Their Kind of Indoctrination
By Diane Ravitch for the NY Review of Books
Diane Ravitch is a historian of education, an educational policy analyst, and a research professor at New York University’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. Previously, she was a U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education under President George W. Bush.
For a range of far-right activists, Trump’s second term will be a chance to discipline public schools—and ultimately defund them.
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 (“At the very least,” it adds, “the program’s Covid-19 vaccine and mask requirements should be rescinded.”)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.
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