Trump's back: What's next for education?

Will President Donald Trump dismantle the U.S. Department of Education? "Nope," predicts Rick Hess. He'd need the House majority, as yet uncertain, and 60 filibuster-proof votes in the Senate to get it through Congress. "Meanwhile, plenty of influential right-wingers would rather see a Trump administration leverage the department than dismantle it."

Will he support school choice? A federal tax credit scholarship program is the most likely.

Trump has promised to "terminate" the Biden administration's Title IX rewrite, which "extended new protections for transgender students," writes Erica Meltzer in Chalkbeat. The feds will not be pushing for "male-bodied" students on girls' sports teams.

It's likely "civil rights enforcement will look very different," she writes. As in Trump's first administration, schools will have more leeway to suspend or expel disruptive students.

I wouldn't be surprised to see a "parents' bill of rights."

Could Tiffany Justice, co-founder of Moms for Liberty, be the next Education secretary?

Who could lead the embattled Education Department? Education Week's Alyson Klein runs down the options, which include Cade Brumley, Louisiana's state superintendent, Tiffany Justice, co-founder of Moms for Liberty, and U.S. Rep. Byron Donalds, who "used his speech at the Republican National Convention to stump for school choice, recounting how his single mother sacrificed financially to send him to private schools because the public schools didn’t challenge him academically." Donalds’ wife, Erika Donalds, is a former school board member and charter school founder, Klein notes.

Teachers' unions passed an anti-testing measure in Massachusetts: Students won't need to pass a state test to qualify for a high school diploma.

Each district will set its own standards for a diploma, writes Jessica Grose in the New York Times. The credential will become "virtually meaningless," as the Boston Globe put it in an

editorial urging voters not to return to the bad old days.  

Unions also financed successful anti-choice campaigns in Colorado, Kentucky and Nebraska, writes Michael McShane, director of national research at EdChoice in Forbes.

Colorado voters rejected amending the state constitution to establish a right to school choice. In additions to the unions and left-leaning voters, he writes, the Christian Home Educators of Colorado came out against it as well, worried about the term “quality education” in the amendment’s text. "They had questions: Who defines quality? Could this lead to intrusive regulations? " In addition, the state’s largest charter school organizations sat out of the campaign.

In Kentucky, voters were confused by a proposed constitution amendment that would have authorized funding for students "outside the system of common schools," but didn't propose a choice program, he writes.

Nebraskans voted to repeal a $10 million fund for scholarships for students to attend private schools.

However, "school choice is still on the march," McShane writes. "The governor of Indiana won against an explicitly anti-school choice challenger," and most legislators in state that passed school choice bills won re-election. NBC's Chuck Todd argues that support for school choice helped Republicans with Hispanic voters.