide scholarships to allow students to attend private and religious schools — similar to a program that’s been in place in Pennsylvania. He also wants federal tax credits for parents who homeschool their kids.

Trump and his divisive Education Secretary Betsy DeVos also backed the school-choice agenda when he was president, but the Project 2025 blueprint for a second term now calls for replacing career public servants with MAGA-movement loyalists to accomplish more of his goals. Project 2025 also endorses education savings accounts, a form of taxpayer-funded vouchers.

Here in Pennsylvania, we saw the power of big money and this combustible issue this summer when Republican lawmakers — who received the benefits of the bulk of at least $18 million in Yass donations to a web of political action committees that support school choice — balked at passing a state budget after Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro reversed course on signing Yass’ pet proposal: a voucher program called Lifeline Scholarships.

Yass may be leading this movement, but he is hardly an outlier. Throughout the 21st century, a rogues’ gallery of America’s super-wealthy — DeVos, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation, the late Los Angeles billionaire Eli Broad, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Bloomberg, and more — have supported charter schools and other alternatives to traditional public schools. They insist that running schools like the businesses that made them so rich will benefit low-income kids stuck in struggling classrooms. Cynics say these billionaires just hate organized labor, like the teachers’ union, and want to keep their own taxes low.

» READ MORE: Pa.’s TikTok billionaire, Donald Trump, and ‘The Selling of the President 2024’ | Will Bunch

Writer Harold Meyerson, in a Los Angeles Times op-ed, explained that the superrich share “a belief in individual betterment — but not only that. They also share a fierce opposition to collective betterment, manifested in their respective battles against unions and, in many cases, against governmentally established standards and services.”

That’s not a popular concept, but it has gained a lot of steam in the four years since the COVID-19 pandemic massively disrupted classrooms. The Yass crowd and right-wing politicians saw that anger over remote learning, which was compounded by conservative outrage over anti-racism or positive LGBTQ instruction and books after 2020’s George Floyd protests, could be leveraged to get public support for vouchers and similar programs. Critics stepped up their rhetoric against public schools, calling them “government-funded indoctrination centers.”

Last year, 20 states with GOP legislative majorities raced to approve education savings accounts or other programs that allow for more tax dollars to send kids to private or religious schools. Now, the bills are coming due.

In Arizona, Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs has watched a voucher program approved by Republican lawmakers balloon in cost to some $900 million, the prime reason why the Grand Canyon State now faces a $400 million budget deficit. Critics say that the way the program is structured, a lot of those dollars go to families who already had kids in private schools — many of which have hiked their tuition to take advantage of the spending spree.

In Colorado, a state that has seen a significant amount of billionaire foundation funding for charter schools, enrollment in traditional public K-12 schools has plunged to the lowest level in a decade, likely to trigger state funding cuts; Denver has closed 48 neighborhood public schools and opened 70 charter schools since 2005.

But now, rural Republican lawmakers are concerned, with good reason, about the future of their local public schools — the only ladder up for children in their districts — which are getting swamped by this billionaire onslaught. It certainly smacks of gross hypocrisy from a political movement that claims to speak for “the forgotten Americans” in their heartland communities.

What’s worse, the billionaires spending so much on this project have been unable to produce the evidence that vouchers or other forms of school choice improve student outcomes — the supposed raison d’être for doing all of this. In 2017, the Brookings Institute reported four separate studies on vouchers in Louisiana, Indiana, Ohio, and the District of Columbia that all reached the same result: The students who switched schools with vouchers scored lower on tests than similar students.

But the superrich seem determined to seize the moment and buy the hearts and minds of the electorate. “It’s not enough to be right,” Tracy Gleason, heir to an industrial fortune who heads a foundation that funds National School Choice Week, told a recent gala. “We actually have to sell the notion of school choice … and bring everyone around to our way of thinking.”

Now, the leading billionaire funder of pro-voucher politicians has the ear of a man who’s dead even in the polls to become our next president, right at the moment when Trump desperately needs cash. Think about that — and the future of the public school in your neighborhood — when you go to the polls in November.

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