In September 2020, during the waning days of his first term, Donald Trump announced the creation of a task force to get to the bottom of what had gone so wrong with the nation’s education system. In the months since Covid-19 shuttered schools across the country, a story had quickly taken shape on the right in which parents, afforded a view into the classroom via Zoom, witnessed a steady stream of horrors from their kitchen tables: as rainbow and Black Lives Matter flags fluttered in the background, blue-haired Marxists taught “gender ideology” in science class and Critical Race Theory in history. “Teaching this horrible doctrine to our children is a form of child abuse, the truest sense,” Trump declared in a speech. Intended as a counterweight to the New York Times’ 1619 Project, which Trump characterized as “toxic propaganda” and “ideological poison,” the 1776 Commission was tasked with promoting so-called patriotic education as a course correction for the nation’s youngsters.
The commission handed in its homework assignment, “The 1776 Report,” less than two weeks after Trump’s supporters laid siege to the Capitol, with just two days remaining in his presidency. The document, its forty-one pages padded with images and pull quotes, was widely panned by actual historians for its worshipful treatment of the Founding Fathers, its downplaying of slavery, and its portrayal of a century-old “administrative state” controlled by leftist radicals.
The charges of shoddy scholarship and plagiarism that dogged the report obscured a less heralded accomplishment. The commission may have fallen short in producing a definitive conservative rendering of American history, but buried in its appendixes was an answer to the question of how, and when, the nation’s schools had gone off the rails. While Trump himself ordered the “restoration of American education” in response to recent threats—what conservatives disparage as the “Great Awokening”—his commission identified an older villain.
The “pronounced decline” of education in the country had actually begun not in this century, or even the one before, but in the late 1800s, the commission declared. In this account, schools had once been great, with students learning the sorts of “transcendent knowledge and practical wisdom” that were handed down generation after generation. But then came the same progressives who’d ushered in a tyrannical shadow government via child labor laws and meatpacking plant regulations. Virtue and transcendent truths were out; “skills-based, jobs-orienting training” that subordinated “America’s students to the demands of the new industrial economy” was in.
Original Sin
A rising chorus of influential conservative voices has since joined the 1776 Commission, which was killed by Joe Biden and then revived by Trump as soon as he retook office, in locating the real source of the trouble for American education. “It’s easy to think that the problem was just remote school,” warns Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts in his recent book Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America. “But the truth goes much deeper.” While Roberts isn’t sure of exactly when things went wrong—sometime between the Old Deluder Satan Law, the 1647 Massachusetts act ensuring that young colonists would learn to read and write, and the twenty-first century—he eventually settles on a century ago. That’s when progressives began their hundred-year march through the institutions—public schools, universities, teacher-training colleges—systematically eliminating anything that smacked of philosophy or religion in favor of the sorts of “useful” skills favored by the modern industrial economy. “For more than a century, the Party of Destruction has zeroed in on the education system as the key institution of social transformation,” writes Roberts. The goal: to “create generations of obedient drones.”
Was there ever a time when American schools weren’t somehow bound up with the economy?
Trump’s beleaguered defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, makes a similar claim in the 2022 book Battle for the American Mind, coauthored with David Goodwin, editor of The Classical Difference, a magazine about Christian schools. Long before he was group-chatting U.S. bombing plans or clear-cutting banned books from Department of Defense libraries, Hegseth was “uprooting a century of miseducation” about the nation’s schools, to quote the subtitle of his book, which spent weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. What Hegseth describes as “the unauthorized history of American education” dates back 120 years, when “Progressives had big ideas to change the cultural and economic order while dissolving old reliances on Christianity.” The point of the plot is essentially the same. “Behind a smokescreen of ‘preparing students for the new industrial economy,’ early progressives had political control in mind,” a promotional synopsis for the book reads.
