Here's what Trump's win means for schooling in America — and the Education Department



President-elect Donald Trump has big plans for education in America.

When asked about what the Republican has in mind, Trump-Vance transition spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt told Time, "The American people re-elected President Trump by a resounding margin, giving him a mandate to implement the promises he made on the campaign trail. He will deliver."

If Trump delivers on his campaign promises and corresponding Agenda47 plan for education, then the Education Department as it now exists is toast, and most of its present responsibilities are likely headed back to the states.

Extra to hollowing out the Education Department, Trump has also promised universal school choice; protections for prayer in public schools; a prioritization of reading, writing, and arithmetic and an ejection of leftist propaganda; a switch from tenure to merit pay for teachers; and a federal reinforcement of parental rights.

In a September 2023 video outlining his ten principles for improving schools, Trump noted, "The United States spends more money on education than any other country in the world. And yet we get the worst outcomes. We are at the bottom of every list. In total, American society pours more than a trillion dollars a year into public education systems. But instead of being at the top of the list, we are literally right smack — guess what — at the bottom."

According to the Education Data Initiative, K-12 public schools blow through around $857.2 billion annually, with the federal government covering at least 13.6% with taxpayer funds. Costs have grown rapidly over the years.

The nationwide public K-12 annual spending per pupil in the 2011-2012 school year was $10,648. This year, the per-pupil cost for a substandard education was $17,280.

Despite the U.S. ranking fourth among Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development members for spending on elementary education, the quality of education leaves much to be desired.

Recent estimates from the National Literacy Institute indicated that roughly 40% of students across the nation cannot read at a basic level. The National Center for Education Statistics revealed that when compared to 80 other nations' education systems in 2022, the U.S. average math literacy score for 15-year-old students was lower than the average in 25 education systems. The NAEP also found that as of 2022, only 26% of eighth-grade public school students across the country were proficient in math.

A Pew Research Center survey revealed earlier this year that 51% of American adults figure the public K-12 education system is headed in the wrong direction. A separate survey of public school teachers found that 82% of respondents figured the state of education has worsened over the past five years.

'You can't do worse.'

"Rather than indoctrinating young people with inappropriate racial, sexual, and political material, which is what we're doing now, our schools must be totally refocused to prepare our children to succeed in the world of work, and in life and the world of keeping our country strong, so they can grow up to be happy, prosperous, and independent citizens," said Trump.

The once and future president indicated that in order to optimize education and schools in America, it is necessary to:

  • "respect the rights of parents to control the education of their children";
  • "empower parents and local school boards to hire and reward great principals and teachers, and also to fire the poor ones";
  • "ensure our classrooms are focused not on political indoctrination, but on teaching the knowledge and skills needed to succeed";
  • "teach students to love their country";
  • "support bringing back prayer to our schools";
  • institute "immediate expulsion for any student who harms a teacher or another student";
  • "ensure students have access to project-based learning experiences inside the classroom";
  • "strive to give all students access to internships and work experiences that can set them on a path to their first job"; and
  • "ensure that all schools provide excellent jobs and career counseling."

Trump also indicated that his administration would effectively "close" the Education Department, which has been a Cabinet-level agency since 1980, and send "all education and education work and needs back to the states."

"We want [the states] to run the education of our children, because they'll do a much better job of it," said Trump. "You can't do worse. We spend more money per pupil, by three times, than any other nation. And yet we're absolutely at the bottom. We're one of the worst. So you can't do worse. We're going to end education coming out of Washington D.C. We're going to close it up — all those buildings all over the place and yet people that in many cases hate our children. We're going to send it all back to the states."

'I figure we'll have like one person plus a secretary.'

Blaze News reached out to the Education Department but did not immediately receive a response.

Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education, told Time, "It is entirely feasible to close down the Department of Education, but the functions of the Department of Education will need to continue."

With the Republican trifecta in Washington, D.C., Trump will likely be able to significantly reduce or possibly even cut funds for racist DEI and critical race theory programming.

