Toward the Higher- and Secondary-Ed Alliance!

As the Trump administration swings its wrecking ball toward the institutional bulwarks of American education, bolstering them from within might seem futile. But crises can reveal new sources of strength. If there is a future for higher ed, it’s one that will likely require collaboration between the university’s often arbitrarily separated populations: faculty, staff, and students. There’s another source of academic allyship, though, that has been too often overlooked: teachers of secondary school. The gulf between high school and college educators—particularly in the humanities—would have been well worth bridging even if Trump had never taken office. His success has turned this worthy aim into an existential necessity.

While academics have often been quick to lament their students’ poor preparation for the rigors of college, they have been less eager to learn about the forces that have shaped that preparation. Their absence from those discourses has smoothed the way for secondary ed’s co-optation by two powerful interrelated trends: first, the diminishment of the abstract and open-ended inquiry necessary for humanistic study; and second, the mischaracterization of intrinsically humanistic modes of thought as generic academic skills, as capable of being inculcated by a math class as a history seminar. By largely distancing itself from K-12 education, higher ed has been blinkered to the arrival of these same pernicious trends within its own walls. More, it allowed the promulgators of those trends to define what college is and is for.

The influence of K-12 policy and pedagogy on higher ed can perhaps be seen best in the trickle-up effect of the standards of the Common Core. An Obama-era, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation–funded attempt to create consistent learning expectations for American public-school students, the Common Core continues to exert enormous influence on education today, even where it has been superseded. Though many well-intentioned educators and policymakers participated in its creation, the Gates Foundation’s bias toward assessable skills, mass testing, and “workforce training” virtually ensured that Common Core standards would give short shrift to any academic discipline not grounded in quantitative learning.¹

Consider a bedrock Common Core principle, which has received shockingly little attention in academia: the idea that the humanities have no particular purchase on writing, reading comprehension, or critical thought, at least once basic literacy has taken hold. In the words of the Common Core Standards themselves, “The motivation behind the interdisciplinary approach to literacy … is extensive research establishing the need for college and career ready students to be proficient in reading complex informational text independently in a variety of content areas. Most of the required reading in college and workforce training programs is informational in structure.”²

Dismissed here is not only the idea that humanistic study and literary texts might have practical value. In addition, the Common Core rejects any notion of education for ends other than information comprehension and “workforce training.” Most college professors I know would place skills such as comfort with nuance, complex language, and abstract thinking far above comprehending informational texts in a list of desirable college-bound student traits. The Common Core, however, begs to differ.

Crucially, standards initiatives such as those promulgated by the Common Core and the College Board, another Gates Foundation–funded organization with outsize influence over secondary learning, speak the language of critical thinking and complexity organic to humanistic study. But they do so while reducing those qualities down to generic formulas without any disciplinary specificity, and evacuating them of much meaning in the process. It’s as though the modes of thinking intrinsic to the liberal arts have been fracked: excavated from their pedagogical bedrock; processed into generic, blandly adaptable, quantifiable “skills”; and then injected back into our curricula and institutions, albeit in a barely recognizable state. While promoting their ability to ensure students are soundly prepared for college, the Common Core and the College Board push a vision of education that imagines students primarily as future workers and a captive market. And they have leveraged their widespread perception as neutral nonprofit agents of educational success to ensure that their curricula, assessment systems, and even language are nearly unavoidable in American education.³

No surprise, then, that in higher ed, the humanities fields that have long been under threat often respond to calls for their diminishment by participating in what we might call their own “skillification.” That is, disciplines like English and history have found themselves making the case for their continued existence by speaking the language of pragmatism, career success, and transferability. Missing from this work, however, has been an understanding of how thoroughly many students have already been conditioned to see advanced writing, reading, and critical thought as activities with no particular connection to the humanities or liberal arts: as easily practiced and applied through work with “informational texts” as abstract, literary, and theoretical ones. Countering such notions requires not a case for, say, the English major’s career adaptability, but a robust account of how the thinking nurtured by the humanities is importantly distinct from that which occurs in a business lecture or a chemistry lab.

Today, when the failures of K-12 education are tallied, what tends to get mentioned is not the diminishment of opportunities for rich thought and intellectual exploration at the high school level. Instead, far more attention is reserved for US students’ pretty dismal performance on tests intended to measure early academic performance against the rest of the world’s youth. In 2025, the Common Core’s failure to deliver on its promises is unmissable, but instead of questioning its diminished model of critical thought or its assertions about what constitutes college readiness, states and schools seem eager to chalk those failures up to poor execution rather than faulty assumptions.

Enter the Trump administration’s desire to undo public education as we know it. At a local level, private and charter schools with little oversight or consistency will likely mushroom on the heels of lessened accreditation standards, diminished federal funding, and loose school voucher money. Emboldened by the same forces that have shaped the current administration, proponents of “classical” (read, “conservative”) values and AI-enabled “disruption” are more than ready to step in with their own notions of what learning should look like. Though such schools and programs offer little guarantee of student success, they may find widespread support among parents, who, after all, know only that whatever their child has been learning hasn’t been enough. These schools will doubtlessly have their own notions of what “college and career read[iness]” means, and many of their graduates will arrive on college campuses looking for confirmation of those views. If recent history is any guide, college administrations may well be willing to provide it.⁴

While Trump’s direct attack on academic freedom and funding sources are immediate dangers to the university, equally pernicious are his administration’s attempt to fashion a generation of young people with little preparation for, or interest in, the values and modes of thinking that undergird the liberal arts and advanced study as we know it. This trend, already seeded within contemporary systems of education—geared, as they often are, toward job training, wealth creation, and social capital as much as intellectual endeavor—now needs little encouragement to flourish, with the zeal of an all-too-comfortable invasive species.

The sheer economic heft of American colleges and universities means they are likely to endure. The form that endurance takes is what’s in question. For many young people, a college degree will continue to be desirable. (Indeed today, despite assertions to the contrary, it remains so, stubbornly, particularly among those demographics once excluded from its achievement.) ⁵ The likelier scenario is this: following the trend already established by what Tressie McMillan Cottom has termed “lower ed,” college for all but the most privileged students will simply be evacuated of much meaning beyond a professional certification: obtained through transaction rather than intellectual labor, indicating nothing so much as economic anxiety and deference to an anachronistic notion of scholarly achievement.⁶

Related readings

Reviews

Beyond Rank Ambition: Can Colleges Save Democracy?

Gregory Laski

What, then, is to be done? This might feel like the wrong moment for a stocktaking of past misalliances. But the forming of new bonds to fight new threats requires some understanding of what has been overlooked.

University faculty have participated in their own marginalization: by largely ignoring what has been happening within their own schools of education; by understanding their disciplines in too narrowly institutional terms; and by overvaluing their capacity to initiate students into new modes of thought. Ultimately, just like those who govern secondary schools, university educators have ceded education’s purpose and meaning to others.

How does your institution teach students to become teachers? What does that training look like? What kind of classes must education students take within your department? Might your department reach out to local high schools to offer opportunities for classroom visits, talks, or workshops? Might your professional organizations broaden their conference pedagogy panels to include teachers of high school and education school faculty?

If you haven’t considered such questions before, why is this so? And perhaps more pressingly, what might be lost, if we don’t address them now?