Upon taking office again, President Donald Trump resumed attacking public education.
On Jan. 29, Trump issued two executive orders signaling his administration’s intentions: diverting public money to private, predominantly religious schools and imposing a Christian Nationalism-infused curriculum on public school students.
“Rather than funding private religious schools that can discriminate and indoctrinate, Trump should focus on providing adequate resources to our country’s public schools that are open to all students and serve 90 percent of America’s children,” Americans United President and CEO Rachel Laser responded in a press statement.
“Expanding private school vouchers is part of the Project 2025 playbook for undermining our public education system and our democracy,” Laser continued. “Christian Nationalists want to divert public money to private religious schools even as they continue to strive to impose their narrow religious beliefs on public schoolchildren. Parents who care about their children’s education and taxpayers who care about quality public schools that are the building blocks of our communities should vehemently oppose this scheme.”
Trump’s executive order directed the secretary of education to issue guidance on how federal funds could be funneled to “educational choice initiatives” — code words for private school vouchers. The Labor, Health and Human Services (HSS), Defense and Interior secretaries similarly were instructed to find ways to free up federal funds from their departments for vouchers and similar programs, including those offered by “private, faith-based, or public charter schools.”
Also on Jan. 29, Republicans in Congress reintroduced the misnamed Educational Choice for Children Act (ECCA). Aiming to create the first-ever, nationwide, federally funded private school voucher scheme, the bill would annually divert $10 billion in taxpayer money from public schools to private, mostly religious schools.
Americans United opposes private school vouchers. Vouchers violate taxpayers’ religious freedom by forcing people to fund religious education and indoctrination. Primarily giving money to wealthy families whose kids never attended public school, they fund private schools that discriminate against students, families and staff. Lacking accountability, vouchers have a history of fraud and abuse while failing to improve students’ educational outcomes.
Alessandro Terenzoni and Dena Sher, AU’s vice president and associate vice president of public policy, noted many of the problems with vouchers in a February letter to senators urging them to oppose Trump’s nomination of Linda McMahon to lead the Department of Education. Formerly leading the Small Business Administration during Trump’s first term, McMahon recently chaired the Stephen Miller-founded America First Policy Institute, a shadowy organization pushing a Christian Nationalist agenda — including private school vouchers.
McMahon also supports another Project 2025 goal: eliminating the Department of Education altogether. Repeatedly asked about Trump’s call to close down the department, McMahon, during her confirmation hearing before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee, said, “I am really all for the president’s mission.”
Although only Congress can eliminate the Department of Education, Trump and McMahon have discussed downsizing and shifting programs to other federal departments. For example, McMahon suggested HSS could manage programs for students with disabilities — a claim that prompted Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.) to quip, “So, I just want to be clear: You’re going to put special education in the hands of [newly confirmed HHS Secretary] Robert F. Kennedy Jr.?”
Trump was expected to order the Education Department to begin dismantling itself by the end of February, according to The Washington Post. At Church & State’s press time, the order had not yet been issued and McMahon’s confirmation by the Senate was pending.
Meanwhile, the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) led by Trump appointee Elon Musk has begun canceling nearly a billion dollars in Education Department contracts that fund research. Musk has also threatened to withhold federal money from state education departments unless they end all programs believed to advance diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI).
Christian Nationalist re-education camps
“An attack on our public schools [that] seeks to turn them into re-education camps for white Christian Nationalist disinformation” was how AU’s Laser described the second anti-public education order issued by Trump on Jan. 29.
Deploying Project 2025 culture war buzzwords, the order requires several departments to suggest policies for eliminating “radical, anti-American ideologies” from public schools. In effect, Trump wants to whitewash America’s history with slavery and racism, minimize representation of LGBTQ+ people and enforce an unscientific, Christian Nationalist view of gender that erases transgender and gender-nonconforming people. Only lessons contributing to a hyper-patriotic, nationalist, exceptionalist view of America will be allowed by Trump’s Department of Education.
