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At a recent dinner with family and friends, the conversation turned to Tel Aviv. Apparently Israel’s city that never sleeps has pull-up bars everywhere, the result of decades of investment in fitness stations and workout nodes. Which led to a discussion of how many pull-ups each of us could manage. And because several friends are on GLPs, the answers were inextricably tied to weight loss.
Friend #1: I could probably do one if I keep losing weight.
Friend #2: I did a pull-up last month. Maybe 2 or 3 now?
Then my 15-year-old son Zev walked up and chimed in.
Zev: If you gain weight, it will help you on the way down.
For nearly two years, the weight’s been piling on and America’s had no trouble going down. On Tuesday November 3, we’re going to lose weight and may be able to pull ourselves back up, or at least begin dreaming of the possibility. But yo-yoing from weight gain to weight loss isn’t healthy. And that fairly sums up the state of the union. As Dana Milbank put it last week in the new Washington Sun, “for a couple of decades now, we’ve been pinging back and forth every two or four years because neither side has been able to deliver the relief that the voters are demanding. Instead, we’re stuck in a national doom loop of perpetual cycles of revenge.”
At the same time, few in memory have been as deserving of a backlash as our 47th President. Corrections are needed across vast swaths of federal responsibility, from trade and defense to energy and climate, from immigration and unsustainable deficits to undermining public health, the rule of law, and the look and culture of our nation’s capital. The world’s most powerful government shouldn’t have to resort to hiring dead-enders, grifters, bad lawyers, or lawyers who aren’t really lawyers. And for goodness sake, stop picking on Canada.
But just like hope isn’t a strategy, neither is revenge. And that’s certainly true for education and workforce. In fact, revenge only increases the likelihood of the weight coming back.
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Since the days of George W. Bush and No Child Left Behind, neither education nor workforce has been a high-priority area for the federal government. So presidents have been happy to draft political appointees from sympathetic left- or right-wing think tanks. Increasingly they’ve gotten ideologues who spent their out-of-power-but-well-remunerated years dreaming up career-making policies that would thwart the perceived excesses of the other side. As a result, across K-12, higher ed, and workforce, the whipsawing has accelerated.
In K-12, we’ve gone from standards and testing to waivers to testing with a focus on equity; from Common Core to anti-Common Core; from school choice and pro-charter to anti-charter; and from more funding to proposed deep cuts (rejected by Congress) to a Biden boatload of additional cash. In higher education we’ve seen dramatic shifts in regulation of for-profit institutions (gainful employment) and varying efforts to collect or cancel student loan debt. And then there’s the endless tug-of-war over Title IX. In workforce, the Department of Labor has gone back-and-forth on the size and shape of WIOA funding and whether to keep or scrap Job Corps.
But this was all prior to Trump II. So while nearly everything is now political and if one side is in favor of something the other is against, Trump II is not the protagonist of this procedural – at least not in education and workforce – merely the latest player.
What has this administration accomplished in the past 21 months? The headlines have been school choice, apprenticeship, and a war on college.
School Choice
In an effort to cement the ESA (educational savings account aka voucher) Revolution of the past decade, in January taxpayers will begin claiming an
Education Freedom Tax Credit of up to $1,700 for donating to organizations that provide scholarships for private and religious schools. 30 states have opted in – mostly red states with ESAs, but also Colorado, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, and Virginia. The
Treasury Department estimates that by 2030, hundreds of eligible scholarship granting organizations will provide $26 billion in scholarships to over 2 million students each year.
Apprenticeship
Workforce policy now revolves around apprenticeship with the first-ever federal numeric goal (
1 million active apprentices) and a shift from grants to
pay-for-performance funding, which will result in more federal dollars reaching the employers, sponsors, and intermediaries that launch apprenticeship programs and hire apprentices. And in anticipation of having an apprenticeship winner on their hands, DOL has signaled that
other WIOA spending like Job Corps should be reallocated to apprenticeships.
