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This week, President Trump signed executive orders that will, among other things, expand school choice, eliminate critical race theory and radical gender ideology, and punish schools that undermine parental rights.
On Wednesday, President Donald Trump signed two executive orders on education that are designed to increase educational freedom and put the classroom focus back on academics.
The first order, “Expanding Educational Freedom and Opportunity for Families,” reads: “It is the policy of my Administration to support parents in choosing and directing the upbringing and education of their children.”
The order cites poor performance in schools across the nation as evidence of the need for school choice.
“Parents want and deserve the best education for their children. But too many children do not thrive in their assigned, government-run K-12 school,” the order says, noting the recent release of this year’s National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), which showed that “70 percent of 8th graders were below proficient in reading, and 72 percent were below proficient in math.”
President Trump’s order states:
“When our public education system fails such a large segment of society, it hinders our national competitiveness and devastates families and communities. 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.”
“These States have highlighted the most promising avenue for education reform: educational choice for families and competition for residentially assigned, government-run public schools. The growing body of rigorous research demonstrates that well-designed education-freedom programs improve student achievement and cause nearby public schools to improve their performance.”
Because of this, Trump has ordered the Secretary of Education to issue guidance on how states can use federal funds to support school choice programs and, in coordination with the Secretary of Labor, submit a plan regarding how to expand educational freedom through discretionary grant programs.
The Secretary of Health and Human Services will also release guidance on how states can use Child Care and Development Block Grant funds to promote school choice.
Trump’s executive order also seeks to end indoctrination in schools, including Critical Race Theory, radical gender ideology, and other non-academic teachings that have infiltrated schools in recent years.
“Parents trust America’s schools to provide their children with a rigorous education and to instill a patriotic admiration for our incredible Nation and the values for which we stand,” the order says. “In recent years, however, parents have witnessed schools indoctrinate their children in radical, anti-American ideologies while deliberately blocking parental oversight…In many cases, innocent children are compelled to adopt identities as either victims or oppressors solely based on their skin color and other immutable characteristics.”
The order also calls out the rampant transgenderism in schools, in which “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. 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.”
The order points out school staff “steering” children toward gender transition without parental notification or consent and allowing males in private spaces intended for females.
The Secretaries of Education, Defense, and Health and Human Services are also instructed to consult with the Attorney General and develop an “Ending Indoctrination Strategy.”
The plan will eliminate federal funding or support for any school that engages in discriminatory treatment and indoctrination based on gender ideology or “discriminatory equity ideology.”
The order seeks to prevent funding from being used by a school to teach ideas such as that one group of people is inherently racist or morally inferior and also stop funding from being used to facilitate social transitions of students. Social transitioning includes using a child’s preferred name and pronouns, treating that child according to their preferred gender, letting them use bathrooms and locker rooms and play on sports team according to their gender identity.
Many schools not only allow this but encourage it and then hide the transition from parents.
The order instructs the Attorney General to file legal action against any school staff engaged in “unlawfully practicing medicine by offering diagnoses and treatment without the requisite license” or “otherwise unlawfully facilitating the social transition of a minor student.”
The order also seeks to promote “patriotic education.”
Trump ordered the reestablishment of the 1776 Commission which will promote knowledge of American history.
This order has been a long time coming, but it is completely necessary to restore America’s education system. Somewhere along the line, public schools and teachers’ unions lost total sight of their mission: to provide a rigorous education in core subjects, prepare children to succeed in the workplace, and help them understand the rights and responsibilities of American citizenship.
But they are failing in every possible way.
The Nation’s Report Card results, released on Wednesday, demonstrate that the need for change is significant.
Reading scores fell at the two grade levels that are routinely tested, fourth grade and eighth grade, and a third of eighth graders are reading at a “below basic” level, the worst in the history of the assessment.
Below basic means that students can’t identify the key ideas of a text, such as what motivates the primary character.
The only states to see progress were Louisiana, whose fourth grade reading scores were higher than in 2019, and Alabama, whose fourth grade math scores were higher.
There is no question that some of this learning loss is due to COVID and use of remote learning, but much of this harm was exacerbated by the fact that many schools remained shuttered long after the lockdowns were lifted because teachers at the behest of teachers’ unions refused to return to work.
