Each week during the football season, ESPN’s Dan Graziano pens a column reacting to the prior weekend’s NFL chatter, explaining whether the conventional wisdom is on-point or an overreaction. It’s a terrific device for sorting through a deluge of hot takes. Well, after answering the same questions over and over for reporters this past week, I thought I’d crib from Graziano and address the most common queries about what the election means for federal education.

With that, let’s get into it.

Trump won, so the U.S. Department of Education is going to be abolished. After all, Trump explicitly promised to abolish the department. Republicans have been seeking to do away with the department for 45 years, and their frustration has been supersized by Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona’s malfeasance on FAFSA, tepid response to campus antisemitism, and illegal loan forgiveness schemes. Given that it looks like the GOP is going to control both chambers of Congress, it’s curtains for the department, right?

Verdict: OVERREACTION. It’s not likely to happen. Recall that Republicans had the trifecta during Trump’s first two years in office (after he’d promised in 2016 to abolish the department), and yet it survived. It’s hard to see how you abolish the department without legislation, and the Republicans won’t have the votes. Even with a narrow House majority, they’d get no Democratic votes, and insiders laugh at the idea they could even keep enough Republicans on board. (It’s safe to say they’d lose at least Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins.) Unless Republicans nuke the filibuster, they’d need 60 votes in the Senate, where they’ll have 53 seats. Plus, there’s a contingent of Trump-aligned education conservatives who’d much rather use the department to promote their vision the same way the Obama or Biden teams did. There may be efforts to trim the department or move parts of it, but anything more seems unlikely.

Trump Administration 2.0 will have trouble staffing up, given Trump’s conduct and his split with the GOP establishment. Observers keep noting that Trump burned through White House staff at a frenzied pace last time and has alienated so many with his conduct after losing in 2020. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, for instance, resigned after January 6. And, of course, Trump has cut the traditional GOP establishment out of the loop this time in a way he didn’t in 2016, when Mike Pence was his VP and the President-elect leaned heavily on establishment Republicans like Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell. This time, it’s going to take them a while to find staff, get them confirmed, and get rolling, isn’t it?

Verdict: OVERREACTION. In fact, the opposite is probably closer to the truth. In 2016, nobody really expected Trump to win. His education transition was pretty haphazard. There was a sense among many Republicans that working for a Trump Department of Education was a huge career risk, because it would hurt their prospects with many education employers and with most of the traditional GOP. The bench was thin after eight years out of power, there wasn’t much of a GOP-friendly education ecosystem, nor was there much of a playbook. It took the Republicans a long time to get the Department of Education staffed up and for the agenda to take shape. Plus, a razor-thin Senate majority made confirmation a dogfight. (Readers may remember that DeVos required a second confirmation vote after GOP defections on the first go-round.)

Things are very different this time. The GOP has been remade in Trump’s image. He just claimed the biggest Republican victory since 2004. The education transition operation looks to be running smoothly, and there’s no longer the “Trump hesitation” that was so evident in 2016. Meanwhile, over the past five years, raging battles over school closures, school choice, CRT, SEL, DEI, gender, loan forgiveness, Title IX, and campus antisemitism have led to the emergence of a growing web of right-leaning education groups. There’s a pipeline of savvy potential appointees and a thick playbook of possible policies and executive actions. The 53-seat Senate majority should make confirmations much easier, so it’s a good bet the administration will rapidly install key appointees and hit the ground running.

College presidents should be nervous that their lives are about to get a lot more stressful. It’s been a brutal stretch for college presidents. Concerns about declining enrollment and trust have been joined by public disgust with campus disorder and antisemitism over the past year. One bad House hearing was enough to end the tenure of two Ivy League presidents. Now, the stressors in the halls of academe are about to go to a whole new level. The vice president-elect has termed universities “the enemy.” Trump has promised to dismantle DEI, address antisemitism, bust up the accreditation cartel, and boost the tax on college endowments. It’s going to be a long four years for college presidents.