The order also re-established the 1776 Commission from Trump’s first term, originally created in opposition to The New York Times’ Pulitzer Prize-winning “1619 Project,” which examined how slavery and systemic racism has always impacted the country. In January 2021 then-president Joe Biden eliminated the original Commission, which days earlier had issued “The 1776 Report” — a widely panned document with no source citations and some portions lifted from conservative opinion pieces.
Critics especially pointed to sections minimizing the fact that many of the country’s founders enslaved Black people; misappropriating quotes from the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.; and likening the fight for civil rights to national threats on par with fascism and communism.
The report also perpetuated the myth that the U.S. was founded as an officially “Christian nation” and misconstrues the intent of church-state separation, claiming the founders sought “neither to weaken the importance of faith nor to set up a secular state, but to open up the public space of society to a common American morality.”
In response, AU Senior Adviser Rob Boston noted on AU’s “Wall of Separation” blog, “Anyone who attempts to argue that the government of the United States has a religious basis, as this report does incessantly, quickly runs into a problem: Our Constitution doesn’t say that. In fact, its First Amendment says the opposite.”
By smoothing out the country’s historical rough spots when it comes to the fight for freedom and equality, Boston notes, the 1776 Commission diminishes the accomplishment of America’s current religious pluralism. “That would not have been possible without separation of church and state and its key partner, secular government,” Boston wrote. “We ought to be proud of those features. Instead, the 1776 Commission tosses them aside and in favor of a tale anchored in myths and wishful thinking.”
Alongside the Commission’s original mission “to promote patriotic education” is a new task — helping the federal government recognize the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence next year.
No new commission members have yet been named. Earlier members included chair Larry Arnn, president of Hillsdale College — a conservative Christian school marketing its so-called “1776 Curriculum” on American exceptionalism to public K-12 schools — two Hillsdale professors and Jerry Davis, president of the conservative Christian College of the Ozarks.
They were joined by Michael Farris — a previous CEO of the Christian Nationalist group Alliance Defending Freedom and founder of the Home School Legal Defense Association — and a number of conservative politicians, political commentators and members of conservative groups like the Heritage Foundation and Claremont Institute.
Emboldening state legislators
On the state and local level also, Trump likely will embolden Christian Nationalist efforts to impose religion on public schoolchildren.
Days after Trump’s election, Oklahoma Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters emailed every superintendent in the state a video of himself praying in support of Trump. Ordering the video to be played for all public school students, he encouraged them to join him in prayer. Walters already was (and remains) a defendant in two lawsuits filed by Americans United and allies — one challenging the creation of what would be the nation’s first religious public school, and one challenging Walters’ mandate that the Bible be taught in all public schools.
AU and allies urged Oklahoma public schools not to air the prayer video. “Superintendent Ryan Walters is willing to throw every public school kid in Oklahoma under a bus in order to kowtow to Trump,” AU’s Laser said. “Walters is abusing the power of his office to advance a Christian Nationalist agenda and impose his personal religious beliefs on other people’s children.”
Last June, shortly after Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry signed a law mandating that all public school classrooms display the Ten Commandments (and days before AU and allies filed a federal lawsuit to challenge the law), Trump voiced his support in capital letters on his social media platform Truth Social: “I LOVE THE TEN COMMANDMENTS IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS, PRIVATE SCHOOLS, AND MANY OTHER PLACES, FOR THAT MATTER. READ IT — HOW CAN WE, AS A NATION, GO WRONG??? THIS MAY BE, IN FACT, THE FIRST MAJOR STEP IN THE REVIVAL OF RELIGION, WHICH IS DESPERATELY NEEDED, IN OUR COUNTRY. BRING BACK TTC!!! MAGA2024.”
Americans United is monitoring and ready to respond to future Trump actions and rhetoric that may further advance Christian Nationalists’ crusade against public education. Already, legislatures in 16 states are considering bills allowing public schools to display the Ten Commandments. Texas and Oklahoma hope to infuse public school curriculum with the Bible. Several state bills would encourage coercive prayer in public schools.
“Christian Nationalists are trying to use the machinery of the state to impose their religious beliefs on all of our children — and to get taxpayers to fund it,” Laser said. “Not on our watch. We need a national recommitment to keep church and state separate — our public schools and our democracy depend on it.”