Trump wants education to become indoctrination, and the Democratic Party isn’t fighting back. But we can.
By Jesse Hagopian, Truthout
President Donald Trump is waging an all-out assault on education by issuing executive orders designed to privatize schooling, attack immigrant and transgender students, prohibit solidarity with Palestine, chill dissent on college campuses and censor discussions of race, gender, sexuality and systemic oppression in schools.
One of his latest orders, misnamed Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling, threatens federal funding for schools that teach truthfully about Black, Indigenous, and people of color’s history or structural inequality, while also banning discussions of gender identity. These actions are about indoctrinating young people with what I call “uncritical race theory” — an ideology that denies systemic racism, either dismissing it altogether or reducing it to nothing more than isolated individual bias.
As if this wasn’t enough, Trump is preparing to escalate his assault on education by issuing an executive order to abolish the Department of Education (DOE). While only Congress has the legal authority to completely end the DOE, The Washington Post reports that Trump’s order “directs the agency to begin to diminish itself. …The new administration has been trying to reduce the workforce by putting scores of employees on administrative leave and pressuring staff to voluntarily quit.”
Let’s call this move what it is: an extremist power grab designed to dismantle public schools and enforce ideological conformity. If successful, this order would gut $18.4 billion in Title I funding, which provides crucial support to high-poverty schools, and strip $15.5 billion from disability education under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), leaving millions of students without legally required accommodations. The Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, which protects students from racial, gender and disability discrimination, would be hollowed out, further fueling the school-to-prison pipeline and allowing systemic inequities to go unchecked. And Trump’s attack on the DOE isn’t just about K-12 education — it also threatens the federal student loan system, throwing $1.6 trillion in student debt into chaos and potentially stripping away protections that prevent borrowers from being preyed upon by private lenders. This isn’t about “local control” or efficiency; it’s a direct attack on public education, paving the way for corporate profiteering and right-wing ideological supremacy.
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