Verdict: NOT AN OVERREACTION. We’re likely about to see something we’ve never seen before: a Republican Department of Education aggressively and unapologetically exploiting every last bit of its executive authority, just like the department during the Obama or Biden administrations (think “gainful employment” or college loan forgiveness). In the Obama years, Russlynn Ali and Catherine Lhamon used investigations to force colleges to adopt preferred policies, and then they used those settlements to issue guidance that produced sweeping changes in how colleges approached Title IX—leading to the campus kangaroo courts that trampled due process protections and yielded hundreds of court reversals.

Well, there are potential Trump appointees itching to bring that same approach to higher education. They look at the bullying and harassment of Jewish students last year and see a massive failure to protect civil rights. They look at college admissions practices and strongly suspect that some selective colleges are disregarding the Supreme Court’s 2023 Students v. Harvard ruling that race-based admissions are unconstitutional. They see research universities that have endorsed ideological orthodoxies and suspect they’re collecting vast sums in federal funds while violating assurances regarding the protection of free inquiry. They’ve seen evidence that some colleges have collected large sums from foreign nations and then failed to report it in accord with federal statute. College presidents at deep-pocketed, high-profile institutions may want to have their attorneys and lobbyists on speed dial. I should add that community college leaders and, especially, those at nontraditional entities stymied by the accreditation cartel may have a far more pleasant experience.

School choice has been on a winning streak, so we’re going to see some kind of major federal school choice bill. During the first Trump administration, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos was a passionate crusader for choice but couldn’t point to many big wins on the ground. Since 2020, though, the dynamics have fundamentally changed. The pandemic eroded trust in traditional school districts, fed an appetite for options, and introduced millions to new school models. In the past three years, choice advocates have been on a historic run in the states.

Verdict: NOT AN OVERREACTION. That said, it matters how one defines “major federal school choice bill.” Republicans won’t have 60 votes for choice in the Senate, so, again, assuming they don’t nuke the filibuster, they’d need to pass anything through reconciliation (which requires only a bare majority). But it’s not at all clear that the GOP could get 50 votes in the Senate or 218 Republicans in the House to vote for a stand-alone bill, even if Trump leaned in. (Keep in mind that the House vote on voucherizing Title I last year, and it failed, 113–311.) And choice referenda just went down in (deep red) Kentucky, (deep red) Nebraska, and (purple) Colorado. While it’s a mistake to make too much of these results (given big union dollars, some not-great language, and off-key messaging), those losses should not be dismissed—and will be reasonably read by some electeds as evidence that rural America has mixed feelings on choice.

So, what will get done? The likeliest scenario is a substantial tax-credit program (presumably along the lines of the Educational Choice for Children Act) getting folded into next year’s extension of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. The program would allow donors to deduct contributions to scholarship organizations from their federal taxes. A bill which included something like a $5 billion tax credit would be small beans in terms of the budget impact but represent a major win for school choice. That said, it wouldn’t be viewed as a “school choice bill” by anyone except school choice aficionados. It’s worth noting that DeVos wanted to do something similar in 2017 but was handicapped by a skeleton staff and the lack of a clearly developed proposal. This time, there’s an existing bill with a slew of cosponsors and a lot of momentum in the states. (Might a tax credit bill be done solo via reconciliation? Unlikely. Setting aside the voting math, the reconciliation process is a lift—it’s only been used about two dozen times in the half-century it’s existed. I can’t imagine GOP Hill leaders spending the time on a bill this small when it could be tacked onto major tax legislation.) There’s also a good chance that the administration will seek to step up charter school funding and unwind the onerous regulations that the Biden administration imposed on the sector.

Truth is, we’d all be well-served if everyone cooled it a bit on the hot takes. As ever with a presidential transition, those who know the most about what’s going to happen aren’t saying, and those of us who are saying don’t really know. All of this is, at best, a series of educated guesses, and Trump himself remains a mercurial presence. But there’s reason to hope that we won’t just be getting more of the same. And after four years of feckless federal leadership on education, that’s promising in its own right.

Frederick Hess is an executive editor of Education Next and the author of the blog “Old School with Rick Hess.”