Proposed Changes to Federal Policy and Charter Schools

 

It’s been a busy couple of weeks for federal education policy. It is too early to predict how the Trump Administration’s effort to make deep changes in government practice will play out. This update provides an overview of some of the major changes being proposed.

Some changes will definitely affect charter schools and authorizing. Indeed, a few actions call out the federal Charter School Program (CSP) explicitly. Other actions may eventually affect our work. The NN4DA will continue to track developments and provide updates on events that may impact authorizing.

Attached here is a partial chronology of events that are potentially relevant to charter schools and authorizing.

In the long-term, one of the most impactful events doesn’t come from the Trump Administration. A game changer for the charter sector may have come from the U.S. Supreme Court, when it agreed to hear an Oklahoma case regarding the legality of religious charter schools.

If the Supreme Court finds that religious charter schools must be allowed nationwide, regardless of legal precedent and the ubiquity of state legal language to the contrary, the charter sector is likely to experience a political reckoning that could be catastrophic for the sector, at least in Blue states. If Democratic state leaders feel they must choose between being forced to allow religious charter schools and banning all new charters, most will ban charters.

After the Supreme Court, a raft of consequential Executive Orders (EOs) and official memos are changing things for the U.S. Department of Education (ED), the Charter School Program (CSP), and, eventually, for us.

A central theme in all this activity is the effort to expand the power of the President, while diminishing the authority of Congress; the statutory basis of federal programs; and legal protections of civil service workers.

At its farthest reaches, if continued federal action follows through on language in several of the EOs to withhold funds from states and schools that do not align with the Administration’s priorities, the effort to expand Presidential power will eventually conflict with the autonomy of states and school districts as independent government entities.

Predictably, State Attorneys General and the organizations representing affected workers, grantees, and others have challenged some orders in court. But the sheer volume of action is making it difficult for the legal challenges to keep up with the proposed changes step-for-step.

If the courts ultimately affirm the primacy of law, we could be launching into years of litigation triggered by all the recent efforts.

Also, as predicted, a few judges have stopped some of the most egregious actions immediately.

One conclusion from observers is that the Trump Administration appears to believe they will persuade the courts to make a transition toward a much more powerful Executive Branch. For example, they hope the courts will overturn a 1974 law that prevented all Presidents since Nixon from unilaterally shutting down programs after Congress authorizes them, through the process of  “impounding” money.

Contained within this broad political and legal strategy are elements that will have direct impacts on the charter school sector and the federal CSP, as well as changes that may indirectly affect charters and authorizing. Other changes, like shuttering USAID, are relevant because they show strategies that may be applied to education later. In the short term, efforts to push out federal employees could create a brain drain at any agency that undermines capacity and diminishes the grantees’ experience.

The chronology linked here provides details and citations for several of the relevant actions, which include:

• Broad efforts to leverage federal money to overturn federal, state, and local district policies that address gender-based discrimination, LGBTQ rights, DEI, and the “ideological indoctrination in K-12 Education;”
• Stopping the CSP grant competitions for State Entity (SE) grants and CMO grants that were previously announced by the Biden Administration, to “reduce needless and burdensome bureaucracy” and to align these grants with the Administration’s desires;
• Directing ED to change all federal discretionary grant programs (like the CSP) to make them “expand education freedom” and to ensure all federal programs align with the Trump Administration’s political agenda; and
• Planning to close the Department of Education.

There are always substantive changes to how the federal government works during a Presidential transition. When a conservative president takes over, we should expect changes in direction. Much more significant than any change in direction is an effort to dismantle the nation’s systems of checks and balances, or to operate outside our structure of laws and regulations. Despite the predictable change from one administration to another, there is simply no precedent for the scale and depth of the intended disruption to the federal governments’ practice like what is being pursued now.

Education and charter schools will eventually be caught up in all this — and probably sooner rather than later.

Alex

Read more here for the Chronology of Education Actions potentially affecting charter schools and authorizing. This edition was updated on 2.7.25 for clarity.