War on College
As red meat for the President’s base (no degrees + degrees of dislike for educated elites), the administration has launched a
multi-front war on college including alleging constitutional and civil rights violations, restricting research funding, attacking accreditors, making American colleges less appealing for international students, increasing the endowment tax for the wealthiest institutions, and dramatically cutting student loans for graduate and professional programs. As a result, a $750 billion sector that was already facing major secular challenges is now
in crisis. And now there’s a post-midterm plan to
extend the war to student loans: imposing penalties and hiring private debt collectors to go after borrowers who’ve defaulted.
Democrats returning to power have a decision to make: continue the cycle by reversing or repealing everything this administration has done in education and workforce, or attempt to build in areas of common ground. We know what the former looks like (i.e., same as the last 20 years). But what about the latter?
Common Ground
1) Apprenticeship
The most obvious area is apprenticeship. Bipartisan agreement on apprenticeships has become so routine that commentators have begun mocking workforce policy from both sides as “
apprenticeships and stuff.” In terms of how we fund apprenticeships, it’s hard to imagine Democrats wanting to return to the former, ineffective grant-based model; attempting to pick winners meant desperately needed federal funding was going to recipients (e.g., community colleges and workforce agencies) that never launched an apprenticeship program nor hired a single apprentice. More damningly, it led policymakers to conclude that investing in apprenticeships – jobs first and foremost, and fundamentally different from “train-and-pray” programs – was just as ineffective as other WIOA spending. As pay-for-performance funding begins to demonstrate results, there should be ample common ground to dramatically increase investment in apprenticeships
2) Accountability for Outcomes
There ought to be agreement around increasing accountability in both K-12 and higher education. Arne Duncan, President Obama’s Secretary of Education, has joined with Margaret Spellings, President George W. Bush’s Secretary of Education, to pen a
clarion call for a new accountability agenda. President Biden’s Covid cash infusion was accompanied by disappearing accountability. The result is districts like chronically mismanaged Los Angeles Unified, which has lost 40% of its enrollment in just fifteen years and – as federal funds run out –
has no plan to balance its budget. It
embarrasses Duncan that the only bright spots on test scores are coming from red states.
Given that there are now 18 states with ESAs, it’s hard to imagine a K-12 agenda that ignores school choice. This is why Secretary Duncan supports the Republican Education Freedom Tax Credit. Among developed countries, America’s K-12 system is uniquely decentralized. States and districts can decide on different configurations for delivering primary and secondary education, and – with increased choice – are likely to do so at a faster pace. As such, accelerating choice could help solve one of the great mysteries of American education: why – outside of the richest, non-representative suburbs – we haven’t managed to develop anything remotely resembling model districts like China where Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu, and Zhejiang consistently top the international tables. It’s bananas that we don’t know what produces better learning outcomes, although we know enough to know it’s not just spending more per student.
In higher ed, as the culture war on college comes to a merciful end, rather than gainsaying this administration’s entire higher education agenda, there’s an opportunity to recognize that it’s burst the graduate and professional education bubble and put an end to the decades-long visibly outdated college-for-all consensus that limited pathways to economic opportunity, transformed high schools into honors-and-AP factories bereft of meaningful CTE or vocational programs, and left us poorly positioned for an age when work experience will become relatively more important and classroom experience relatively less so.
The fact that colleges have been a doughty bastion of resistance doesn’t mean everything they were doing before 2025 was hunky dory. College’s ancien régime has lost a lot of support – even among Democrats; when 70% of Americans say anything (such as higher education is heading in the wrong direction), it’s time to change course. A bipartisan higher education agenda could build from here by prioritizing employment outcomes and insisting that institutions track and report them. It could also mandate and fund the full spectrum of work-based learning: residencies, work colleges, co-ops, internships, clinics, and projects. We can no longer afford for any student to graduate from college without first having benefited from in-field, paid work experience.
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So when America’s Trump fever dream finally breaks next week, Democrats would do well to keep in mind what their Senator from another sunny place with lots of pull-up bars, Hawaii’s Brian Schatz, is saying: “[Trump] has sort of driven people into our arms, and if people give us a chance, we should understand that we’re sort of the rebound boyfriend.”
If Democrats can do better than their nemesis did two years ago and recognize that a rebound is not a mandate, they’ll pinpoint these areas of common ground, break the cycle of weight gain and weight loss, and pull up American education and workforce development.