What Trump’s Second Term Could Mean for New York Schools

A review of Trump’s first term, along with his campaign promises and details found within Project 2025, indicate what’s to come in New York.

Bianca Fortis   ·   November 20, 2024
Photo collage of Donald Trump in front of school desks, with a map of New York state in the background.
| Photo: Gage Skidmore via Flickr | Illustration: New York Focus

President-elect Donald Trump hasn’t yet laid out a detailed plan for his administration’s education policy. But a review of his first term and his campaign promises, as well as the details contained in the 2025 Presidential Transition Project, gives some indication of what might be coming in New York.

Trump, who has falsely claimed that the US ranks last in education, has repeatedly vowed to eliminate the $79 billion US Department of Education. “I’m dying to get back to do this,” he said in September. Whether he succeeds will depend on whether he has congressional support.

Late Tuesday, Trump announced his pick for Secretary of Education: Linda McMahon, who oversaw the Small Business Administration during Trump’s first term and co-founded the WWE wrestling empire.

McMahon is the chair of the America First Policy Institute, which has assisted Trump’s transition team. The think tank’s policy proposals for education center on school choice, allowing parents to evaluate curriculum materials, teaching life skills like financial and digital literacy, and prohibiting the teaching of Critical Race Theory

While education advocates wait for Trump to take office, they are bracing for changes in how public education is administered.

“We don’t know yet what will happen,” said Randi Levine, the policy director of Advocates for Children of New York, “but many of the policy proposals raised would be devastating for the students we serve.”

Cuts to federal school funding

Regardless of whether the Department of Education closes, Trump can seek to limit federal aid to schools — something he repeatedly tried to do during his first term.

His administration proposed a number of cuts to the education budget, including appropriations for Title II, which mainly aims to help states and districts pay for teacher development and reduce class size; Title IV, which administers postsecondary federal student aid; and funding for after-school and summer programs for low-income students. Congress rejected these cuts.

This time, Trump’s allies have had more time to lay the groundwork for their proposals. The nearly 900-page Project 2025 report, published by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, lays out ideas for downsizing and reshaping federal agencies — including the elimination of the Education Department. While Trump has sought to distance himself from the playbook, at least 140 people who worked within his first administration were involved in the project, according to CNN.

The Heritage Foundation has argued that budget cuts would help transition control over education back to states and localities.

The federal government also pays for about 10 percent of the US Special Olympics budget, which the first Trump administration tried to cut. Former Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos defended that move to Congress, unsuccessfully.

Michael Rebell, the executive director of the Center for Educational Equity, said he is skeptical that Congress will agree to shutter the Department of Education, since the agency is federally mandated to distribute funding to low-income schools and students with disabilities.

“That’s easier said than done on the campaign trail, and whether Congress is going to go along with that is another question,” Rebell said.

The proposed federal cuts are coming just as New York begins to reevaluate Foundation Aid, the formula used to distribute most state funding to public schools. Federal budget cuts would increase pressure on the state and local school districts to make up for any shortfalls.

Compared to the $36 billion the state spends on school aid, federal funds account for a much smaller amount – $8.6 billion during the 2024 fiscal year, according to the Division of the Budget. For New York City, 5 percent of its budget, or $2 billion, comes from the federal government, according to the City Comptroller’s Office. An additional $1.5 billion goes toward the CUNY system and early childhood programs.

State education funding is a reliably heated battle during each budget cycle. Last year, Governor Kathy Hochul’s proposed cuts to education were roundly rejected by the state legislature. But many observers expect that she may try again.

Levine’s organization is calling for the new formula to create funding for homeless students, and increase it for students with disabilities and English Language Learners.

“We think this is a key moment for the state to commit to providing the resources necessary for all students to get the excellent education that they deserve,” she said.

David Little, the executive director of the Rural Schools Association, pointed to the state education department’s current effort to overhaul graduation requirements as a program that will be harder for districts to implement if their budgets are cut.

“The only thing that can derail that is money,” Little said. “If the governor is in the process of trying to figure out how we alter state education aid — with an eye toward trying to ratchet that back — and the federal government is proposing to also diminish federal funding, then you immediately go into survival mode.”

Trump has also pledged to withhold funds to schools that recognize transgender students or teach critical race theory, an academic framework that seeks to understand history and society through the lens of historical and systemic racism.

The deportation of newly arrived students

Trump, who has called immigrants “criminals, drug dealers and rapists,” has made tightening US immigration policy a signature part of his platform. (There is no link between an increase in immigrant populations and a rise in crime.) He has promised the mass deportation of millions of undocumented immigrants living in the US, an effort that would be both logistically complicated and costly.

The number of unauthorized immigrants in the United States grew by about 800,000 to 11 million between 2019 and 2022, according to the Pew Research Center. That number peaked in 2007 at 12.2 million.

More than 200,000 new immigrants and asylum seekers have entered New York State in the last two years, prompting school districts statewide to find ways to respond to the unexpected jump in student enrollment.

During the last Trump presidency, the New York City Department of Education issued guidance to schools and families to protect students from federal immigration action.

“We certainly hope that the city will step up again and do all it can to protect immigrant students and families and keep their records confidential as well,” Levine said.

A rollback of civil rights protections

Trump’s return also poses a risk to the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, the arm of the agency responsible for investigating claims of discrimination at schools and universities across the country.

That office handled more than 19,000 claims last year – a record for the 44-year old department. In New York state alone, there are currently 423 pending cases at elementary and secondary schools and another 207 at colleges and universities. The office is also tasked with collecting data about access to education.

