Commentary: Education gets short shrift from Trump and Harris on the presidential campaign trail

Once again, education hasn’t made the grade as a serious and important campaign issue. It’s a pattern I’ve been observing for decades covering education for The Times.
Immigration brings up a lot more emotion for the electorate, and it’s hard to argue that Donald Trump’s nonstop lies and attacks on women’s rights, civil rights and the very tenets of democracy in this country shouldn’t outweigh concerns about curriculum. Then of course there are the just plain weird issues that grab attention, such as Trump’s fascination with Arnold Palmer’s genitalia. And we were concerned about President Biden’s mental fitness?
Still, the country has about 50 million students enrolled in public schools, and that’s not counting the preschoolers, private-school students, parents, teachers and other school staff who all have a direct personal connection to education. Nor does it include the millions of students at community and four-year colleges.
It wouldn’t be wildly amiss to estimate that more than half of Americans are directly affected by the education system. That’s not considering those of us who simply care about education as the force that will shape future generations.
Yet neither candidate has had anything substantive to say about the subject. Trump predictably says he would do away with the U.S. Education Department and return power over schools to the states. At the same time, he said he would cut federal funding for schools that teach material with which he disagrees, such as critical race theory. That sure sounds like federal interference.
He wants to open parent choice, to the point of allowing widespread vouchers that include religious schools, even though it’s not the parents who pay for public education. It’s the taxpayers. In any case, even if he shuttered the Education Department, many of its tasks would have to be undertaken by another agency. The 2015 Every Student Succeeds Act, a softened version of No Child Left Behind with testing and other requirements, is still federal law. Some agency has to oversee federal financial aid programs for college students.
Harris has had even less to say, mainly limiting herself to brief mentions of continuing some kind of bailout for people struggling with student loan debt, and increasing career paths for young adults who don’t go on to a four-year college education, which is close to half of all high school graduates. That would include eliminating the bachelor’s degree requirements for half a million federal jobs.
The idea that people can lead good lives without a bachelor’s degree is gaining popularity. It’s a cause dear to my heart, after years of degree inflation during which employers required four-year degrees for jobs that really didn’t need them. I even wrote a book about it. But it’s a dicey choice for Harris and not a very original one because Trump got the ball on that rolling during his first administration. In June 2020, he signed an executive order that bans requiring a bachelor’s in federal hiring unless it can be shown that the degree is necessary to do the job, which the Biden administration has begun to carry out and Harris would continue.
That doesn’t mean there isn’t plenty of groundwork to be done. Most of the better-paid jobs after high school require some level of training but what’s available now is woefully insufficient. The next president should go full-force on providing incentives for public-private partnerships that create apprenticeships in a wide variety of fields — not just the blue-collar jobs, which have long had them, but in white-collar careers including marketing, human relations, middle management, coding, creative fields and entrepreneurship.
Also, just because the nation has discovered that skills and smarts matter, this doesn’t mean that we can forget about access to higher education. Trump has vowed to start a free, national online university, but after seeing the workings of Trump University, I’ll take a pass on that. Besides, he has not come up with an adequate funding mechanism to make it happen; a good online college education is expensive because it requires not just excellent instructors, but enough teaching assistants to read papers and provide guidance, as well as in-person instruction for laboratories, art equipment and similar needs.
It’s time for fresh thoughts on K-12 education as well. The nation has too many students who feel disengaged from their schools and curriculum, who find it hard to read entire books — partly a consequence of former President Obama’s federal push for the Common Core curriculum that emphasizes excerpts over whole books — or dig past the noise of social media and AI to get to the truth.
With an adjustment here and there, the public-school curriculum is much as it’s always been, while employers complain that students aren’t taught key skills needed for the workplace, such as good communication, initiative, analytical thinking, financial literacy and problem-solving. The federal government could pull together a consortium with participation from teachers and parents to modernize what students are taught and how.
A reconfigured curriculum that engages students and readies them for real life might not grab headlines as Harris did by telling Trump that Russian President Vladimir Putin would “eat you for lunch” or the way Trump’s swaying to music for a half hour did. But the nation will only get the education it demands from its candidates, and right now, the demands are too low.