While these accounts differ in particulars—you say Progressive, I say progressive—the sweeping story of decline they tell, not just of America’s schools and students but of the nation, is identical. Whereas schools and churches once produced spirited and spiritual citizens, that ended when vocationalism trumped virtue, and education became synonymous with preparation for future employment. “They successfully hollowed out America’s vision of education into nothing more than job training,” writes Hegseth. “A lifelong search for greater meaning in life” was replaced by the “search for a job.” It’s a critique that would sound perfectly at home on the left, save for one key detail. The kids who’ve been on the receiving end of this conspiracy for the past century-plus are presented as simultaneously corporate stooges and Marxist revolutionaries—“ideal cogs in a globalist, Uniparty economic system,” as Roberts would have it. “The problem is that our schools have been transformed from institutions designed to cultivate children’s souls into godless assembly lines meant to shape obedient little comrades who think morality is a construct and nature is an illusion.”
Skill Issue
Roberts and Hegseth are wild for the conservative cause du jour, the so-called classical education that, as Roberts defines it, seeks to form virtuous students by grounding them in the best of the Western canon, typically represented by a selective mélange of Greek and Roman texts, early Christian writing, and U.S. founding documents. Hegseth couches his case for classical Christian education in military terms. Yes, students will be immersed in the great books—books that have contributed original ideas to “the conversation about Truth, Goodness, and Beauty that descends from at least three millennia of the Western Christian tradition”—but only after an insurgency defeats the monopoly of “government schools” and “woke” private institutions. “First we survive, then we regroup and reorganize while weakening the control and legitimacy of our foe,” writes Hegseth. “And finally we replace their power structure with reconstructed schools based on freedom and faith.”
But was there ever a time when American schools weren’t somehow bound up with the economy? It can be hard to find an idyllic stretch in which education existed free from the demands of employers, when parents weren’t already steering their offspring away from letters and toward numbers. In The Irony of Early School Reform, his seminal 1968 account of the origins of public schools in Massachusetts, historian Michael Katz describes mid–nineteenth century education boosters as seizing on the practical economic benefits of schooling, not just for laborers but for the state. The industrial and commercial success of Massachusetts was dependent “on the intelligence of the laboring classes upon the land and in the shops and mills,” proclaimed George Boutwell, the state’s education chief from 1855 to 1861. “Thus we connect the productive power of our state with its institutions of learning.”
Such early rhetoric equating education with economic growth went hand in hand with warnings to manual laborers that they needed to skill and school up or else. “Whole classes in our community who, not a generation ago, would have been content to earn their living by unskilled labor, are now thrust from that lower market, and forced to add knowledge and intelligence to the labor of their hands,” cautioned the Brookline School Committee, outside Boston, in 1855. The committee was making the economic case for more schools and schooling, but their dire prediction that entire groups of workers faced imminent obsolescence has more or less driven education policy ever since. The farmer needed scientific knowledge of the soil, insisted these early school reformers, while the construction workers of yore, tasked with erecting the structures of the future, would no longer be able to rely on practical experience—the “ ‘rule of thumb’ of an ignorant mechanic.”
Roughly a century and a half later, the XQ Institute, a corporate-minded school fix-it group cofounded by Laurene Powell Jobs, Steve Jobs’s billionaire widow, was back with a nearly identically ominous prophecy. In a report from 2018 on the future of work, the group conceded that American high schools had done a fine job preparing youngsters for an industrializing society—but that was then. Today’s students are has-beens before they’ve even begun, asserted the group, ill-equipped for a world of “innovation, customization, globalization, and automation” and almost certain to be replaced by robots. That is, unless high school is transformed. While the precise nature of this transformation was left vague, the rat-a-tat of questionable statistical claims—e.g., that the average young American will hold more than eleven different jobs between the ages of eighteen and fifty—left no doubt as to its urgency. If the vision of education as job training is as old as American schools, the insistent demand that we fix the schools or risk economic collapse has never been far behind.
