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Trump’s War on K-12 Education [1]
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Date: 2025-02-09
In the name of “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling,” the Trump administration will use federal funding to impose its MAGA ideology on American children. In an Executive Order issued by the White House, Trump and his surrogates are accusing public schools of indoctrinating “children in radical, anti-American ideologies while deliberately blocking parental oversight,” forcing students to “accept these ideologies without question or critical examination” and compelling them to adopt “identities as either victims or oppressors solely based on their skin color and other immutable characteristics.” Worse, “young men and women are made to question whether they were born in the wrong body and whether to view their parents and their reality as enemies to be blamed.” Without any evidence that this is taking place, the MAGA ideology declares that “These practices not only erode critical thinking but also sow division, confusion, and distrust, which undermine the very foundations of personal identity and family unity.”
Public schools and teachers do not do any of these things. As a university-based social studies teacher educator, my colleagues and I stress with prospective teachers that our responsibility is to prepare students to become active citizens in a democratic society. This requires them to become critical thinkers who can evaluate ideas from different perspectives and formulate their own opinions supported by evidence. Goals Trump, MAGA, and Project 2025 want to block.
According to MAGA indoctrination parents trust American schools “to instill a patriotic admiration for our incredible Nation and the values for which we stand,” but they are witnessing schools “Imprinting anti-American, subversive, harmful, and false ideologies on our Nation’s children” such as “demanding acquiescence to ‘White Privilege’ or ‘unconscious bias” that promote “racial discrimination and undermines national unity,” practices that violate “longstanding anti-discrimination civil rights law” and usurp “basic parental authority.” Schools are supposedly “steering students toward surgical and chemical mutilation without parental consent or involvement or allowing males access to private spaces designated for females.”
Public schools can be denied federal funds if they don’t promote “patriotic education” focusing on “an accurate, honest, unifying, inspiring, and ennobling characterization of America’s founding and foundational principles;” explaining “how the United States has admirably grown closer to its noble principles throughout its history;” and the “celebration of America’s greatness and history.” To assist in this process, Trump will reestablish the discredited 1776 Commission.
Expect State Education Departments and school districts, intimidated by the threat to lose federal funds, to closely monitor teachers to ensure they are not appearing to violate Trump guidelines. Are teachers referring to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America or as some Congressional Republicans want, the West Bank in Palestine as Judea and Samaria? Newly empowered MAGA supporters will also become thought police, reporting teachers and schools for anything they do not agree with. New teachers will be at the greatest risk of the educational inquisition.
The problem for teachers is that there are many dark chapters in the history of the United States and as students evaluate the “noble principles” of the United States they need to take these into account. There was a system of brutal chattel slavery that denied the humanity of enslaved Africans until it ended after a bloody civil war and for one hundred years after the end of slavery much of the country practiced Jim Crow segregation. Studying about Harriet Tubman, Rosa Parks, and Martin Luther King, even Abraham Lincoln, make no sense unless teachers include the conditions that they were addressing. Will it be illegal to have students read Frederick Douglass’ 1852 speech, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” or view news clips of Birmingham, Alabama police assaulting students with dogs and high-pressure fire hoses in 1963? In English classes will students be able to read the poetry of Langston Hughes and Claude McKay? Will teachers be punished for what they learned in their university classes?
In the United States past Native Americans were removed from their homelands and relocated onto reservations. They were subject to massacres and had their children forcibly assimilated at boarding schools. Women in the United States were legally considered the wards of their fathers and husbands and in many parts of the country could not vote for over 120 years after the nation’s founding. Nativist battled against immigration and succeeded in severely restricting it with discriminatory quotas from the 1920s until the 1960s. European Jews were blocked from entering the country even as antisemitic Nazi assaults escalated in the 1930s. Red scares after World War I and World War 2 silenced political opposition. For much of the 20th century the United States was an imperialist power, and for good or bad it continues to use its military and financial might to dictate policies to other countries. It is still the only country to have used nuclear weapons against another nation. Will any of this remain in the curriculum?
Trump ordered the Secretary of Education, the Secretary of Defense, and the Secretary of Health and Human Services, in consultation with the Attorney General” within ninety days to “provide an Ending Indoctrination Strategy to the President” that would include “eliminating Federal funding or support for illegal and discriminatory treatment and indoctrination in K-12 schools, including based on gender ideology and discriminatory equity ideology. This explains why one of Trump’s first actions was to fire federal agency watchdogs. He wants them replaced by syncopates who will conduct investigations, threaten school districts, and enforce MAGA ideology.
During his 2024 Presidential election campaign, Donald Trump claimed to be unfamiliar with the rightwing Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 blueprint for education in the United States. Not surprisingly, these Trump actions are straight out of the Project 2025 playbook.
Educational officials in New York State announced they would resist efforts by the federal government to impose curriculum guidelines, but it is uncertain how long they will resist if the Trump administration continues with its threat to withdraw much needed federal dollars. School districts currently receive about 10% of their operating funds from the Federal government. If states and school districts self-censor, Trump won’t even have to act
You can follow Alan Singer on Bluesky @zaydealan.bsky.social
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