This article is an analysis.
President Trump signed two executive orders on the evening of Jan. 29: one focusing on gender, race, and American history, and the other directing multiple federal agencies to explore ways to expand access to private school vouchers.
Both orders align with conservative policies that have been gaining traction in the states. The number of children receiving public funds for private education or homeschooling has doubled over the past five years, reaching one million dollars. Additionally, more than 20 states have imposed restrictions on how certain topics are taught in schools. These topics include race, gender, and American history.
One of the executive orders, “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling,” requires that administration officials create plans to cut federal funding from schools that, according to Trump, indoctrinate students on “gender ideology” and “discriminatory equity ideology.”
“Gender ideology” is a reference to an executive order from Trump’s first day in office (“Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government”) that made recognizing only two sexes a federal policy. This order defined “gender ideology” as “the biological category of sex with an ever-shifting concept of self-assessed gender identity,” and the “idea that there is a vast spectrum of genders that are disconnected from one’s sex.”
“Gender ideology is internally inconsistent, in that it diminishes sex as an identifiable or useful category but nevertheless maintains that it is possible for a person to be born in the wrong sexed body,” the Jan. 20 executive order said.
“Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling” also states that federal agencies must ensure that schools or education agencies do not use federal funds to support or fund a minor student’s “social transition” (“the process of adopting a ‘gender identity’ or ‘gender marker’ that differs from a person’s sex”) without parental knowledge or consent. It also prevents schools from concealing a student’s social transition from their parents.
Students, the order states in Section 1, are being “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.”
Spanning 2,400 words, this order aims to prohibit schools from recognizing transgender identities and discussing concepts like structural racism, “white privilege,” and “unconscious bias” by threatening their federal funding.
The second executive order, titled “Expanding Educational Freedom and Opportunity for Families,” recognizes that, instead of the government, parents are the ones who play a fundamental role in directing the upbringing and education of their children. According to Education Week, it aims to redirect federal funds, encouraging parents to enroll their children into private schools, including religious schools, and charter schools. The options for doing that and plans for implementing those options for families starting next fall must be reported back in the coming months by agency heads.
How much impact these new federal orders will have is uncertain, especially in states that haven’t already made similar changes. State and local governments control 90 percent of public education funding, and have full authority over curriculum, testing, teaching methods, and school choice policies. In other words, while the federal government can push for changes, actual implementation depends largely on state and local decisions.
“‘All men are created equal’ should be the cornerstone of our country, yet how far has America come towards achieving this ideal has changed throughout the timeline of the U.S. Where are we now on achieving that dream?” said Clague U.S. History teacher Erin Perry. “These policies only stand to move us further from living up to the principles in the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution.”
Upon the signing of these orders, concerns have been raised regarding how soon funding will be cut from schools.
According to Education Week, many federal agencies — the Defense, Education, and Health and Human Services departments — have been directed to create a strategy with recommendations and a plan to cut federal funding to schools that are considered to be “discriminatory” according to the administration’s definitions of “gender ideology” and “discriminatory equity ideology.”
“When he went to school, when I went to school, and sadly still in many schools across the US, generations of kids have been taught a “sanitized” white-washed version of history so in a way, I understand his why,” Perry said.
The goal is to prevent federal money from supporting schools that promote such ideologies.
“We are all scared,” Perry said. “There is so much going on, and everything is so different. So many things are happening at once, and I think that is on purpose to distract and overwhelm us. It seems there is a lot of angst among the staff, fear, and a lot of unknown. And the unknown is so much harder to process and deal with.”