The right’s portrait of radicals slowly and steadily laying siege to the nation’s education system across the decades en route to socialism also obscures just how thoroughly bipartisan the project of tethering schools ever more tightly to the needs of employers has been. In From the New Deal to the War on Schools, his sweeping 2022 history of federal education policy, political scientist Daniel Moak describes a stifling consensus regarding the purpose and function of education as skills acquisition. The GOP and conservative-minded business groups have long invoked “efficiency” as their sales pitch for this vision, argues Moak: meeting the needs of employers, tying individual earnings to skills, and dominating global economic competition. Liberals have embraced a similar view of schooling but for a very different rationale: that employment-minded education is the best vehicle through which to realize individual success, social mobility, and racial equality. “Elites from across the political spectrum,” concludes Moak, “promote the idea that the public education system should be focused on imparting skills that offer individuals the potential for future success within the existing social and economic order.”
Rotten to the Core
The high-water mark for this consensus view regarding schooling as skills acquisition arrived in the Obama era in the form of the Common Core standards. Kicked off in 2009 by an assortment of governors and state-level education leaders, the effort to enact uniform math and reading requirements across the country commanded a level of bipartisan support that is unimaginable these days. By the end of 2011, forty-five states, more than half of which were led by Republican governors, had signed on. The sweeping endeavor attempted to ensure every American high school student would graduate ready for college or the workplace. But at the heart of the Common Core was a familiar premise: today’s employers should determine what the workers of tomorrow will need to know.
Corporations were happy to push this sentiment down the public’s throats, even interrupting coverage of the scramble to win the coveted Masters green jacket by running advertisements during the famously commercial-averse golf tournament in 2012. Common Core standards were “unlocking a better way to prepare our children for college and their careers,” intoned the ad’s narrator, a cartoon book. Its pages fanned across the screen, full of STEM iconography—test tubes, beakers, planets. “Because when our kids do better, America does better.”
The Common Core’s role in ushering in our current era of burn-it-down populism is underrecognized today.
If an overhaul of educational standards was an unlikely topic to stir the ranks of golf enthusiasts, the advertisement’s sponsor was even more surprising: ExxonMobil, the multinational behemoth better known for extracting natural resources and belching carbon into the atmosphere than for unlocking the career potential of young Americans. But as business reporter Peter Elkind chronicled for Fortune in 2015, the Common Core was a thoroughly corporate undertaking from its inception. Big business had been bemoaning the state of the U.S. public education system since at least the release of “A Nation at Risk,” the incendiary Reagan-era report suggesting that “a rising tide of mediocrity” had engulfed schools. Steeped in Cold War rhetoric, the report famously stated that “if an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.” While many of the document’s claims regarding the deterioration of U.S. schools would be debunked, its central argument that failing schools were a threat to the nation’s economic and global competitiveness would inspire successive waves of school reform, including the Common Core.
Here was an opportunity to solve the problems that CEOs insisted were holding the country back—middling international test scores, a lack of skilled workers—by going to the source: what was taught in every classroom in the land. Bill Gates would chip in more than $200 million for the cause via his foundation, while the Business Roundtable, the CEO-lobby group started in 1972 to counter the power of labor unions, used its political heft to urge states to get with the new program. As Elkind describes, businesses essentially identified the skills that they wanted future employees to have, then worked backward to determine what students should learn. The English Language Arts standards, for example, largely phased out fiction as students got older in favor of so-called informational texts. What good would knowledge of plays and poetry do future workers, after all, in a world of corporate speak and PowerPoints?
The Common Core even had a corporate pitchman: Rex Tillerson, then CEO of ExxonMobil and member of the Business Roundtable. Before going on to serve briefly as secretary of state during Trump’s first term (after firing him by tweet, Trump ascribed the breakup to bad “chemistry”), Tillerson gave speeches, called legislators, and lobbied other CEOs in support of the standards, and ExxonMobil went so far as to cut off campaign contributions to politicians who refused to get on board. For Tillerson, the sales pitch was obvious. Businesses were customers of the public schools, and the students who graduated from those schools were the product, he explained in a 2014 panel discussion. “Now is that product in a form that we, the customer, can use it? Or is it defective, and we’re not interested?”
