A Utah charter school founder is publicly backing the Trump administration’s drive to pull federal bureaucracy out of classrooms and hand education authority back to the states.
“It is very helpful to return the funding to the states that we already get, but with less regulation on those funds so that I can serve our students’ needs — precisely what they need— instead of maybe what somebody in Washington thought they needed,” said Carolyn Sharette, founder and executive director of American Preparatory Academy (APA), in an interview with Fox News Digital.
Sharette started APA in Utah in 2003. The public charter network has grown to more than 5,000 students across eight Utah campuses.
“We know exactly what our students need here to progress, and so returning the education to the states means we get to use the money in more flexible ways to help our students,” Sharette said.
On Oct. 20, APA’s West Valley City campus hosted the 47th stop on Education Secretary Linda McMahon’s 50-state “Returning Education to the States Tour,” a push to spotlight the administration’s K-12 reform agenda. McMahon delivered a keynote titled “The Next 250: K-12 Education,” calling for shifting authority to local leaders, investing in proven academic interventions, and expanding school choice.
Department of Education officials say more than $3 trillion in federal money has gone into K-12 education in recent decades. Despite that spending, national assessment data shows only about three in 10 students perform at or above proficient levels in math and reading.
Since taking office, McMahon has pledged to work toward dismantling the federal education agency, including installing leaders tasked with phasing out their own divisions — part of President Donald Trump’s broader push on education, which he has also promoted through a White House Rose Garden event on school choice.
“School choice is really profound, actually,” Sharette said. “The role we play because we provide a place for parents to choose a different school if they’d like, and it’s wonderful that they have that option.”
“We provide a school that is a classical school,” Sharette added. “We teach through literature, we teach the science of reading. We’ve always had very high reading scores at our school. So parents who are looking for a rigorous and classical education can choose our school and have that freedom.”
Trump has also said he wants to remove what he calls “far-left extremism” from classrooms, arguing decades of federal oversight have failed to produce results.
To cut red tape, the Department of Education has launched a new waiver process letting state leaders request more flexibility in spending federal funds. Iowa became the first state in the country to join the flexibility initiative.
