What Does Another Trump Presidency Mean For Teachers?

Well. I’m writing this about 24 hours after the election results, and there’s both a lot to say and nothing at all to say.

On the election as a whole, I’ll just say that since its inception, this nation’s chief conflict has been between its stated ideals and the brutal realities of white supremacy and colonialism. Throughout our short history, we’ve grappled with the question of which would win: our allegiance to freedom, liberty and justice for all, or our commitment to this oppression.

This question was definitively answered for me on Wednesday morning. America would rather cannibalize itself than live up to its actual ideals.

Now about education. As a former teacher, I’ve been thinking particularly about the ways a second Trump presidency will impact public education. Here are some of the likely changes to come:

• Dismantling of the Department of Education (which would also mean bye-bye to any type of student loan debt relief—but we already knew that was coming)

• Elimination of Title IX protections for transgender students, essentially codifying discrimination

• Immigration policies disrupting school communities—as early as Wednesday night, teachers on Reddit were already reporting anxiety among immigrant students as well as bullying (when I went back to find links, most of these posts had all gotten scrubbed).

• A greater push towards privatization/school choice (though school vouchers were soundly defeated on the ballot in three states, including red Nebraska and Kentucky)

• Using federal funds to incentivize K-12 schools to abolish tenure and adopt merit-based pay (meaning even fewer teachers would want to work in high-poverty schools)

• Pulling of federal funds “for any school or program pushing Critical Race Theory, gender ideology, or other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content on our children.”

And it gets worse. Project 2025 has proposed to:

• Eliminate Title I funding, a move that would dramatically increase inequality and teacher shortages

• Drastic funding and regulatory changes to IDEA and 504, limiting disabled students’ access to a free and appropriate education

• Eliminate Head Start programs for young children living in poverty

• Increase the power of conservative parents’ rights groups to shape school curriculum through a Parents Bill of Rights, further fueling school culture wars

• Attack the power of teachers’ unions, including the NEA, which Trump calls a “radical special interest group” (I mean, has he really even seen radical?)

These moves would gut public education, imperil our most vulnerable students, and move us closer to a dystopia in which education is little more than childcare and teaching a low-skilled, low-paid job where EdTech bots “teach” and humans merely supervise.

They will make the job of teaching even harder than it already is.

On Wednesday, hours after I heard the news, I happened to talk with a prominent teacher transition career coach, who predicted that the change in administration would likely push even more educators out of the profession.

I think she’s probably right. But as someone who is both a former teacher and a parent of a school-aged child with an IEP, I have complicated feelings about this.

I still, despite everything, believe in public education—or at least in its potential to be liberatory. Of course, that’s not what we have here. When other parents bemoan that the education system is broken, I tell them that it isn’t—it functions exactly as it was designed to. Our education system reproduces the social and economic classes of our society, ensuring a small group stays dominant while the majority are just educated enough for industrial jobs, but not enough to truly dismantle oppressive systems and structures. Of course, the exploitation of teachers’ labor is part of this, because our working conditions are always our students’ learning conditions.

Still, still, some kernel of optimism remains in me. Maybe it’s because of the transformative history of student walkouts, or the work my own grandparents did to desegregate schools. Maybe it’s all the bad-ass, dedicated, smart, humble teachers I’ve known, who work to create complex and critical curricula that challenge students and teach unrepresentated histories (I see you, Nivia Alvarado and Angie Yi!).

I don’t want to see public education dismantled.

I don’t actually want to see droves of teachers leave the classroom.

All this leaves me at a bit of a crossroads. I’m not sure how I feel in this moment about writing a publication that aims to help educators transition out of the profession. On the one hand, I don’t believe people should be trapped in abusive or exploitative working conditions, which many teachers are, and I don’t believe there should be gate-keeping around the resources that help them leave.

And yet. If the teaching profession is gutted, as it likely will be, and if a mass exodus occurs, which is likely may—what will be left of our education system? And what will happen to our young people in it, the most vulnerable of whom will be most deeply impacted?

I’m starting to wonder if my efforts might be better directed toward helping the teachers who are still in the classroom to stay—even though I myself couldn’t.

But what does that look like?

On a microlevel, it could mean volunteering at my daughter’s school, filling in for the likely vacancies and increased workloads that are to come.

It could mean organizing with other parents to preserve any remnants of IDEA and Title I that we can.

It might mean supporting teachers’ unions through tangible actions, like canvassing and phone banking.

It might mean writing more researched and reported articles on public education that center teachers’ perspectives. (I’m looking at you, Atlantic.)

Beyond that, I truly don’t know. I think that’s part of how this whole thing works—on so many fronts, we’re too stunned and overwhelmed to know where to turn.

But I know what helping teachers doesn’t look like: sending cheerful memes, buying donuts or telling them to meditate. None of those things kept me in the classroom. Starbucks cards aren’t enough. We can’t GoFundMe our way out of this.

I sold an op-ed to the LA Times almost two months ago—before their whole editorial and unsubscribe fiasco. It’s a well-researched, strongly argued piece about how the teaching profession is inherently anti-parent and the changes that need to be implemented in order to retain teacher-parents like myself.

The nice, overworked junior editor keeps telling me they’re going to publish it “sometime soon.” But in light of the last day, I’m wondering if that’s even the fight I want to fight right now. As much as I believe in what I wrote, the fate of public education and the teaching profession is literally on the line. We have bigger fish to fry now.

I honestly don’t know what I’m going to do. About anything really, including the op-ed and this newsletter. I have some great interviews in the queue and some exciting new ideas I’m working on, but I don’t know if this is where I want to focus my energies.

All of which is to say: I’m thinking about all this. I started this newsletter because I truly love teachers, and I’m trying to figure out what that looks like now.

Like a lot of folks, I felt conflicted about leaving teaching—and especially about starting this newsletter. So I made a deal with myself: I could write about leaving the teaching profession as long as I continued to advocate for public education and support the folks still in the classroom.

While the terms have changed, it’s a deal I still intend to keep.