Today, the Common Core is largely recalled for the education revolt it triggered. Teachers, whose response to the standards was initially mixed, would mutiny against another Obama education policy: get-tough evaluations that tied their jobs to students’ standardized test scores. Parents, already souring on testing, had no love for assessments that seemed intended to demonstrate that their children weren’t as “brilliant as they thought they were,” as Obama’s education chief, Arne Duncan, put it. Among conservatives, Obama’s signature education reform, which used billions in government largesse to get around the constitutional limitation of federal control over what’s taught in schools, smacked of federal overreach.
The uprising against “Obamacore,” as it was branded by grassroots conservative activists, was an early portent of the populist revolt against corporations. While the blue chips made the business case for school reform, activists—often aided by the Koch brothers’ ecosystem of advocacy organizations—smelled a corporate plot. They packed legislative hearings and deluged the offices of state officials with phone calls, threatening to vote out anyone who supported the standards. In 2013, demonstrators from FreedomWorks, the conservative Tea Party group that got its start with funding from the Kochs, showed up at the annual General Electric shareholder meeting to protest the company’s support for the Common Core. It didn’t help that the most prominent companies steering the way for the new standards were global giants such as GE. All the more evidence, charged activists, that the plot was global in nature, aimed at batch-processing serfs to serve a New World Order.
The Common Core’s role in ushering in our current era of burn-it-down populism is arguably underrecognized today. Writing in The Federalist in 2016, editor Joy Pullmann described the Common Core as a classic case of corporate cronies doing what cronies do: “using government to force their low-quality products on everyone rather than getting their butts out into the market and earning the dollars they get from us through a willing exchange.” No wonder most Americans don’t trust big business, Pullman concluded, name-checking ExxonMobil. “They don’t play fair, and we know it. They use their power to cheat us out of honest government and a level economic playing field.”
By 2016, the GOP had officially denounced the cause, even congratulating the states that had repealed the standards in its party platform. Among today’s conservative education activists, the Common Core is recalled as, at best, a well-intentioned initiative gone awry. The 1776 Commission report shoehorns it into a couple of paragraphs devoted to “a few reforms of note,” concluding that “we learned from the failed Common Core experiment that one-size-fits-all national models are a blueprint for trivializing and mechanizing learning.” Roberts credits the backlash against federal overreach and centralized control of classrooms with supercharging the push for school choice, for which he is a vocal proponent. But it is Hegseth who best embodies the right’s evolving thinking on public education. The Common Core, he claims, was yet another conspiracy to “push radical left-wing ideas into the minds of our kids—future voters, to boot.”
STEM the Tide
These days, the Business Roundtable, which led the CEOs’ charge for the Common Core, is a rudderless relic, ill-equipped for a world in which corporations are disparaged as the next phase of socialism. The Republican Party has tilted, as political theorist Melinda Cooper argued in 2022, toward its small-business wing of private, family-owned companies and away from the sorts of multinational corporations represented by the likes of ExxonMobil and the Roundtable. The small-business conservatives have committed to an “antiestablishment insurrection,” writes Cooper, hostile to both the New Deal state with its labor unions and social welfare programs and the big businesses that enable it. “Behind the mask of supposedly capitalistic corporations lies the specter of social control and the destruction of our liberty,” warns Kevin Roberts, calling for the corporate purveyors of woke capitalism to be burned down and broken up.
As corporations have fallen from favor on the right, so, too, has the sort of corporate-minded education reform that the Common Core epitomized. In Battle for the American Mind, Hegseth mocks a New York Times column in which Nicholas Kristof fretted that young Americans’ slumping test scores would render them unable to compete in a globalized economy—precisely the argument that school reformers have been making for the past forty years. Hegseth dismisses Kristof’s analysis as shallow, listing the various gaps—cultural, civic, patriotism, and faith—that he argues matter far more than metrics of academic achievement. Posits Hegseth: “What if you are creating workers who don’t love their country for a future economy that doesn’t exist?”
