Former President and 2024 presidential candidate
Donald Trump
outlined his
education
policy platform in a video Thursday, promising to remove “Marxists” in the
Education Department
and restore local control of schools.
In a
four-minute video
released Thursday evening, the former president promised that a new Trump administration would confront critical race theory in schools, pass a parental bill of rights, enact universal school choice, weed out “radical zealots and Marxists” in the Department of Education, and protect women’s sports.
“When I’m president, we will put parents back in charge and give them the final say,” Trump said. “We will get back to teaching reading, writing, and math. … And we will give our kids the high-quality, pro-American education they deserve. We spend more per pupil than any nation in the world by double. We’re going to keep spending the money. But we’re now going to get our money’s worth.”
INSIDE RON DESANTIS’S WAR WITH THE COLLEGE BOARD OVER AP AFRICAN AMERICAN STUDIES
In the last year of his previous term, Trump pushed several initiatives aimed at confronting critical race theory while enacting what he called “patriotic education.” The most high-profile of these efforts was the 1776 Advisory Commission, which released a report on “patriotic education” two days before Trump left office in January 2021.
In the new video, Trump said that “the Marxism being preached in our schools” was hostile to Christianity and represented “an established new religion.”
“For this reason, my administration will aggressively pursue potential violations of the establishment clause and the free exercise clause of the Constitution,” Trump said.
The former president vowed to pursue civil rights investigations against school districts that engaged in “race-based discrimination,” particularly against Asian Americans. He also called for school principals to be elected by parental vote, a proposal he called “the ultimate form of local control,” and said he would cut “the costly divisive and unnecessary diversity, equity, and inclusion bureaucracy.”
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“As the saying goes, personnel is policy,” Trump said. “At the end of the day, if we have pink-haired communists teaching our kids, we have a major problem.”
