Educators Express Concerns Over Trump’s K-12 Learning Order. The U.S. Department of Education has provided colleges and schools with race-specific programs—including financial aid and racially themed dorm floors and graduation ceremonies—until the end of the month to eliminate them or risk losing funding as educators rushed over the holiday weekend to understand the sweeping scope of new guidelines. If you’d like to know more about Trump’s K-12 learning order and what the views of educators about this plan are in detail, please keep reading the article below.
Educators Express Concerns Over Trump’s K-12 Learning Order
Some educators, such as the Michigan Education Association and the state’s superintendent of public instructions, have expressed their concerns over President Donald Trump’s executive order “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling.” The order was released on January 29, 2025, on the official website of the White House. The press secretary of the MEA, Thomas Morgan, said, “The press secretary of the MEA, the state’s largest union of teachers and other school personnel. According to Trump, the main objective of this order is to guarantee that recipients of federal education funds follow laws that forbid discrimination and safeguard parental rights.
Trump’s order says, “Parents trust America’s schools to provide their children with a rigorous education and to instill a patriotic admiration for our incredible nation and the values for which we stand. In recent years, however, parents have witnessed schools indoctrinate their children in radical, anti-American ideologies while deliberately blocking parental oversight. Such an environment operates as an echo chamber, in which students are forced to accept these ideologies without question or critical examination.”
According to Morgan, these claims are nothing but political attacks against educators and are part of a coordinated plan to divide parents and teachers. He said, “Playing divide and conquer might be an effect of politics, but it does harm our children.”
The guidelines, signed by acting assistant secretary for civil rights Craig Trainor, said schools using “race in decisions pertaining to admissions, hiring, promotion, compensation, financial aid, scholarships, prizes, administrative support, discipline, housing, graduation ceremonies, and all other aspects of student, academic, and campus life” were in violation of anti-discrimination laws and legal precedent set in the high court’s affirmative action case.
The order stated, “The definitions in the Executive Order ‘Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government’ (January 20, 2025) shall apply to this order.” The discriminatory equity ideology has been defined by the order as “an ideology that treats individuals as members of preferred or disfavored groups, rather than as individuals, and minimizes agency, merit, and capability in favor of immoral generalizations.” The order lists “white privilege” and “unconscious bias” as examples of discriminatory ideologies.
The letter singles out “white and Asian students, many of whom come from disadvantaged backgrounds and low-income families” as victims of discrimination. It did not mention other types of school programming that appeal to nonracial groups, such as women-only residence halls, dorm room floors, or programs for LGBTQ+ students or religious communities. The order also addresses “social transition,” which it defines as “the process of adopting a ‘gender marker’ that differs from a person’s sex.”
California got about $16.3 billion in total federal funding last year for its 5.8 million K-12 public school students, according to the Education Data Initiative, which compiles information from government sources. The figures include education-related spending outside of the education department, such as school meal programs and Head Start for preschoolers. The letter did not say if the selection relates to funding that comes beyond the department.
At the college level, more than $1.5 billion is distributed each year from the department to California students via Pell Grants, which do not have to be paid back and are provided to students with low family incomes. Additionally, more than $1 billion more is allocated throughout the country via other programs supporting low-income students.
Morgan said taking away federal funds would be “robbing kids in low-income communities of the education they need to compete in the global workforce.”
Education and legal experts said Sunday that the department’s guidance targets not only practices in which scholars agree that the use of race is illegal—admissions and hiring—but also those that are commonplace and often not controversial. They include scholarships aiding underrepresented racial minorities, culturally themed dorm room floors and optional graduation ceremonies for Black, Latino, Native American, and other college and high school groups.