At the heart of the Common Core was a familiar premise: today’s employers should determine what the workers of tomorrow will need to know.
Not only has the project of national academic standards been junked, but the GOP has now made a sharp turn against any standards at all. Donald Trump’s top education priority, dismantling the federal Department of Education, is premised on exactly the sort of let-the-states-do-as-they-like logic that once so infuriated the CEO set. The Department of Government Efficiency chain saw, meanwhile, has eviscerated the federal government’s ability to track student progress. The Trump-era GOP’s vision of education, clad in the rhetoric of parents’ rights and the free market, centers on giving tax dollars directly to parents to spend on whatever flavor of school they like: private, virtual, homeschool, for-profit microschool. In a growing number of red states, so-called universal voucher programs are open to even the wealthiest families. Some of these states have allowed parents to use education savings accounts to pay for any expense that might be considered “school”: indoor trampolines for gym class, ski resort passes, or flat-screen TVs for general education.
“Anyone know of a flat earth curriculum?” That query, posted in earnest last year in an online discussion group for recipients of school vouchers in Arizona, unleashed a torrent of mockery, including from the state’s governor. “The Earth is round, evolution is real, gravity exists. Arizona taxpayers should not pay to teach our children junk science,” Governor Katie Hobbes opined on X. But as the state’s top education official would make clear in an interview, while the Department of Education could potentially refuse to pay for such a curriculum on the grounds that it is an “unreasonable expense,” Arizona law is emphatically hands-off when it comes to any public oversight of what students in its voucher program are learning. Indeed, to advocates of rules-free education, the ability for parents to choose learning materials that align with their values is the point, even if those values include belief in a flat Earth.
Boosting student proficiency in science, technology, engineering, and math has been a national obsession since the Soviets fired Sputnik into space in 1957. But the right’s turn against public education and any kind of standards also extends to STEM. In the rendering of Hegseth et al., the focus on STEM has been a decades-long error, the latest iteration of the progressives’ fiendish attempt to replace the wisdom of yore with practical skills, subsuming schools and students to the demands of the industrial economy. “America’s classrooms have been centralized, technicalized, and scientized—with the aim of pumping out workers, not thinkers,” writes Hegseth, who admits, regrettably, to having written his Harvard graduate thesis on the topic of STEM schools. “Foolish schools, foolish theses.”
The conservative hostility toward STEM has rapidly been translated into policy. The Trump administration has slashed spending on science, cuts that have fallen with particular savagery on STEM education research. A little more than a decade ago, corporations made the case that the imminent arrival of a skills-heavy future necessitated an urgent overhaul of American schools. Despite the technological demands of the administration’s economic vision, including reshoring high-tech industries in order to outcompete China, the right’s schooling priorities are now decidedly backward-looking, romanticizing a time not just of less science but of less education.
Left Behind
It is striking how contemporary critiques of this narrow vision of education as job training come almost exclusively from the right, given that criticism of public education’s cozy intertwining with capitalism used to be dominated by scholars on the left. Economists Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis made left-wing analyses of public education cool for generations of scholars with their 1976 classic Schooling in Capitalist America. The authors, who came out of 1960s-era campus political movements, provided a bracingly Marxist take on the role that class plays in undermining the democratic potential of education. They were unapologetic that true education reform required a far-reaching economic transformation. “An educational system can be egalitarian and liberating only when it prepares youth for fully democratic participation in social life and an equal claim to the fruits of economic activity,” they argued. In the book’s final chapter, “Education, Socialism and Revolution,” Bowles and Gintis contended that schools would never achieve their liberating, equalizing capacity as long as the economy itself was rigged. “The people of the United States do not need a doctor for the moribund capitalist order,” they wrote. “We need an undertaker.” In 1980, sociologist Jean Anyon published her eye-opening account of the “hidden curriculum” at five elementary schools where fifth graders of different class backgrounds were already being prepared for their respective ladder rungs. While students at what Anyon called an “executive elite school” were developing their analytical intellectual powers en route to becoming lawyers and doctors, those at working-class schools were engaged in the sort of rote, mechanical training prized by factory bosses.
