by Kathryn Smith •
January 2025
On January 29, 2025, President Trump issued an executive order that attempts to dictate to students, their parents, and educators what they can read, learn, say, and who they can be. It utilizes inflammatory and dangerous language to bully LGBTQ+ youth and allies who attempt to support them, and attempts to censor fact-based curriculum that teaches about our nation’s history. This order directs the Departments of Education, Defense, and Health and Human Services to work with the Attorney General to develop a strategy within 90 days that includes a plan to eliminate federal funding for K-12 schools that engage in what the order characterizes as “anti-American ideologies,” including education that it says is “based on gender ideology and discriminatory equity ideology.” It also encourages the prosecution of teachers and officials who respect a student’s transition.
This order directs agencies to take necessary administrative action, including promulgating regulations, to implement these directions, but that process will take time. The provisions relating to curriculum censorship do not take immediate effect, although preemptive compliance by law enforcement officials is possible.
“Radical, anti-American ideologies”:
This executive order uses disturbing, inaccurate, inflammatory rhetoric to describe fundamental ways of supporting LGBTQ+ youth (such as addressing a student by their preferred name) and other marginalized students. It calls the concept of gender identity part of a “radical-anti-American ideology” that encourages students to “question whether to view their parents and their reality as enemies to be blamed.” It calls respect for transgender students and curriculum relating to our country’s history of racism ”anti-American, subversive, harmful, and false ideologies.” It falsely implies that educators are “steering” students toward surgery without parental consent or involvement, and states that demanding acquiescence to ‘White Privilege’ or ‘unconscious bias,’ actually promotes racial discrimination and undermines national unity.”
Defining “Discriminatory Equity Ideology,” “Patriotic Education,” and “Social Transition”:
In addition to incorporating the definitions from the Anti-Trans executive order issued on the first day of the President’s term, this order provides new definitions based on very concerning—and often inaccurate—rhetoric:
Operative Provisions:
“Ending Indoctrination Strategy” Report. This order directs the Departments of Education, Defense, and Health and Human Services to work with the Attorney General to develop an “Ending Indoctrination Strategy” within 90 days that must include a plan to eliminate federal funding for K-12 schools that engage in what the order characterizes as anti-American, “illegal and discriminatory treatment and indoctrination[,]” including education that is “based on gender ideology and discriminatory equity ideology[.]” The report is also directed to include:
The order claims to be centered on “protecting parental rights” and relies on the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act and the Protection of Pupil Rights Amendment as well as on Title IX and Title IV: the implementation of this order could therefore have significant implications for agencies’ enforcement of civil rights laws, as well as on their key data collections that ask about concepts like gender identity and race and have informed much of our knowledge on the lives and well-being of LGBTQ+ and other marginalized youth.
Directs the prosecution of teachers and officials who “unlawfully facilitate” a student’s transition. The order directs the Attorney General to work with State Attorneys General and local prosecutors to file appropriate actions (presumably under state criminal law) against K-12 teachers and school officials for:
otherwise “unlawfully facilitating” the social transition of a minor student.
1776 Commission on Promoting Patriotic Education. The order directs the Department of Education to reestablish this commission within 120 days, to be comprised of a team appointed by the President to serve 2 year terms. During the first iteration of the 1776 Commission at the end of President’s Trump’s first term, they released a report that the American Historical Association called “a simplistic interpretation that relies on falsehoods, inaccuracies, omissions and misleading statements”;
Promotion of Patriotic Education. The order directs all relevant agencies to monitor compliance with existing federal law that requires teaching about the U.S. Constitution on September 17, and directs agencies, including the Departments of Education, Defense, and State, to “promote patriotic education,” including in programs like Fulbright.
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