Political eras change slowly, then all at once. This week’s midterm elections marked the start of the “all at once” phase.
The midterm election was a seismic event, creating one of the biggest political shifts in at least a decade—and arguably many more. The facts speak for themselves: the largest vote margin in the House in 50 years, Mississippi potentially becoming a swing state, Hispanic and young voters swinging toward Democrats by roughly 30 percentage points and five governorships and 11 state legislative chambers flipping to Democrats. The list goes on. The scale and breadth of these results suggest that Trump’s coalition is fragmenting and the prior political era may be ending.
At Education First, we care deeply about our public education system, and this election creates a new landscape for policy—education included. Few candidates ran on education this year. Yet the governors, legislators and members of Congress elected this week will make consequential decisions about school funding, standards and accountability for years to come.
Education leaders need to understand how important, rare and fleeting moments of change like this are. They need to seize this moment to lay the groundwork for a better era of education policy.
The next two years–from now until the 2028 presidential election–will define the next era of policymaking. Unfortunately, neither party has made a clear case for what education should look like going forward.
The Democrats’ newly elected cohort of leaders represents a range of ideologies, from Democratic Socialists to former Republican pastors—virtually none of whom made education a central part of their campaigns.
On the Republican side, Trump has purged his party of dissenters for years, but now enters the lame duck period of his presidency with historically low popularity and depleted political capital. His education policies, largely drawn from Project 2025, have focused on “culture war” battles and dismantling the Department of Education. It remains to be seen whether his Republican successors adopt or change these ideas.
This is an opportunity, not a guarantee. This election shakes up the political map and changes the balance of power. But it doesn’t ensure that any specific change or coalition will form. We could be entering a new political equilibrium–or a period of continuous rejection of incumbents, leading to volatile oscillations between left and right. Education leaders therefore need to treat the next two years as a unique opportunity to cultivate the ideas and coalitions that will define our next political era.
The new ideas that will be debated by presidential candidates over the next two years will almost certainly come from policies pioneered, replicated and scaled by states.
The decentralized governance structure of education policy in America means that states have always been the primary drivers of education policymaking, even when the federal government claims to be “bringing education back to the states.”
But states become even more important when our country needs new policy ideas. States have long been America’s “laboratories of democracy,” using innovation and experimentation to identify promising policy ideas. In education, ideas ranging from charter schools to accountability to high-quality curricula all came from states. These state laboratories now need to get busy. There is a new cohort of state policymakers taking the reins, including 21 new governors and well over 1,000 new state legislators. These new state leaders should be bold and creative.
To start off the conversation, here are four areas of policymaking that education policymakers should consider:
There is a temptation for the Democrats coming into power to use their mandate to bring back previous ideas. That would be a mistake. An election of this scale should not be about returning to a prior era, but rather building a new one. Americans did not vote for a pendulum; they voted for progress.
Both parties have led major education efforts at both the state and national levels, and the best education successes—from the No Child Left Behind Act to the Mississippi Miracle—have historically been bipartisan. Going forward, policymakers must focus on what works rather than campaign rhetoric. That means prioritizing evidence-based literacy and math instruction, robust career pathways and real accountability. Democrats should work with Republicans–including in the states where Democrats no longer need Republican votes to pass legislation–to follow the evidence and find areas of agreement. The response to the partisan excesses of the last decade should not be partisan excesses in the opposite direction.
So what should the next era of education policy look like?
We recommend one overarching idea: education policies should be bipartisan, pragmatic, evidence-based and student-centered. We should look at our education challenges with fresh eyes, and be willing to adopt ideas that may not have fit into our previous partisan ideologies. If we’re doing this right, policymaking should feel both exciting and uncomfortable.
The policy window is now open, but it will not stay open for long.
The ballots cast this week were for the future world that our children will live in. Those children can’t afford to wait, so neither can education leaders.
Click here to learn more about Education First’s policy analysis under the Trump administration.
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