Trump 2024's Education Plan

Yes, you've seen bits and pieces quoted, And I have misgivings about giving this any more air, but folks laughed Trump off in 2016, and we know where that got us. 

We have to pay attention because 2024 is shaping up to be a year in which GOP candidates compete to see who can beat up public education the worst (and Democrats stand there just kind of tongue-tied). 

So on January 26, Trump released a video manifesto of education, and I'm going to run through the whole thing, because every single point is a radical threat. You can watch it yourself if you want to check my work, but I don't recommend it.

Trump just leaps right in and starts doggy-paddling through a deep vat of nonsense soup

Schools have been taken over by the radical left maniacs. Here is my plan to save American education, restore power to American parents.

First, we will cut federal funding for any school or program pushing critical race theory, gender ideology, or other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content onto our children. We're not going to allow it to happen.

Next I will direct the Department of Justice and Education to open civil rights investigations into any school district that has engaged in race-based discrimination. That includes discrimination against Asian Americans. 

The Marxism being preached in our schools is also totally hostile to Judeo-Christian teachings and in many ways it's resembling an established new religion--can't let that happen--for this reason my administration will aggressively pursue potential violations of the establishment clause and the free exercise clause of the Constitution--that's simple.

It's a little staggering how this all boils down to using the power of the federal government to stamp out things that folks on the right don't like. And he's pulling from lots of grievances floating around the right wing-o-sphere right now, from the schools in Virginia being hammered over a made-up scandal (schools failed to quickly notify students who fell in the fourth tier "commended" category for National Scholarship because, allegedly, those also rans are Asian) but it got traction on Twitter. The whole idea of saying schools teach some kind of secular religion and thereby violate the establishment clause is silly--doubly silly since the Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that free exercise trumps establishment every time, and therefor even if schools were found to be teaching such a religion (violating the non-existent Judeo-Christian tradition), by current reasoning, it would violate teachers free exercise rights to make them stop.

But he has just barely begun to get scary.

Additionally, on day one we will begin to find and remove the radical zealots and Marxists who have infiltrated the Federal Department of Education. And that also includes others--and you know who you are--because we're not going to allow anybody to hurt our children.

Hunt down those guilty of thought crime.

Joe Biden has given these lunatics unchecked power. I will have them fired and escorted from the building and I will tell Congress that any Appropriations bill I sign must reaffirm the President's ability to remove defiant employees from the job. It's all about our children.

Does anybody in the Department of Education have unchecked power? And if so, what exactly have they been doing with it? Well, the unchecked power is supposed to belong to Trump. And I hope we've all learned enough to avoid saying, "Well, Congress wouldn't let him..." because they rolled over for him in 2016, and that was before Congress was packed with insurrectionists.

I will veto the sinister effort to weaponize civics education. We will keep men out of women's sports. And we will create a new credentialling body that will be the gold standard anywhere in the world to certify teachers embrace patriotic values, support our way of life, and understand that their job is not to indoctrinate children, but very simply to educate them.

Pretty sure the effort to weaponize civics is a DeSantis thing. And don't indoctrinate kids--just teach them that our way of life is the One True way and properly patriotic citizens don't think otherwise. But no indoctrination, which is guess is only indoctrination when it goes against Beloved Leader's desires. 

Finally, I will implement massive funding preferences and favorable treatment for all states and school districts that make the following historic reforms in education:

One, abolish teacher tenure for grades K through 12 so we can remove bad teachers and adopt merit pay to reward good teachers we want great teachers in our schools.

Two, drastically cut the bloated number of school administrators, including the costly, divisive, and unnecessary diversity, equity and inclusion bureaucracy. 

Three, adopt a parental bill of rights that includes complete curriculum transparency and a form of universal school choice.

And four, implement the direct election of school principals by the parents. It's all about the parents for their children. More than anyone else, parents know what their children need. If any principal is not getting the job done, the parents should be able to vote to fire them and select someone who will. This will be the ultimate form of local control. Our country has frankly never had anything like it or let's say for at least the last fifty years.

The first three are such pandering baloney. Number four is extra-silly. It is not the ultimate form of local control, because all the local taxpayers who are not parents get no say. Of course, if we gave parents and taxpayers the chance to elect a representative council to handle such matters, like a board, related to the school. Lord, this is such a dumb idea.

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.

When I'm President, we will put parents back in charge and give them the final say. We will get back to teaching reading writing and match called arithmetic and we will give our kids the high quality pro-American education they deserve.

But no indoctrination.

We spend more per pupil than any nation in the world by double. We're going to keep spending the money, but we're now going to get our money's worth. We're at the end of every list on education, and yet we spend the most. We're going to change it around. We may spend the most but we're gonna be tops in education no matter where you go, anywhere in the world. Thank you very much. 

There is a sequel to this--26 more seconds about those teacher credentials.

As part of our new credentialling body for teachers, we will promote positive education about the nuclear family, the roles of mothers and fathers and celebrating rather than erasing the things that make men and women different and unique. I will ask Congress to pass a bill establishing that the only genders recognized by the United States Government are male and female, and they are assigned at birth.

I'm surprised he didn't say "assigned at conception." 

I can remember when conservatives thought government should keep out of peoples' lives; now they don't even support keeping government out of peoples' pants. 

This is some totalitarian "we must all love the fatherland and trust Beloved Leader" shit here, and if you don't think it's scary already, take a stroll through the Youtube comments to see all the people who can't wait to have the country dragged back to the white christianist 1950s of grandpappy's imagination. Parts of this are just boilerplate copied from the actvists already at work, but the parts about rewarding our friends and punishing our enemies, about rooting out and eradicating people who Believe Bad Things are legitimately scary.

Doubly so because none of this has been thought through and so the attempt to turn it into real policy could be so much worse. Triply so because Ron DeSantis may feel the need to up his own totalitarian game to push past Trump. It's still a long way to the primaries, and I'm afraid these are going to be really rough times for public education.