Irrespective of party, politicians often target and malign education — as author Erika Christakis very capably makes clear — making hay of education’s perceived failings. But, this negative rhetoric ignores what we know to be true: the American public education system, despite some anecdotal problems, despite struggling with mixed financial investments, despite being the frequent target of opportunistic and misinformed politicians, does provide an overall positive benefit to school children and families. And further, educators are not satisfied, educators are not done with attempting to improve.
Education Policy Fights Don’t Focus Enough on Teaching and Learning
Along with other federal departments under the new administration, the U.S. Department of Education has been staffed not by a policy or practice expert, but by an ideologue. And related to what is known about the new Secretary of Education is her advocacy for school choice in the form of vouchers, despite what the most recent research reveals about their ineffectiveness as a school improvement model. But, as this article well demonstrates, governmental education reform efforts are rarely about improving instructional practice, and instead about the more politically-oriented governance. Too often, legislative school reform omits those most informed, and those most affected: the practitioners and students.
Why For-Profit Education Fails
Because of the new leadership at the U.S. Department of Education, educators worry that political ideologies and unproven agendas will be pushed and imposed, 
rather than reforms based on best practice and research. In this article published in The Atlantic, the failures of the for-profit education reform sector are examined.
The Complexity of School Choice as Improvement Model
The Harvard Graduate School of Education‘s online journal Usable Knowledge published an interview with educational economist Joshua Goodman regarding the implications of President Elect Donald Trump’s selection of Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education. Specifically,
The selection (of DeVos) has raised larger questions about who should finance education, how schools should be held accountable, and even how we define the value of a public school system.
A major factor negatively influencing school choice and market pressures as the sole direction of education improvement efforts are the lack of immediacy, where school quality is more difficult to measure than in other areas of the economy, like Goodman’s examples of restaurants and grocery stores.