President Donald Trump is expected to sign an executive order on Wednesday supporting school choice programs, according to a White House document on the action obtained by Scripps News.
The order directs the federal government to prioritize funding to support school choice programs and directs the Secretary of Education to prioritize school choice programs in discretionary grantmaking.
“It recognizes that parents, not the government, play a fundamental role in choosing and directing the upbringing and education of their children,” the document states.
The new action also requires the department to issue guidance on how states can use federal dollars to support K-12 scholarship programs and direct the Department of Health and Human Services to share guidance on how block grants to states can be used to support alternative education -- including private and faith-based institutions.
The executive order requires the Secretary of Defense to share a plan on how military families can use defense funds for school choice, and the Secretary of the Interior to share a plan on the use of federal funds for students in the Bureau of Indian Education Schools.
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“Every child deserves the best education available, regardless of their zip code. However, for generations, our government-assigned education system has failed millions of parents, students, and teachers,” the document states. “This Executive Order begins to rectify that wrong by opening up opportunities for students to attend the school that best fits their needs.”
The White House, according to the document, contends school choice programs improve academic performance, are cost-effective and have majority support.
The news of the executive order comes on the same day that new government data was released about student academic progress in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The new figures from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a bi-annual analysis of federal test scores often dubbed the “Nation’s Report Card,” show that while American students have made modest improvements in mathematics, their reading scores remain down significantly — even lower than pre-pandemic levels.
“Overall, student achievement has not returned to pre-pandemic performance,” NCES Commissioner Peggy Carr said in a statement. “Where there are signs of recovery, they are mostly in math and largely driven by higher-performing students. Lower-performing students are struggling, especially in reading.”
In math, fourth-grade students’ test scores improved by about two percentage points over the past two years, following a 5-point decline from 2019 to 2022. Eighth-grade students’ math scores showed no significant change.
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In reading, however, student progress was significantly worse. NEAP uses three categories to classify student achievement: basic, proficient and advanced. According to the new data, the proportion of eighth-grade students scoring below the basic category was “the largest in the assessment’s history,” while the proportion of fourth graders scoring below basic was the “largest in 20 years.”
“Today’s NAEP results reveal a heartbreaking reality for American students and confirm our worst fears: not only did most students not recover from pandemic-related learning loss, but those students who were the most behind and needed the most support have fallen even further behind,” the Dept. of Education said in a statement. “The Trump Administration is committed to reorienting our education system to fully empower states, to prioritize meaningful learning, and provide universal access to high-quality instruction.”
Brandon Cardet-Hernandez, a former New York City schoolteacher, principal and education policy advisor to Mayor Bill de Blasio, who now runs an education technology company, told Scripps News in an interview he thought the new NEAP data was “terrifying” and could point to issues with the quality of educational instruction throughout the country.
“We have to assess if our educators really have the skills to teach phonics-based instruction, and that when we are putting an educator forward into the classroom, that they have the expertise to do it, and that they then have the curriculum and the scope and the sequence of all the things that are needed in order to deliver that,” Cardet-Hernandez.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said Trump would also sign executive orders “ending funding for public schools that support critical race theory and other divisive measures in their curriculums” during an interview with Fox News Wednesday morning.
The latest executive action from Trump reflects the policy he advocated for on the campaign trail. During the election, Trump emphasized universal school choice, parental rights, defunding schools over critical race theory and ‘gender ideology,’ and returning to a state-led education system.
