‘Their Kind of Indoctrination’

Donald Trump and his supporters have hardly been shy about his ambitions for education. They can be found laid out concisely in three documents: the Republican Party’s brief platform for his presidential campaign, known as Agenda 47; the Heritage Foundation’s Mandate for Leadership publication, a sprawling, group-authored right-wing policy plan better known as Project 2025; and the agenda of the America First Policy Institute (AFPI), a think tank with close ties to Trump’s transition team. The texts differ in length and detail, but they have some common themes. Agenda 47 and Project 2025 propose the same steps for overhauling the education system: abolish the Department of Education, which transmits funds to states for federal programs and defends the civil rights of students; redirect federal funds to the states for subsidizing tuition at any schools that parents choose, including religious ones, demolishing the separation between church and state; and purge regulations that recognize the existence of nonbinary and transgender students. 

The vision hardly ends there. Head Start—the federal program that supports low-income preschoolers by funding programs where they learn social and academic skills, eat nutritious meals, and get regular health screening—is located not in the Department of Education but in the Department of Health and Human Services. Project 2025, however, would eradicate it, too, along with the office that supervises it. (“At the very least,” it adds, “the program’s Covid-19 vaccine and mask requirements should be rescinded.”) Trump, for his part, promised during his first term to reduce the threat of school shootings by allowing trained teachers to carry concealed weapons; in the past year he has vowed to restore the right to pray in public schools—indeed to “champion” such prayer as a “fundamental right”—and create “a credentialing body to certify teachers who embrace patriotic values and support the American Way of Life.” One can only imagine the opprobrium that will be visited upon teachers who are not certified as patriots. 

These goals are not all easily achievable. Republicans would need sixty votes in the Senate to abolish the Department of Education; they have fifty-three senators. No Democrat will vote to eliminate the department, and some Republicans might join them. But even if Trump’s administration stops short of fulfilling that ambition, his appointees could inflict serious damage not only on the department but on American education writ large—and empower some of the country’s most passionate right-wing activists in the process. 

In Trump’s first term he gave the position of Secretary of Education to the billionaire Betsy DeVos, who had by then spent decades and many millions of dollars advocating for the diversion of public dollars to private schools, especially religious schools. (She continues to finance the campaigns of state legislators who share her enthusiasm for charter schools and vouchers.) Now he has chosen another billionaire for the role, the entrepreneur Linda McMahon, who built her fortune in the wrestling-entertainment industry and served in his first term as administrator of the Small Business Administration until she stepped down in 2019. After Trump lost the 2020 election, McMahon helped found the AFPI, which advocates, among much else, for school choice and patriotic history against the “racially divisive policies and theories” that “are indoctrinating America’s youth with an anti-American ideology.” 

The AFPI is affiliated with the so-called parental rights movement, a loose association of right-wing activists who originally organized in opposition to pandemic measures such as mask mandates and school closings. As those issues faded, the movement redirected its energies to the cause of pressuring schools to remove books about racism and sexuality from their curricula and libraries. The largest of these “parental rights” groups, Moms for Liberty, originated in Florida with the encouragement of Governor Ron DeSantis and now claims more than 100,000 members across the country. The group has had quick success influencing government, starting in its home state, which in 2022 passed legislation designed to prevent teaching about sexuality, gender identity, or the history of racism. One of those laws, widely known as “Don’t Say Gay,” is officially called the Parental Rights in Education Act. Trump spoke at both of Moms for Liberty’s two most recent national conventions; when news broke of McMahon’s appointment, the group congratulated her on social media for planning “to work in service of American parents and their children.”

The AFPI’s statements offer some insight into what the parental rights movement thinks is ailing the country’s education system. “Education activists,” it asserts, “have sought to introduce factually inaccurate and damaging teachings into our Nation’s schools” and worked to wall off their handiwork from public scrutiny. Full transparency, the group claims, would reveal that “many children are being taught to see white supremacy everywhere, indoctrinated to believe America’s foundation was built on racism, talked to about sex and gender identity in developmentally inappropriate ways, and presented with other questionable curriculum.” If parents only knew what was happening, they would fight against it—but “teachers’ unions and the ACLU have fought viciously against increased transparency measures.” The AFPI therefore demands that every parent be given the right to “see all curriculum materials in every class their child attends.” Its proponents never explain what should happen when parents disagree about what should be included or excluded.

