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California Hits Back at Trump Move to Censor School Curricula in Blue States [1]

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Date: 2025-01-30

by Mark C. Eades

Donald Trump says he wants to eliminate the U.S. Department of Education and “send education back to the states.” These statements by Trump are echoed in the 2024 Republican platform, which states: “We are going to close the Department of Education in Washington, D.C. and send it back to the States, where it belongs, and let the States run our educational system as it should be run.”

This may be true for red states like Florida and Texas that are run by MAGA Republicans, where teaching content is censored and books are banned to suit right-wing MAGA preferences. It is not true, however, for blue states, where Trump is threatening “to cut federal funding to schools that teach certain topics related to race, sex, gender or politics” that Trump doesn’t like. To this effect, Trump signed an executive order on January 29 aimed at “ending radical indoctrination in K-12 schools” by cutting federal funding to schools that promote “anti-American, subversive, harmful, and false ideologies” including “gender ideology and discriminatory equity ideology.” What “discriminatory” means here, of course, is anything that conservative white Christians don’t like.

When it comes to “states’ rights” and state control of education — as with everything else — Republicans are the biggest hypocrites in the world, and have a double standard for everything. For Republicans, “states’ rights” are only for red states. For Republicans, while it’s perfectly okay for red states to censor teaching content and ban books to suit right-wing MAGA preferences, it is not okay for blue states to run their schools according to the liberal preferences of their Democratic voters.

As Chester E. Finn, Jr. of the Fordham Institute recently observed, there is an inherent contradiction between the Trump GOP’s stated goal of sending education “back to the states” (for red states) and right-wing federal education policies “forcefully deployed to reshape what schools teach” (in blue states).

California, the place Republicans love to hate more than any other place on earth, is likely to be the first target for Trump’s federal education funding cuts. Schools in other blue states will also be in Trump’s crosshairs. California, however, is hitting back in advance: On the same day Trump’s executive order was signed, the following statement was posted by the California Department of Education:

“President Trump signed an executive order today that does nothing but require the Secretary of Education to determine what federal education funds can legally be rescinded as a penalty for teaching curricula that President Trump finds objectionable. “We can give the Trump Administration that answer right now: nothing. It is against federal law for the White House to dictate what educators can and cannot teach by threatening to defund essential public services for students. "School curriculum should not vacillate back and forth depending on the occupant of the White House, which is why federal law already prohibits the federal government from leveraging grants to mandate specific instructional content in schools.”

As I’ve noted in previous posts, California has the largest economy by far of any U.S. state, and provides more federal tax revenue by far than any other state. This includes the federal tax dollars that pay for federal education funding; and it’s not just because California has more people than any other state. Individual California taxpayers, on average, pay more federal income tax than those in most other states, because average incomes are higher in California than in most other states. Tax dollars from California and other wealthy blue states subsidize federal funding for red states.

Federal funding for education, or for anything else, is not a gift from Donald Trump. Donald Trump is not Santa Claus, making a list of which states have been naughty and which have been nice, to decide which states will get federal funding and which will only get lumps of coal in their Christmas stockings. Federal funding to states comes from taxpayers in those states, both red and blue. It’s their money, not Donald Trump’s to give or take away according to his whims.

California has a record of winning federal lawsuits against Trump, including lawsuits over attempts by Trump to deny federal funding to states. If Trump attempts to strip federal funding from schools in blue states, legal action will quickly follow. Even if Trump succeeds in cutting education funding to California, the state would be financially better able to make up for it from in-state sources than red states whose schools are subsidized by California and other wealthy blue states. In either case, if Trump attempts to impose his will on California schools, he will fail.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/1/30/2300106/-California-Hits-Back-at-Trump-Move-to-Censor-School-Curricula-in-Blue-States?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=trending&pm_medium=web

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