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Unlike many other education advocacy groups, the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools stayed publicly silent after the Trump administration announced last month that it was outsourcing key parts of the Education Department.
Privately, though, leaders there were worried — and busy.
In an initial email to supporters, which I obtained, National Alliance CEO Starlee Coleman listed a string of “concerns that are top of mind.” One fear, Coleman wrote, was that Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer, whose department would manage a number of education programs, was too aligned with labor unions.
Coleman soon landed a meeting with Chavez-DeRemer, according to parts of another private email I reviewed. The labor secretary assured Coleman that she is not in league with teachers unions and would support charter schools, according to Coleman’s recounting. “I think we’re going to be fine with this administration,” Coleman told me in an interview this week.
But she is worried about the long-run implications of the move, particularly for the Charter Schools Program, or CSP, a federal startup fund. “I am still extremely concerned about what happens when a Democratic Secretary of Labor has control of the CSP — that won’t be good,” said Coleman in her second email. Charter supporters, she wrote, would have to plan to push the program back to the Education Department or at least out of the Labor Department.
The behind-the-scenes moves from the country’s leading charter school advocacy group offer a window into the current power dynamics in D.C. The Trump administration has prioritized dismantling the Education Department, even if it ruffles feathers of allies in the charter school world. Yet Trump officials moved quickly to address their concerns, at least in part.
“A commitment to choice and education freedom is Administration wide, so parents, families, and advocates have no reason to fear,” Madi Biedermann, spokesperson for the Education Department, said in a statement.
The pushback from advocates of charter schools, which many Republicans support, also underscores just how difficult it will be to get Congress to fully eliminate the Education Department. And it highlights charter schools’ mixed political prospects in the long term as they maintain both skeptics and supporters on the right and the left.
Charter schools are typically not unionized and are often opposed by teachers unions — hence the flurry of concerns from advocates over the move of K-12 education programs to the Department of Labor. “Anyone who truly understands Washington knows that there may not be a cabinet agency more captured by a set of interest groups than the Labor Department is by labor unions,” Vic Klatt, a former Republican Congressional staffer, recently wrote for the Fordham Institute, a pro-charter think tank.
Jed Wallace, who runs a website called CharterFolk, raised a number of questions about the move, too. “What happens when a Labor Secretary, potentially union aligned or even coming directly from labor itself, sits atop the bureaucracy?” he wrote. “This is how a program we have built over decades ends up in the wood chipper.”
For charter school leaders, the dismantling of the Education Department was an unwelcome complication from an administration they hoped would be more supportive of charter schools than the last.
Coleman, who took over as National Alliance CEO last year, is pushing the administration to rewrite rules for the charter startup fund. She’s still optimistic that will happen, but acknowledges the administration is busy dismantling the Education Department. “That’s my worry: that it kind of gets lost in the shuffle,” Coleman said in our interview.
Coleman said that in their meeting, Labor Secretary Chavez-DeRemer emphasized her support for unions of skilled tradespeople, not teachers. In her email, Coleman noted that Chavez-DeRemer had little to say about education before high school. Coleman herself emphasized that schooling is more than just workforce development.
For rank-and-file charter schools leaders and parents the most pressing question is whether the main pots of federal money will be preserved. The charter startup fund consumes a great deal of political oxygen, but represents only a fraction of the federal money that charters receive. That’s also top of mind for Coleman.
“While the announcement didn’t include any indication of program eliminations or consolidations, we shouldn’t rule it out,” she wrote in her initial email. “Today, nearly four million students learn in public charter schools. Many rely on essential funding from the Department of Education.” Compared to district schools, charters receive a slightly larger share of their money from the federal government.
The Trump administration has said that it is simply moving programs not axing them. Separately, though, its budget proposes eliminating a number of education funding sources, including money for teacher training and English language learners.
Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news organization covering public education.
