Former President and current Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump has released a 12-point plan (actually, 8 points, the last of which has 4 sub-points) for revamping and improving our nation’s public education system. He deserves large credit for laying out a specific plan. No one in the Progressive-Democratic Party has been willing to do anything of this specificity, especially including Progressive-Democrat Vice President and Party Presidential candidate Kamala Harris, other than tightly hewing to the teachers union line and denigrating voucher and charter schools.
For all that, much of Trump’s plan will be difficult to achieve. The dozen points, together with my august comments (in italics), are listed below.
- Cut federal funding for any school or program pushing Critical Race Theory, gender ideology, or other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content on our children. These, especially CRT, will be hard to enforce, beyond getting rid of public verbiage on Web sites. Florida provides a good example of how to do this. That’s at the State level, though. South Dakota v Dole will impact the extent to which this can be implemented at the Federal level. That ruling held that while Federal funds could be preferentially withheld, they could not be withheld to a coercive extent.
- Direct the Departments of Justice and Education to open Civil Rights investigations into any school district that has engaged in race-based discrimination, including discrimination against Asian Americans. There need to be sanctions identified, also, though.
- Because the Marxism being taught in schools is aggressively hostile to Judeo-Christian teachings, aggressively pursue potential violations of the Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise Clause of the Constitution. Better would be to enforce teaching Judeo-Christian material alongside.
- Find and remove the radicals who have infiltrated the federal Department of Education, and get Congress to reaffirm the president’s ability to remove recalcitrant employees from the job. The former will be hard to define. The latter needs to be done wholly separately, and Executive Branch-wide, not just in DoEd.
- Veto the sinister effort to weaponize civics education. And teach civics far more than in just a single 8th grade semester.
- Keep men out of women’s sports. In parallel, make a Title IX case, or amend Title IX, to require separate athletic programs for transgender athletes in the same manner that Title IX mandates for men and women sports programs.
- Create a new credentialing body to certify teachers who embrace patriotic values, and understand that their job is not to indoctrinate children, but to educate them. The new credentialing body also needs to emphasize subject matter expertise, not merely “teach how to teach.”
- Implement massive funding preferences and favorable treatment for all states and school districts that make the following historic reforms in education: These are local control matters; see my remark above for how South Dakota v Dole will impact the extent to which “funding preferences” can be implemented. Reward funding, though, will be easier to implement than coercive defunding.
- Abolish teacher tenure for grades K through 12 and adopt Merit Pay.
- Drastically cut number of school administrators, including the “DEI” bureaucracy.
- Adopt a Parental Bill of Rights that includes complete curriculum transparency, and a form of universal school choice.
- Implement the direct election of school principals by the parents, as the ultimate form of local control.
On the whole, this is a plan worth pursuing with all speed.