Ramaswamy’s Education Agenda: A Threat to Ohio’s Public Schools
Vivek Ramaswamy is promoting an extreme, anti-public education agenda straight from the Koch Brothers’ playbook — not Ohio’s students, families, or educators. His plan is funded and driven by billionaire privatizers like Jeff Yass, an out of state pro-voucher megadonor.
Bottom line: Find out the #TruthOnVivek and educate your friends, family, neighbors, and colleagues about how his policies would defund public schools, silence educators, and supercharge ongoing efforts to hand Ohio’s education system over to private interests.
What Ramaswamy Supports
1. Attack and Weaken Educators’ Voices
Calls for eliminating or seriously weakening teachers’ unions at the local and state levels.
Blames public school educators and their unions — not underfunding, overcrowded classrooms, or poverty — for student challenges.
This is the same playbook used to silence educators’ voices on class size, safety, and special education services.
2. Expanded Unaccountable Vouchers for Private Schools and Homeschooling
Pushes what he calls “school choice on steroids”: taxpayer-funded vouchers for any private school or even homeschooling.
That means less funding for neighborhood public schools — especially in working- and middle-class districts — and more public money flowing to unaccountable private entities.
3. Merit Pay / Test Score Pay Schemes
Wants to scrap experience- and degree-based salary structures.
Replaces them with “performance pay” for teachers, principals, administrators, and superintendents.
These schemes are historically biased, based on test scores that fail to measure a student’s true potential, and punish educators serving the highest-need students.
4. Eliminate the U.S. Department of Education
Follows Trump’s plan to abolish the department entirely.
That would gut federal protections for students with disabilities, English learners, and low-income students — and strip away guardrails on discrimination and misuse of funds.
5. Bring Back “Test, Blame, and Punish” Policies
Supports going back to a No Child Left Behind-style system built on high-stakes testing, public shaming of schools, and punitive consequences instead of support.
Backs reinstating Ohio’s Third Grade Reading Guarantee retention requirement, disproportionately harming young readers instead of helping them.
Floats culture-war policies like “teaching bitcoin in schools,” instead of focusing on staffing shortages, mental health, literacy support, and career/tech pathways.
Who’s Really Behind This Agenda? Billionaire Megadonor Jeff Yass
Ramaswamy’s political operation is heavily financed by Jeff Yass, who supplies roughly 60% of the funding for his main Super PAC.
Yass is known nationally for bankrolling universal voucher schemes and attacking anyone — including Republicans — who won’t go all-in on privatizing schools.
These policy proposals are not about helping public schools. They are only about moving public dollars into private pockets.
Additional Billionaire Backers
Ross Stevens and other high-dollar donors are also tied in.
Earlier funding for Ramaswamy’s ventures, including his firm Strive Asset Management, came from Peter Thiel — another billionaire who backs deregulation, union-busting, and privatization.
These relationships raise serious concerns that Ohio education policy would be written to please out-of-state billionaires and not to meet the needs of Ohio’s students, educators, families, and communities.
What This Means for Ohio.
If adopted in Ohio, Ramaswamy’s plan would:
Accelerate privatization: Rapid expansion of vouchers would drain public school funding and push students into private systems with no public accountability.
Weaken or eliminate collective bargaining: Silencing educators makes cutting pay, increasing class sizes, and ignoring student needs easier. This proposal would also destabilize over forty years of labor/management cooperation, returning Ohio to a time of wildcat strikes and discriminatory employment practices.
Strip federal protections: Eliminating the U.S. Department of Education would rip away support for students with disabilities, rural districts, and districts with concentrated poverty.
Bring back test-and-punish: More time on tests, more public “failing school” labels, and fewer resources — the failed No Child Left Behind model all over again.
Give control to billionaire special interests: Policy decisions would be driven by megadonors pushing vouchers and union-busting, not actually helping kids learn in Ohio classrooms.
THE TAKEAWAY.
Learn the #TruthOnVivek. His education platform is not a plan to strengthen Ohio’s public schools. It’s a plan to:
Defund them.
Privatize them.
Silence the people who work in them.
And hand them over to out-of-state billionaires.
Ohio students deserve fully funded and supported public schools regardless of their zip code — not a “school choice on steroids” experiment designed by billionaires.