Trump Expands School Choice, Narrows What Schools Can Teach

On Wednesday, President Donald Trump signed a pair of executive orders that could transform public K-12 education in the United States. The first is an order directing federal grants to help fund state-level school choice programs, and the second attempts to ban so-called “radical indoctrination” in K-12 education.

The school choice order directs the secretary of education to issue guidance on how states can use federal formula funds to fund “K-12 educational choice initiatives.” The order also contains provisions to expand school choice opportunities for low-income families, military families, and those eligible for Bureau of Indian Education schools.

“When our public education system fails such a large segment of society, it hinders our national competitiveness and devastates families and communities,” the order reads. “For this reason, more than a dozen States have enacted universal K-12 scholarship programs, allowing families — rather than the government — to choose the best educational setting for their children.”

The second order denies federal funding to K-12 schools that engage in “illegal and discriminatory treatment and indoctrination in K-12 schools, including based on gender ideology and discriminatory equity ideology.” Under examples of this “discriminatory ideology,” the order lists teaching like “members of one race, color, sex, or national origin are morally or inherently superior to members of another race, color, sex, or national origin,” or that “an individual, by virtue of the individual’s race, color, sex, or national origin, is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously.” The order also reinstates the 1776 Commission, a group dedicated to promoting “patriotic education.”

While Trump’s school-choice executive order primarily works to allow states to use federal funds to expand school-choice programs, his order against Critical Race Theory attempts to reshape the ideological tenor of many public school curricula. Governments generally have wide latitude to direct curriculum decisions in public schools, but there’s reason to be cautious of orders like this. Many “divisive concepts” measures, like this executive order, are “so vague that they arguably forbid teaching about slavery or racism at all, even uncontroversial and anodyne statements of historical fact,” warns the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), a First Amendment group.

However, it’s almost certain that the “radical indoctrination” executive order is constitutional. While similar laws have generally not been upheld when they’ve been applied to universities, laws like Florida’s STOP WOKE Act have been allowed to go forward in their applications for K-12 schools. Public university professors have full First Amendment rights, but public K-12 teachers face much stricter limits on academic freedom. 

“Imprinting anti-American, subversive, harmful, and false ideologies on our Nation’s children not only violates longstanding anti-discrimination civil rights law in many cases, but usurps basic parental authority,” reads the order. “Demanding acquiescence to ‘White Privilege’ or ‘unconscious bias,’ actually promotes racial discrimination and undermines national unity.”

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