Virginia Rep. Ben Cline (R) recently told Fox Business that it would be possible to slash trillions of dollars in government spending as Elon Musk, the potentially oncoming Department of Government Efficiency head, has proposed.

When asked where deep cuts could be made, Cline said, "Well, let's just look at the Department of Education and how billions of dollars stay in Washington, funding bureaucrats whose simple goal is to interfere in the decisions about educational choice at local and state levels."

In October, Trump signaled at a campaign rally in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, what his ideal Education Department would look like after he's done with it:

I figure we'll have, like, one person plus a secretary. You'll have a secretary to a secretary. We'll have one person plus a secretary, and all the person has to do is, "Are you teaching English? Are you teaching arithmetic? What are you doing? Reading, writing, and arithmetic. And are you not teaching woke?"

"All they're going to do is see that the basics are taken care of," added Trump.

Trump's proposal in some ways resembles the memorandum advanced in 1981 by President Ronald Reagan's Education Secretary Terrel H. Bell, which advocated for turning the department into a foundation tasked primarily with administering block grants, collecting information, and conducting research.

Education Weekly reported at the time that Bell's unrealized proposal suggested that most of the department's activities would ultimately be "transferred, terminated, or modified as new Administration policies are implemented." For example, the functions for the department's Office for Civil Rights could be moved to the Justice Department.

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Boys Aren’t Reading As Much As Girls, And It’s A Major Problem

Parents and teachers must celebrate masculinity with the right books, believing in boys' potential to be strong readers and strong men.

Scientific American demands federal regulation and background checks for homeschoolers



Scientific American, a 178-year-old science magazine published by the German-British Springer Nature Group, has prioritized ideology over science in recent years, having made clear its commitment to "advancing social justice" and to promoting progressive leftist perspectives absent counterpoint on various issues.

The publication, which broke with nearly two centuries of convention in 2020 and endorsed Joe Biden for president, has pushed social constructivists' pseudoscientific claims about gender; suggested Western science invented the sex binary; advanced the suggestion that the science informing legislation against sex change mutilations is "disinformation"; and championed the use of irreversible and dangerous puberty blockers, which were long used to sterilize sex offenders.

Extra to arguing that the deep state isn't real, denying the possibility that wealthy elites profited from the pandemic, stressing the COVID-19 vaccine was safe, and declaring the lab-leak theory regarding COVID-19 "false," Scientific American has also wasted ink, time, and money on multiple articles claiming that math, the NFL, and fighting obesity are racist.

Scientific American recently directed its activistic energies to concern-mongering about homeschooling.

In its Monday "Today in Science" newsletter, Scientific American reiterated claims from an article published in the June issue of the magazine entitled, "Homeschooling Needs More Uniform Oversight," by "The Editors."

'Federal mandates for reporting and assessment to protect children don't need to be onerous.'

The magazine's editor in chief is Laura Helmuth, a University of California, Berkeley, graduate who was called out by a peer-reviewed medical journal, the BMJ, last month for ignoring science that undermined her preferred crumbling narrative on gender. Steven Pinker, a cognitive scientist at Harvard University, recently called Helmuth a "woke fanatic."

Jeanna Bryner, the managing editor at the magazine, appears to be an ideologue of similar stripes.

The editors suggested that the Biden administration "must develop basic standards for safety and quality of education in homeschooling across the country."

"It is clear that home­school­ing will continue to lack accountability for outcomes or even basic safety in most states," wrote the editors. "But federal mandates for reporting and assessment to protect children don't need to be onerous."

Scientific American suggested that in order to teach one's own children, parents "could be required to pass an initial background check, as every state requires for all K–12 teachers."

In addition to securing approval from Washington, D.C., to do what their forebears otherwise did freely, the editors suggested that parents "could be required to submit documents every year to their local school district or to a state agency to show that their children are learning."

While the editors sounded the alarm about the potential for abuse of students at home in the absence of federal regulation — despite the rampant abuse in the otherwise regulated public school system — they appeared more concerned about curricular content and the prospect some students may not be subjected to the orthodoxies of the day.