Under DeVos, the agency’s arm became more lenient, limiting the time and scope of investigations in an effort to clear a backlog of old cases, according to a ProPublica review. DeVos also rescinded protections for transgender students issued under former President Barack Obama while expanding rights afforded to individuals accused of campus sexual harassment and assault.

“The ones who are going to get clobbered are going to be the kids in states that are going to be happy to see civil rights enforcement go by the wayside.”

—Michael Rebell, executive director, Center for Educational Equity

Project 2025 recommends moving the Office for Civil Rights under the Department of Justice and would require its actions against violators to take place through litigation, rather than administrative enforcement.

The plan also recommends the government rescind guidance issued during the Obama era that is meant to weed out racial discrimination toward students of color with disabilities.

Education advocates in blue states like New York can expect their state governments to take a more active role in civil rights enforcement, Rebell predicted.

“The more so-called progressive states will probably pick up at least some of the slack,” Rebell said. “The ones who are going to get clobbered are going to be the kids in states that are going to be happy to see civil rights enforcement go by the wayside.”

School meals

Previously, Trump tried to tighten requirements around who qualified for free school lunches, which would have caused nearly half a million students to lose access to the program, according to an analysis by the US Department of Agriculture. He also sought to loosen Obama-era nutrition standards.

Project 2025 refers to the federal free lunch program as an “entitlement program” that represents “an example of the ever-expanding federal footprint in local school operations.” The plan would do away with a provision that eases access to free meals in high-poverty areas and recommends cutting summer meals for students who are not enrolled in summer programs.

Throughout New York, 57 percent of students were eligible for the federal free or reduced-price lunch program during the 2022–23 school year, slightly higher than the national average, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

A few cities — New York City, Albany, Rochester and Yonkers — have their own universal free school meal programs to help fill in gaps where the federal program does not cover all students. State legislators have successfully expanded access to free meals in other regions, but efforts to pass a statewide universal program have stalled.

New York City’s program, which receives $545 million in federal funding, could face restrictions in the wake of budget cuts, according to the city comptroller.

A push for school choice incentives

Trump has championed charter and private schools, a win for school choice proponents in New York. His administration pushed for federal funding to go toward charter schools, voucher programs and tax credits for private school tuition, as a means to empower parents and give them educational options that better suit their children.

“For too long, countless American children have been trapped in failing government schools,” he said in his 2020 State of the Union address.

A recent study from the Stanford University Center for Research on Educational Outcomes found that charter schools have begun to outperform public schools. Critics say school choice is an effort to privatize schools and that charter schools are a financial burden on public school districts.

Though New York has 357 charter schools, there is a statewide cap on the number of schools that can open. New York’s public education community is largely opposed to using public funding for private schools, noted Little of the Rural Schools Association.

“There might be proposals to make inroads,” he said. “But our governor and our legislative houses are so overwhelmingly Democratic that it would be really hard for them to try and advance a prospective agenda like that.”

Update 11/20: This story was updated to reflect the nomination of Linda McMahon to lead the Department of Education.

At New York Focus, our central mission is to help readers better understand how New York really works. If you think this article succeeded, please consider supporting our mission and making more stories like this one possible.

New York is an incongruous state. We’re home to fabulous wealth — if the state were a country, it would have the tenth largest economy in the world — but also the highest rate of wealth inequality. We’re among the most diverse – but also the most segregated. We passed the nation’s most ambitious climate law — but haven’t been meeting its deadlines and continue to subsidize industries hastening the climate crisis.

As New York’s only statewide nonprofit news publication, our journalism exists to help you make sense of these contradictions. Our work scrutinizes how power works in the state, unpacks who’s really calling the shots, and reveals how obscure decisions shape ordinary New Yorkers’ lives.

In the last two decades, the number of local news outlets in New York have been nearly slashed in half, allowing elected officials and powerful individuals to increasingly operate in the dark — with the average New Yorker none the wiser.

We’re on a mission to change that. Our work has already shown what can happen when those with power know that someone is watching, with stories that have prompted policy changes and spurred legislation. We have ambitious plans for the rest of the year and beyond, including tackling new beats and more hard-hitting stories — but we need your help to make them a reality.

If you’re able, please consider supporting our journalism with a one-time gift or a monthly gift. We can't do this work without you.

Thank you,

Akash Mehta
Editor-in-Chief
Bianca Fortis is the education reporter at New York Focus. She was previously an Abrams reporting fellow at ProPublica, where she spent 18 months investigating how Columbia University protected a predatory doctor who had sexually abused hundreds of patients for more than 20 years… more
Also filed in New York State

New York’s home care workers are suing insurance companies for systematically underpaying them for grueling, around-the-clock work.

Most utilities barely track how much water they lose to leaks, but one thing is clear: Aging infrastructure is costing customers.

New York could see more frequent and destructive blazes, but the state doesn’t have enough forest rangers and firefighters to respond to the growing threat.

Also filed in New York City

One Brighton Beach property connects political donations, Medicaid scams, and a Turkish charity

Offshore wind is crucial to the state’s plans for cleaning up its electric grid, and construction is already behind schedule. The incoming president could slow it down a whole lot more.

Also filed in Education

Years of shortages have led to a staggering problem across the state, with few solutions on the horizon.

Nearly half of the state’s child care providers have raised tuition and a third have lost staff, a new report found.

Hundreds of Child Victims Act cases have been filed against New York schools, some over accused serial offenders that could leave districts with tens of millions of dollars in liability.