It’s not exactly indoctrination that bothers these parents: many of them, after all, want public money to pay for tuition at religious schools, whose very purpose is indoctrination. They want their kind of indoctrination. When the AFPI says that it wants “honest teaching about America’s history in our schools, not a political agenda,” it means insulating children from shameful aspects of their country’s past like lynchings, targeted murders of civil rights workers, segregation, unequal justice, and the denial of voting rights. (The group’s prime example of “radical political advocacy masquerading as ‘journalism’” is The 1619 Project, led by Nikole Hannah-Jones and published by The New York Times, which put Black experience at the center of US history, and which a number of schools have adopted into their curricula.) “Instead of promoting inaccurate and unpatriotic concepts,” the institute’s policy agenda declares, “our schools should teach the true story about our Nation’s incredible yet imperfect history.” 

The AFPI feels certain that “accurate” history will produce “patriotic” citizens. If students learn “the true story” about our nation’s founding, the group suggests, they “will be proud to be Americans and will have a greater appreciation for their freedoms and the importance of defending them.” Trump, for his part, seems to agree that the less American citizens know about the country’s past, the more patriotic they will be. One of his last acts as president in 2020 was to create a “1776 Commission” charged with writing a “patriotic curriculum” in direct response to The 1619 Project. One of President Biden’s first acts on his first day as president was to terminate it.  

Even if Trump’s administration fails to eliminate the Department of Education, he will surely fill it with staffers aligned with the values of the AFPI and the Heritage Foundation. Under Trump, we can expect to see the department’s office of civil rights vigorously investigate districts for discriminating against white and male students, for stressing diversity, equality, and inclusion policies, for allowing transgender students to compete in sports—even chess, dancing, and darts—that align with their gender identity, or for otherwise recognizing trans students or staff in any way. On the other hand, we can expect it to ignore complaints about districts that punish students of color disproportionately, or fail to comply with federal laws protecting the rights of students with disabilities, or fail to treat men and women equally, or fail to provide effective bilingual programs, or discriminate against gay and trans students. All this will, in the aggregate, have a chilling effect on teachers committed to treating their students equally and teaching their subjects in objective terms. 

One rationale for public schools has long been that students benefit from learning alongside classmates from different backgrounds. The commingling of children of varied religions, ethnicities, and races, it was long believed, would shape a shared American culture. But this is precisely what the parents’ rights movement rejects. They implicitly prefer a culture that is white and Christian, the traditional story of great white men that predominated a generation ago, and they want to encourage legislators to let parents use public funds to pay for private schools that align with their beliefs. To that end the movement has been pursuing a still more ambitious goal than preventing schools from teaching “inaccurate and unpatriotic” material: taking education out of the hands of the federal and state government altogether and returning it to the family and the church, as it was in colonial times. 

On both these counts, Trump has been willing to oblige. Agenda 47 promises that Trump will “restore parental rights” by empowering parents 

to inspect professional development materials, to be notified before an out-of-school guest speaks in class or at a school event, to review the budget and spending of their children’s school…to consent to all student surveys related to health, to have the right to opt out of school healthcare services, and to be immediately notified if a teacher or other school employee has worked to change their children’s name, pronouns, or understanding of his or her gender. 

As if that last item were insufficient, he also promises both to “immediately reverse Joe Biden’s barbaric ‘gender-affirming care’ policies” and to “sign an executive order instructing every federal agency, including the Department of Education, to cease all programs that promote the concept of sex and gender transition, at any age.” The GOP platform proposes to enforce these safeguards on “parental rights” by cutting federal funding for public schools that promote “critical race theory, radical gender ideology, and other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content.”

And yet Trump’s agenda would also, still more radically, turn federal funding over to the states and eventually over to parents directly, leaving fewer resources than ever for public schools no matter what their curriculum. The federal government supplies only about 10 percent of public schools’ budgets, but to lose that much funding would be devastating. It would inevitably force schools to fire staff, reduce the curriculum, and raise class sizes. No one who endorses this radical education agenda, to my knowledge, has tried to explain the contradiction at its center: federal funding is to be used as leverage over public schools that teach “inappropriate” subjects, but also handed over to states and localities for parents to dispense in any way they like, hollowing out public schools regardless of their stance on gender, American history, or anything else.

To achieve that goal, Trump’s supporters have proposed turning large funding streams into “block grants” for states to disburse as they wish with no strings attached, ideally for vouchers freely available to every family, regardless of income. The two biggest federal programs that would devolve to the states in Project 2025’s vision are Title I, which distributes money to schools based on the percentage of students in poverty, and IDEA (Individuals with Disabilities Education Act), which funds the education of students with disabilities. After ten years the federal funding would end. Then the full cost of education would be borne by the states and parents.