"Many parents are attracted to homeschooling because they want to have more say in what their child learns and what they do not," they wrote. "Nearly 60 percent of home­school parents who responded to the 2019 NCES survey said that religious instruction was a motivation in their ­decision to educate at home. Some Christian home­school­ing curricula teach Young Earth Creationism instead of evolution."

"Most states don't require home­schooled kids to be assessed on specific topics the way their classroom-based peers are," continued the editors. "This practice enables educational neglect that can have long-lasting consequences for a child's development."

It's unclear how productive the proposed changes would be granted the standards set by the government for the public education system appear to accomplish very little.

The Hill noted earlier this year that in 44 Chicago public schools, not a single student was performing at grade level in math. In 24 schools in Chicago, not a single student was reading at grade level. In 40% of Baltimore's city high schools, not a single student was satisfying standards in math.

Blaze News noted last year that the National Assessment of Educational Progress' 2022 assessment revealed that grade 8 students' history scores last year were the lowest they had been since the NAEP began monitoring in 1994. Significant declines in academic ability were also observed amongst public grade-schoolers in reading and mathematics as well as in other subjects.

In fact, the poor quality of the public education system is one of the reasons why homeschooling is so popular today.

The National Center for Education Statistics revealed in a September 2023 publication that the top reasons parents gave in a 2019 survey for homeschooling were: concerns about the school environment; to provide moral instruction; to emphasize family life together; dissatisfaction with schools' academic instruction; to provide religious instruction; to provide a nontraditional approach to education; and/or to help with their child's special needs.

In the years since, ruinous school closures, sporadic teachers' union strikes, and the politicization of the classroom likely also had a substantial impact.

The Washington Post revealed late last year that the number of home-schooled students jumped by 51% over the previous six years while public school enrollment dropped by 4%.

The Post found that for every 10 students in public schools during the 2021-2022 academic year across 390 districts, there was one home-schooled child. By October 2023, there was an estimated 1.9 million to 2.7 million home-schooled students in the country.

Writer and home-school mom Heather Hunter responded to the Scientific American article, stressing it "selectively picked extreme examples from every anti-homeschooling argument."

"'Horrific abuse'? Many parents are taking their kids out of school because their child is getting abused/bullying and schools are doing nothing," wrote Hunter. "There have been numerous examples in just the past year of students ending up in critical condition in the hospital because of other students beating them so severely. People forget that there is also negative socialization. The vast majority of homeschool parents are loving and going above and beyond in their child's education.

"'Poor education'?" continued Hunter. "My daughter will be a second grader this fall (but now doing third grade curriculum in language arts) and can count to 100 in French, is learning about ancient civilizations, Latin, math, playing soccer, socializing with her friends at the homeschool co-op while doing art projects and learning science hands on in field trips and in nature."

Corey DeAngelis, senior fellow at the American Federation for Children and executive director at the Educational Freedom Institute, said of the proposed regulations, "Hell no."

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Critics ruthlessly mock teachers' union president over her post about causes of home schooling spike: 'It's you, Randi.'



Randi Weingarten, the head of the American Federation of Teachers, took a break Sunday from championing radical causes to share an article to X detailing how the spike in home schooling that occurred during the pandemic wasn't a flash in the pan.

Weingarten made the mistake of captioning the post, "What's behind the increase in homeschooling," prompting concerned parents, conservatives, and other critics of her union's ruinous initiatives to read it as a question and provide their own answers, which the ATF boss later characterized as attacks.

While various commenters indicated leftist indoctrination efforts in the classroom helped drive the home schooling boom, the most common answer to Weingarten's unintended question appears to have been "you."

The report

The ATF boss linked to an Axios breakdown of a recent Washington Post report, which revealed home schooling is America's fastest-growing form of education.

In states where data was available for comparison, the Post indicated the number of home-schooled students jumped 51% over the past six years. Meanwhile, private school enrollment increased by 7% and public school enrollment dropped by 4%.

