AMAC Exclusive – By Aaron Flanigan
Last Thursday, former President Donald Trump released a comprehensive policy plan to “save American education” and “restore power to American parents”—one of the first major policy rollouts of his 2024 presidential campaign. The plan, which was outlined in a video posted to Trump’s Truth Social page and in an email sent to the press, follows previous policy proposals concerning the protection of free speech and eliminating drug cartels.
“Our public schools have been taken over by the radical left maniacs,” said Trump. To address this problem, the first component of his plan includes cutting federal funding for schools and programs pushing Critical Race Theory (CRT) and gender ideology on American children—a strategy Trump has promoted in many of his rallies and speeches.
“Next,” Trump continued, “I will direct the Departments of Justice and Education to open civil rights investigations into any school district that has engaged in race-based discrimination.” Trump specifically noted academic discrimination faced by Asian American students, who have been unfairly targeted by so-called “equity” admissions practices at several prominent U.S. high schools.
Trump went on to decry far-left ideologies in classrooms as “hostile to Judeo-Christian teachings,” going so far as to deem the creeds of wokeism as “resembling an established new religion.” As such, Trump went on, “my administration will aggressively pursue potential violations of the Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise Clause of the Constitution.”
The next pillar of Trump’s plan involves a “day one” purging of left-wing bureaucrats who have “infiltrated” the Department of Education. “Joe Biden has given these lunatics unchecked power,” Trump said, before pledging to “have them fired and escorted from the building” and urging Congress to “reaffirm the president’s ability to remove defiant employees from the job.”
The former president also reprised his previously stated call to “keep men out of women’s sports,” and proposed the creation of “a new credentialing body” to “certify teachers who embrace patriotic values, support our way of life, and understand that their job is not to indoctrinate children, but very simply to educate them.”
The final component of Trump’s proposal is a plan to “implement massive funding preferences and favorable treatment for all states and school districts” that prioritize four specific reforms: the abolition of tenure for K-12 teachers, a “drastic” cut to the “bloated number of school administrators” (particularly the so-called “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” bureaucracy), adoption of a “parental bill of rights” that promotes curriculum transparency and universal school choice, and finally, the implementation of “direct election” of school principals by parents. “If any principal is not getting the job done, the parents should be able to vote to fire them and select someone who will,” he said. “This will be the ultimate form of local control.”
Trump concluded: “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 am president, we will put parents back in charge and give them the final say. We will get back to teaching reading, writing, and math” and “we will give our kids the high quality, pro-American education they deserve.”
Trump’s plan is the first of its kind for a concerted conservative education policy at a time when a startlingly high number of American parents are losing faith in the public education system. Though other figures in conservative politics like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis have received media attention for their work on education reform, Trump’s plan is undoubtedly the most bold, specific, and original proposal released by any Republican to date.
As the 2024 Republican primary cycle continues to ramp up, Trump’s would-be contenders will very likely find themselves—and their education policies—standing in the shadow of Trump’s innovative policy plan, which is all but certain to be a political trendsetter among GOP presidential hopefuls. But even more significantly, Trump’s plan provides a roadmap for the next Republican president—whether it’s Trump himself or someone else—to finally reform the corrupt education system, prevent classrooms from becoming left-wing indoctrination chambers, and form America’s youth into the next generation of educated and patriotic leaders.
Aaron Flanigan is the pen name of a writer in Washington, D.C.
