Donald Trump has draconian ideas about how the nation’s public schools should be run and how students should be taught. Oh, and he also has some bad ideas about how teachers should be credentialed.
He said as much on Truth Social earlier this year writing that he plans to “take back control from the Radical Left maniacs indoctrinating our children,” and adding that a state-approved curriculum should be replaced with a “quality, pro-American education.
What the gefuddlehoppers does that even mean? Trump always speaks in broad strokes, and this time around he’s even managed to rankle at least one far-right extremist. Raw Story reports that Kevin Roberts, president of the usually Trump-fawning Heritage Foundation, told The Wall Street Journal he thoroughly disliked the proposed policy.
“I hate it,” Roberts told the Journal. “It’s a terrible idea.”
Apparently, the Heritage Foundation worships the former president so much that Jim Geraghty, a senior political correspondent for the right-wing National Review, wrote in a column for The Washington Post that it “takes a lot to get the Heritage crowd to be critical of the former president these days.”
Geraghty also wrote that not only has the Heritage Foundation ditched its Reaganite ideals for Trump’s MAGA philosophy, but the think tank (a team I use loosely here) has stepped up to push Project 2025, which is frankly, a nightmare if there ever was one. The project is a comprehensive plan for staffing the federal service with tens of thousands of MAGA supporters. In this instance, Republicans hope to set up an administration that heavily promotes traditional checks and balances to push far-right political goals (read: propaganda).
Think Invasion of The Body Snatchers, but this time it’s actually true.
According to Geraghty, that’s only the half of it. Not only is this opposed by Heritage — which is dead set against any form of teacher certification at the state level — but the U.S. Constitution itself may oppose Trump’s plan to overhaul public education credentialing standards.
“Right now, states set their own standards for certification of teachers; it is unclear what would happen if a teacher had state certification but not Trump’s new federal certification, or vice versa,” he writes. “Nothing in the constituion gives the federal government the authority to determine who is eligible to teach in public schools. But, given what we know of Trump, he isn’t going to let some little detail such as that stand in his way.”
And this isn’t the only time Trump has tried to pull this. As the 2020 election was looming then-President Trump’s White House issued a statement promoting “patriotic education,” saying “some versions of American history offer a misconstrued and one-sided account of our founding in an effort to paint America as a systemically racist country.”
Um, did the folks in the Trump White House miss the memo or flunk U.S. history? The U.S. is a “systemically racist country.” Did these people not learn about the historic race riots in the 1950s and 1960s? Did they forget that this country was forged on the backs of people who were stolen from their homes? Or how our ancestors committed a monstrous genocide of America’s indigenous people?
Just because you don’t want to include something that makes your ancestors look bad, doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.
But of course, Heritage isn’t worried about that. It wants to pave over true history to paint a pretty picture of how our White ancestors were heroes. When they certainly were not.
I think the only reason Trump is pushing this is because he wants to make himself look good. And as The Washington Post’s Valerie Strauss notes Trump’s education is an attempt “to excuse Founding Fathers who enslaved people.”
Who would have ever guessed I’d be on the same side as some nutball from the Heritage Foundation, but here we are.
Project25 IS the Deep State. Trumpism has abandoned “limited government” to an autocracy.
Funny how the grandson of an immigrant (who didn’t even come here necessarily by choice–something akin to “draft evasion” as I recall) feels he has the ability to speak of “our founding” as if his family had something to do with it. (Then again, I doubt most of the MAGAt morons are descendants of the founders–either from the Jamestown group or the Plymouth group. I know they’re not the descendants of the Santa Fe brigade and I can pretty much guarantee they’re not the descendants of the indigenous people.)
Grandpa Drumph (the original family name) fled his home country to avoid mandatory military service. Years later he went back and asked for forgiveness. The King told him to go f**k himself and kicked him out of the country so he came back over here. I’ve often lamented grandpa Drumph wasn’t given some time in the slammer and allowed to stay over there. Our country (and the world) would be a better place had things gone down that way!
“the U.S. Constitution itself may oppose Trump’s plan to overhaul public education credentialing standards.”
Like tRump gives a damn about the Constitution.