The Post found that for every 10 students in public schools during the 2021-2022 academic year across 390 districts, there was one home-schooled child. There are now an estimated 1.9 million to 2.7 million home-schooled students in the U.S. — a population likely to continue growing.

While home-school student enrollment since the 2017-2018 school year is up across the board, at least where recent data is available, New York, South Dakota, Rhode Island, Tennessee, California, Florida, and the District of Columbia have seen especially high increases — 103%, 94%, 91%, 77%, 78%, 72%, and 108%, respectively.

The rise has reportedly not dropped off since the end of the pandemic.

"This is a fundamental change of life, and it's astonishing that it's so persistent," Nat Malkus, deputy director of education policy at the American Enterprise Institute, told the Post.

"Policymakers should think, 'Wow — this is a lot of kids," said Elizabeth Bartholet, an emeritus Harvard Law School professor and child welfare advocate. "We should worry about whether they're learning anything."

While Batholet and others might only speculate about the quality of a home school education, it's abundantly clear the American public school system isn't cutting it.

Blaze News noted in May that the National Assessment of Educational Progress's 2022 assessment revealed that grade 8 students' history scores last year were the lowest they had been since the NAEP began monitoring in 1994. Significant declines in academic ability were also observed amongst public grade-schoolers in reading and mathematics as well as in other subjects. Such damning figures cast doubt on whether students are learning anything in public classrooms with ATF-linked educators.

The post

Although there was no question mark in Weingarten's post, captioned, "What's behind the increase in homeschooling," she was nevertheless deluged with answers.

— (@)

Ricochet editor in chief Jon Gabriel responded, "You are."

Similarly Corey DeAngelis, executive director of the Education Freedom Institute, wrote, "It's you, Randi. It's you."

Spectator contributing editor Stephen Miller kept to the theme that Weingarten was the problem, sharing an image of a mirror.

Young Americans for Liberty suggested that Weingarten had unwittingly served as "one of the greatest homeschool advocates in American history." For that, Moms for Liberty indicated the 65-year-old leftist deserved thanks.

Gov. Ron DeSantis' press secretary, Jeremy Redfern, responded, "Can't believe she posted this unironically. The lack of introspection continues."

Weingarten called the Trump administration's proposal to reopen in-person learning in 2020 "reckless" and "cruel." While the AFT resisted a return to real work, union affiliates joined in, staging sickouts and going so far as to call reopening schools racist.

Weingarten and her strike-happy union reportedly also had a decisive hand in shaping the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidance, again preventing a wide scale resumption of normalcy.

These teacher-sought closures have been linked to a significant spike in mental illness, suicide, and obesity, as well to students' diminished immune systems and compromised academic development.

Weingarten's post has seen over 4.1 million times but only netted 210 likes at the time of publication.

In the comments, Weingarten wrote, "Ah, I see that the reply-guys are out in force attacking this tweet."

The ATF boss singled out possible remedies to a few problems she did not necessarily create, writing, "Look at the data: if we dealt w/gun violence, had robust anti-bullying programs & provided more services for special needs students, many of these parents wouldn't feel compelled to homeschool."

It appears the data Weingarten was alluding to derives from Washington Post-Schar School poll results published in September, which revealed some of the reasons parents provided for sparing their children from the American public school system. Beside religious factors, parents expressed concerns about school environments; a desire to provide moral instruction; dissatisfaction with academic standards; concerns about school shootings; liberal propagandizing; discrimination; and pandemic restrictions.

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Leftists claim it is a 'dark day' after Canadian province ratifies parental bill of rights



The fight to re-establish and bolster parental rights has spread far beyond the borders of red states and Eastern European nations. Among the various battlegrounds to see a decisive victory in recent days is the Canadian province of Saskatchewan.

The prairie province introduced a policy in August upholding parental rights in taxpayer-funded classrooms. The usual suspects lashed out, but Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe and his right-leaning Saskatchewan Party held firm, going so far as to invoke the "nuclear option" to pass and entrench the law on Friday.

What's the background?

Moe's government, handed an overwhelming majority and clear mandate by the electorate in 2020, announced mid-summer new parental inclusion and consent policies aimed at protecting parental rights in the classroom.