Fifty years later, our public education system is arguably even more committed to what Bowles and Gintis identified as “capitalist production.” Forget the talk about blue-haired Marxists indoctrinating children; these days, despite the populist outcry, schools are focused on career readiness and not much else. In a recent essay, teacher and writer Annie Abrahams argues that although the Common Core brand may be diminished, its emphasis on aligning education with the demands of industry is woven through state-level standards that determine what students are taught. Abrahams’s inventory includes Pennsylvania, which, starting in 2026, will require kindergarteners to learn about the importance of work ethic and entrepreneurial traits, while middle schoolers will have to “identify ways to market yourself as a job candidate.” In New York, suggested activities for elementary-school students include making a diorama showing a person engaged in work or telling a story about how a cafeteria worker uses math and English on the job.
This past spring, the influential lobby group Democrats for Education Reform called on the party to develop a clear national education vision and “reconnect with our own core values.” The document was notably heavy on greatest hits—the combination of red-tape slashing, test-based accountability, and charter schools that has held sway since the Clinton era, with a new openness to private-school vouchers. Other than nods to “education excellence” and the need to create “better” and “different” schools, the group had nothing at all to say about the purpose of school. The right today has plenty of answers to the “why” of education: patriotism, piety, virtue, “great books.” But Democrats are still wedded to a vision of neoliberal school reform that reduces the entirety of schooling to job preparation.
Classical education, the liberal-arts-heavy brand of schooling favored by conservatives these days, is explicitly positioned as an alternative to soulless workforce development. Hillsdale College’s 1776 Curriculum for K–12 schools, for example, frames its emphasis on great books and primary sources as education for liberty, rather than corporate interests determining what students should learn. “At the heart of classical education is its view of the human person,” writes Kevin Roberts. “It sees students not as learning machines or future cogs in some great industrial gear but as precious beings made in the image of God.” As education writer Nora De La Cour has observed, while classical education may be right-coded, its goals—of cultivating wonder in children, encouraging students to get lost in the magic of storytelling and to wrestle with profound questions—can seem like a refreshing alternative to the scripted curricula and test prep that rule in too many public-school classrooms. Students, notes De La Cour, a former teacher herself, rarely encounter whole works of fiction anymore: “They’re more likely to encounter these as decontextualized excerpts in corporate-produced test prep materials.” Our effort to make young Americans career ready, she concludes, has left students alienated from reading and parents, who “want good and beautiful things for their kids,” alienated from public schools.
If public education is to survive, Democrats will have to come up with an explanation for why we have public schools that goes beyond bloodless workforce preparation. They would do well to revisit the left-wing scholars of an earlier era for whom education was a terrain of possibility. “We must press for an educational environment in which youth can develop the capacity and commitment collectively to control their lives and regulate their social interactions with a sense of equality, reciprocity, and communality,” Bowles and Gintis argued. Imagine that.
Of course, our public schools may ultimately have no choice but to embrace a purpose beyond job training and getting ahead. If and when that happens, schools will be responding not to right-wing critiques that STEM and career readiness are the latest iteration of a century-long plot to pump out obedient corporate drones but to said corporations’ use of AI to eliminate, well, all the jobs. In a recent interview, AI researcher Daniel Kokotajlo, who coauthored the terrifying manifesto AI 2027, explained that it would soon make little sense to raise kids to be economically productive given that “they won’t really be participating in the economy in anything like the normal sense.” As for how he planned to educate his own kids, Kokotajlo said that he’d be prioritizing values like wisdom and virtue. “I will do my best to teach them those things because those things are good in themselves, rather than good for getting jobs.”