Donald Trump is coming out with a new education policy plan—minus the education or the plan—and it … looks a little desperate. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is out here actually implementing racist and anti-LGBTQ education policies, and Trump is left in his wake, trying to soak up some credit for being hateful. Not that being hateful is any difficulty for Trump.
Trump’s education plan, as reported by Politico, is basically a word salad of far-right obsessions. He’s going to cut federal funding to any school that includes “critical race theory, gender ideology, or other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content.” He’s going to “keep men out of women’s sports.”
Wrapping the culture war rhetoric together with the longstanding Republican desire to make it easier to fire teachers, Trump says, in a video released to Politico along with the plan, “As the saying goes, personnel is policy and at the end of the day if we have pink-haired communists teaching our kids we have a major problem.” Translation: the end of teacher tenure, which gives teachers some protection against a single angry parent ending their careers, plus what sounds like a commitment to hiring discrimination. He’d give “funding preferences and favorable treatment” to school districts that abolish teacher tenure, and establish a certification program for teachers who “embrace patriotic values.” Trump also wants school principal to be an elected position.
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In short, it’s a plan to fill schools with the Trumpiest possible teachers and administrators while chasing out anyone who teaches anything inconvenient to Republicans, however much it may be based in fact. Take the part about cutting federal funding to schools that teach “critical race theory, gender ideology, or other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content.” As has been extensively documented, K-12 schools do not actually teach critical race theory, which is a graduate-level legal theory. Some K-12 schools do teach that racism is structural or give attention to how racism has been written into laws in U.S. history, ideas expanded and deepened by critical race theorists, but not the thing itself, and also: true.
And “gender ideology”? All of it? Because when Donald Trump said of his parenting approach that “I won't do anything to take care of them. I'll supply funds and she'll take care of the kids. It's not like I'm gonna be walking the kids down Central Park,” that was most definitely gender ideology. Separate bathrooms for boys and girls? Also gender ideology. The idea that male people should not wear skirts or dresses? Definitely gender ideology.
Of course Trump doesn’t mean gender ideology, he means gender ideology that is visible to him as ideology and that he doesn’t like. That’s different.
”Inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content"? I think we can all translate that. A teacher talking about their opposite-sex marriage is appropriate. A teacher talking about their same-sex marriage is inappropriate. Teaching that racism is not entirely in the past is inappropriate. Schools disciplining Black kids harshly for things that white kids routinely get away with is appropriate. And so on.
Donald Trump does not care about education. What he cares about is political advantage. This “plan” is a sign that he is a little scared of Ron DeSantis, and trying to get the upper hand. But the people harmed by this kind of vicious rhetoric are harmed just the same, whatever Trump’s reasons for spreading it. The danger that any Republican president would pose to public education and the teaching of U.S. history and literature and the treatment of Black and brown and LGBTQ kids and teachers in schools is very real.
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Listen to the latest episode of The Downballot for an in-depth analysis of the 2024 Arizona Senate race and the implications of Kyrsten Sinema's re-election decision. Special guest Victoria McGroary, the Executive Director of BOLD PAC, will also discuss the efforts to prevent losses among Hispanic voters and the fight against disinformation in Spanish language media.