National Center for Education Statistics Commissioner Peggy Carr stated that “Overall, student achievement has not returned to prepandemic levels, so the struggle continues. Where there are signs of recovery, they are mostly in math and largely driven by higher-performing students. Lower-performing students are struggling, especially in reading.”
Most media attention has been on the failure to return scores to where they were pre-COVID. But Carr notes that the problem goes beyond the time students spent out of the classroom and the scores “cannot be just blamed on the pandemic.… This is not just a pandemic story.”
Carr said that while “the patterns are not yet evident” why scores continue to remain lower than before COVID, one thing is evident: More money isn’t solving it.
The Department of Education has a budget of $241.66 billion and Congress spent an extra $190 billion on the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund during COVID to prevent learning loss, and yet schools are still failing.
At the state level, New York spends more per pupil than any other state at $36,293 for each student. Despite that spending, New York students’ scores decreased by double the national average.
In their report on New York’s educational spending Citizens’ Budget Commission wrote, “Continuing to shovel more and more money every year to school districts without fundamentally questioning this status quo behavior will not solve this problem. It is well past time for the state to improve student outcomes and ensure that schools’ vast resources meet the needs of students by improving oversight to identify what is not working, fine-tuning interventions to ensure their effectiveness, and holding districts accountable when schools fail to deliver results.”
The problem goes far beyond Covid. These scores are propped up by higher performing students in some districts, as we have reported there are many districts in America where the vast majority of students are failing.
But the problems go far beyond failing academic performance.
The public education system isn’t working for many students. Perhaps that’s in part because schools and bureaucrats are wasting time and money on instructing kids that they are racist or that they should change their gender, instead of properly educating them.
The nation’s largest teachers’ union has made it clear that its priorities are focused on ideological indoctrination rather than educating children. The National Education Association (NEA) scrubbed its website of votes approving the promotion of left-wing ideologies.
One of those votes was to approve funding to publicize “information already available on critical race theory” and to create “a study that critiques empire, white supremacy, anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeneity, racism, patriarchy, cisheteropatriarchy, capitalism, ableism, anthropocentrism, and other forms of power and oppression at the intersections of our society.”
It also scrubbed its website of a proposal that didn’t pass: “putting a renewed emphasis on quality education.”
NEA President Becky Pringle stated that the union functions on three pillars: advocating for education professionals; elevating the teaching profession; and advancing racial and social justice.
That has borne itself out in schools where children have been taught to judge others based on their skin color. White students are told to feel shame and guilt for things they did not do, black students are taught that they cannot succeed in a systemically racist country, and all students are warned to constantly be on the watch for their own unconscious bias.
Schools are also exposing children to gender ideology and sexually explicit books.
Not surprisingly, our nation’s young people are experiencing a rise in mental health issues and absenteeism, and a recent study by the Centers for Disease Control survey found that 3 percent of high school students are transgender, just a part of the drastic increase in youth identifying as LGBT.
Much of this is because schools quit teaching children reading, writing, arithmetic, and civics and started indoctrinating them to be antiracist activists and to change their gender and hide it from their parents.
When students were learning from home during COVID, parents finally saw what their children were actually being taught, and that led to greater parental involvement and a greater desire for educational freedom. Parents can clearly see now that the public school system is failing their children, and they want the ability to send their child to a school that will give their child a better education and a better future.
Whatever the reasons for the failing of the education system, it’s time to fix it. That starts with eliminating ideological indoctrination and creating opportunities for students to go to a good school that fits their needs, regardless of their zip code or income bracket. These executive orders will benefit kids and will protect the rights of parents to direct the education and upbringing of their child.
School choice isn’t just a right, however, it’s a responsibility. Whether they choose public, charter, private or home school, parents must be deeply involved in their child’s education. That means monitoring what their children are learning, meeting with teachers and school officials and holding them accountable, and inculcating in their children a love of learning, self-reliance, critical thinking, and persistence.
If all parents do that, our educational woes will be largely solved and America will be stronger for it.
As seen in this article, many K-12 schools now embrace the secular woke agenda and are hostile to Christian beliefs and parental rights. Fortunately, parents don’t have to settle for this. Liberty University Online Academy is a K-12 program designed to educate your children in the ways of the Lord while preparing them to stand firm in their faith when they graduate. Our flexible online curriculum ensures that your student is trained at your convenience and keeps YOU the ultimate educator of your children.