Title I was the heart of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, passed under President Lyndon B. Johnson; its purpose was to give rich and poor districts more equitable access to resources and improve educational opportunity. It pays for reading and math enrichment services, after-school programs, teacher training, or whatever else the districts need. If that funding goes away, the states and districts that will lose the most are in the south and in rural areas, where poverty is greatest—and where voters turned out heavily for Trump. 

Project 2025 asserts that the dramatic expansion of choice will improve students’ academic performance, but there is no evidence to support that claim. Voucher programs have been in place for more than three decades, and they have not produced academic gains for students who use public money to transfer from public to private schools; recent studies of vouchers in Louisiana, Washington D.C., Indiana, and Ohio consistently show that, if anything, such students often lose ground academically. The reasons for this are practical. Most participating states hand out vouchers worth less than $10,000, hardly enough to pay tuition at elite private schools. Even if it were, such schools would be unlikely to accept students with poor academic records. Public school students who take vouchers are therefore likely to enroll in religious schools or low-cost private schools with lower standards and uncertified staff. 

Most voucher money, in any case, currently subsidizes students who are already enrolled in private and religious schools. These are families who might like to have their tuition subsidized but can already afford to pay it. State voucher programs, in other words, end up funding well-to-do students while ignoring the needs of the public schools where most students are enrolled. Think of it as welfare for the affluent.

As a national example of the benefits of choice, the authors of Project 2025 turn to Arizona, which offers universal vouchers under the euphemistic name of “Empowerment Scholarship Accounts.” When the state enacted its first voucher program in 2011, it was limited to students with disabilities. Then, step by step, the Republican-controlled legislature expanded eligibility to students enrolled in a school with a D or F from the state, children of active-duty military servicemembers, children who are wards of a juvenile court or adopted or in permanent guardianship, siblings of a student who had previously received a voucher, children who live on an Indian reservation, and children of legally blind or deaf parents. Ultimately the legislature passed a bill in 2017 to make vouchers universally available to all students, not only for private schools but also for homeschooling and extracurricular programs. A year later a grassroots group of education activists called Save Our Schools Arizona gathered enough signatures to put a referendum on the ballot; voters rejected the expansion by 65 to 35 percent. 

Despite that overwhelming rejection of universal vouchers, in 2022 the legislature again expanded the program so that any student could get a voucher regardless of family income. The previous year, according to a report from the Learning Policy Institute, 12,127 of the state’s 1.3 million students had used vouchers to attend nonpublic schools. In the first year of universal choice that number grew by more than 400 percent, to 61,689. The money goes to the parents, who have considerable latitude in spending it. The state has allowed them to use the funds on trampolines, ski passes, ninja warrior training, climbing gyms, martial arts training, Lego sets, golf equipment, a $4,000 piano, and a wide variety of other fun activities. 

Seventy-one percent of the students who started taking vouchers after the expansion had never attended public schools. The state, in other words, had not previously been responsible for their tuition. It is not hard to see why the voucher movement in Arizona has been funded over the years not just by DeVos—who seems to believe in vouchers mainly to support religious schools—but also by secular libertarians like Charles Koch and, before his death in 2019, Charles’s brother David, whose priorities have lain in shrinking the public sector. Republicans must also have realized that they could gain adherents among affluent families by offering them subsidies for their children’s tuition at private schools. 

The results of these priorities are clear. In the first year of universal vouchers, Arizona had a budget shortfall of $1.4 billion, a significant part of which was incurred by the private-school tuition of kids who had never attended public schools. As of last year it ranks forty-eighth in the country in per-pupil public school funding. Public schools in low-income areas of the state have some of the largest class sizes in the US. The program, meanwhile, offers little accountability for quality or results. Arizona can’t track the academic progress of students who use vouchers, because their schools are not required to give state tests. Voucher schools in the state need no accreditation, their teachers do not need to be certified, and they can ignore state standards even as they collect state funding. 

Trump’s plan to take the Arizona model national does not restore a lost tradition; it will not “make American education great again.” In fact, it departs radically from the very past its adherents romanticize. Public schools are a quintessential element of American democracy. In the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which established the rules for laying out new towns, one plot of land was set aside in every township for a public school. None was reserved for religious schools: the Founders had studied European history, with its long record of religious wars, and they made clear in the First Amendment to the Constitution that, although religious freedom was protected, the state should not underwrite religion. But Trump clearly does not know much about American history, and he seems to believe too much knowledge is dangerous. “I love the poorly educated,” he famously said in 2016. His plans for his second term guarantee that there will be more of them to love.