In addition to temporarily cutting radical LGBT activist groups out of sex education in the classroom, the policy stipulated that if a child wants to identify as a member of the opposite sex in school, educators cannot affirm the delusion unless the student's parents consent. This would help ensure that children are not transitioned with the help of educators behind parents' backs.

The province's former education minister said, "Our government has heard the concerns raised by Saskatchewan parents about needing to be notified and included in their children's education in these important areas."

The effort was immediately denounced and characterized as a threat to non-straight students.

The socialist New Democratic Party was among the radical factions to oppose the bill, with its provincial leader Carla Beck claiming, "Teachers will have to choose between shoving kids back in the closet or putting them in harm's way," reported Global News.

Heather Kuttai, the head of the province's so-called Human Rights Commission resigned in protest of the bill, claiming, "Removing a child’s rights, in the name of 'parental rights' is fundamentally anti-trans and harmful."

The LGBT activist group UR Pride Centre for Sexuality and Gender Diversity successfully challenged the policy before a provincial court, securing a temporary injunction against the policy, reported Jurist.

The group alleged in its application, "The policy presents an impossible choice: be outed at home or be misgendered at school, even in one-on-one counselling sessions with school personnel. ... Either outcome entails devastating and irreparable harm to a vulnerable young person."

The group wanted to leave such consequential decisions up to educators' "professional judgment."

Despite the backlash, the premier made expressly clear in September, "We are not backing down."

Notwithstanding the backlash

Saskatchewan Education Minister Jeremy Cockrill introduced the act to the legislature as Bill 137 on Oct. 12, revealing that the province would invoke section 33 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms to see it through. This maneuver, called the "notwithstanding clause" or the "nuclear option," allowed the province to override certain Charter rights with which the legislation might conflict, thereby protecting it from court challenges as well as challenges under the Saskatchewan Human Rights Code.

Cockrill, a member of the Saskatchewan Party, noted that extra to ensuring parents won't be left in the dark about their kids' possible sexual confusion, the legislation would enshrine various other parental rights ideologues might seek to erode or usurp. These include the right to:

  • "act as the primary decision-maker with respect to the pupil's education";
  • "be informed on a regular basis of the pupil's attendance, behaviour and academic achievement in school";
  • "have access to the pupil's school file";
  • be informed at least two weeks before sexual health content is presented to the pupils and withdraw, if desired, the pupil from the presentation of that content; and
  • preclude educators and school staff from using their child's "new gender-related preferred name or gender identity at the school."

"Parents and guardians have a right to know what is being taught in their children's school," said the province's education minister, Jeremy Cockrill. "The Parents' Bill of Rights is an inclusionary policy that ensures that parents are at the forefront of every important decision in their child's life."

On Friday, the legislature passed the bill in a 40-12 vote, eliciting cries from protesters. The legislation then received royal assent, thereby becoming the law of the land.

Moe said after its enactment, the law "is providing parents the right, not the opportunity, to support their child through the formative years of their life and some very important decisions that our children are facing through those particular years."

Defeated UR Pride executive director Ariana Giroux said, "We here at UR Pride are upsettingly unsurprised that the Government of Saskatchewan would force through legislation that would cause irreparable harm to children."

Egale, the LGBT activist group that recently argued in favor of Jordan Peterson's re-education, said in a statement, "This is a dark day in Canadian history. We will remember this as the first time that an elected government has used the notwithstanding clause to limit the rights of children and young people as well as the first time that an elected government has done so with respect to 2SLGBTQI people."

Harini Sivalingam, the director of the so-called equality program at the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, similarly bemoaned the restoration of parental rights, calling the ratification of Bill 137 "a stain on the history of the province."

Canadian state media claimed earlier this year that Republicans in the U.S. are responsible for making parental rights "a legislative lodestar," noting that in 2022, 95 parental rights bills were introduced in 26 states. According to CNN, between January 2021 and June 2023, state lawmakers had introduced nearly 400 parental rights bills.

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