Education is rarely accused of being ahead of the curve. We’re usually the last to get the memo. Just consider how K–12 education delivery has been one of the few large sectors of the American economy not really disrupted by technology—it’s an open question whether that will even happen in the AI era. We treat things that are long settled in the literature as “who knows” jump balls.
But when it comes to politics, K–12 education may have foreshadowed what we’re now starting to see in national politics: a breakdown of the traditional left-right delineations we’ve all gotten used to using as reference points because they are less and less serving any useful purpose.
When I first started doing this work, the field was moving toward odd-bedfellows alliances. This was disorienting, especially for those expecting education debates to run on the same political rails as everything else. Civil rights groups pushing for accountability. Left-right alliances on choice, arguing that low-income Black and Latino families deserved options the wealthy already had. Hard left types allied, uneasily but genuinely, with free-market conservatives who wanted choice for entirely different reasons. Business groups and civil rights organizations finding themselves on the same side of No Child Left Behind (hat tip to Susan Traiman and Kati Haycock). At the same time, some on the left called it a betrayal and some on the right called it grotesque federal overreach. The NEA found itself aligned with conservative states’ rights types to fight it—perhaps that was the real betrayal? In any event, none of it sorted neatly into a partisan column, and it never really has. It was honestly sort of a freak show, and it was fun.
Things started to become more partisan during Obama, especially post–Tea Party, and Trump’s conduct supercharged everything. Now it’s mostly hardened partisanship even where it makes no sense. It’s not fun. Yet in general, beyond education, many clean partisan delineations are breaking down.
The label people reached for at the time was “bipartisanship,” but that misses what was happening. Bipartisanship implies two intact camps agreeing to meet in the middle. That happened at times, but what was mostly happening in education was closer to what some now call cross-partisanship: coalitions that didn’t split along party lines at all, because party wasn’t the operative variable. The real fault lines ran elsewhere—between people committed to whatever their side’s interest groups demanded, and people who weren’t. The fundamental dynamic in education politics, then and now, is a tension between producer interests and consumer interests. The Dems heed producer demands while the Rs champion the consumers. It’s why even when the Dems have compelling ideas or the Rs are going off the rails, the donkey can never quite vanquish the elephant on this issue.
That producer-consumer tension was especially visible in the coalitions that formed around school choice. You had actors on the left and the right who agreed on very little else, but who agreed on this: the system, as structured, wasn’t reliably going to act in the best interest of individual children and families, and so those families needed more agency within it. Some of those actors were libertarians who distrusted institutions on principle. Some were civil rights advocates who had watched the institution fail their communities and realized that large systems are large systems and behave as such regardless of their political valence. Jack Coons, Milton Friedman, and Howard Fuller walk into a bar...
What united them wasn’t broad ideology. It was a shared conclusion about whose interests the system was actually organized around—and a shared appetite for something closer to mass customization, letting families and students shape their own path rather than accepting a single delivery model built for the convenience of the producers running it.
Left-right was, and is, the language people had on hand to describe this, so that’s the language they used. But it never really explained what was happening. Lefty and center-left ed reformers getting labeled as conservatives was, and is, silly. In education, the people resisting change are the real conservatives.
In any event, national politics is now catching up to that same reshuffling, and the evidence is piling up. Affordability has become the animating anxiety in both parties—President Trump may dismiss it as a hoax, but plenty of Republicans are not. In fact, they are now starting reeducation camps for Republicans about the benefits of the free market (even as the government takes stakes in various companies).
Pols in both parties are running against “elites,” and that fight is much more top-versus-bottom and inside versus outside than left-versus-right; candidates from both parties are running on attacking Congress over stock trading. And it shows up in candidates like the ones now being called “Bernie Dogs”—Democratic challengers endorsed by both the Blue Dog Coalition and Bernie Sanders, two wings of the party that agree on little except, apparently, that the current arrangement isn’t working for the people it’s supposed to serve. Micro, but telling: a John Cornyn staffer just went to work for James Talarico, the Democrat running against ethically challenged Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton for the seat Cornyn holds now—a defection that would have been unthinkable under the old partisan sorting rules. Rahm Emanuel—who I think is an underrated presidential candidate should the electorate decide they want change but want it done with no-bullshit competence—is a case study in the same pattern: he’s getting headlines for his willingness to speak hard truths on education, but that same instinct shows up on the Mideast and on the inequitable structure of the U.S. economy.
Data centers are quickly becoming another inside-out issue where the fights are not clean red v. blue at all. Bernie likes many of the Trump tariffs. Biden kept many in place. The ground is shifting.
Part of this is structural: we’re really operating four political parties within the shell of two—DSA-style Democrats and moderate Democrats on one side, MAGA and establishment Republicans on the other. But it’s more than that. It’s an indication the underlying alignments themselves are shifting or at least no longer on firm footing. Recall 2016, when a meaningful share of voters were choosing between Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump in the primaries. Some in the political class waved that off as evidence of ignorant, low-information voters. It wasn’t. Those voters were sorting on a different axis entirely—whether they wanted left-wing populism versus right-wing populism. Independent voters are overrated, since most of them are actually weak partisans, but it does seem like there’s an increasing number of voters up for grabs if something compelling came along. Trump squandered his advantage among those voters in his second term. They wanted lower prices and common sense. They got Iran and Lake America. AP polling shows the president is down 17 among independents (and more among independents without a college degree), a number not politically survivable in the current electoral structure. Still, that 2024 coalition that swept him back into office was remarkable. If talented pols come along, I’d expect more of that, not less, even as partisan identity looks superficially more hardened than ever. They may not be independent, but they are persuadable.
For education, that’s good news. Once we get past the tired, symbolic fights—abolishing the Department of Education and the like—this kind of realignment could be a genuinely fruitful moment for educational change. The sector tends to do its best work when the fights aren’t hard-partisan, when political tension is real and constructive (think 2000), and when coalitions form around what actually serves kids rather than blind partisan adherence.
Editor’s note: This was first published on the author’s Substack, Eduwonk.
