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President Donald Trump on Wednesday signed executive orders to promote parental choice in school selection and end federal funding for curricula that he called the “indoctrination” of students in “anti-American” ideologies on race and gender.
The two directives, which come a week after Trump was sworn into his second term of office, are in keeping with his campaign promise to remake the country’s education system in line with a rigorous conservative agenda that Democrats say could undermine public schools.
The first order directs the Department of Education to issue guidance on how states can use federal education funds to support “choice initiatives,” without providing further details.
“It is the policy of my Administration to support parents in choosing and directing the upbringing and education of their children,” the president said in the order. “Too many children do not thrive in their assigned, government-run K-12 school.”
His second directive aims to stop schools from using federal funds for curriculum, teacher certification and other purposes related to “gender ideology or discriminatory equity ideology.”
“In recent years, however, parents have witnessed schools indoctrinate their children in radical, anti-American ideologies while deliberately blocking parental oversight,” it reads.
Trump and his allies throughout the campaign have accused public schools of teaching white children to be ashamed of themselves and their ancestors due to the country’s history of slavery and discrimination against people of color.
The second order, without evidence, claims that teachers have been “demanding acquiescence” to concepts of “white privilege” or “unconscious bias” and thereby promoting racism and undermining national unity.
The executive order will have a “chilling effect” on subjects related to race and ethnicity in schools, said Basil Smikle Jr., a political strategist.
“I would imagine that it would restrict the kind of reading materials that are even available to students outside of the classroom,” he said.
Although that order does not invoke the term “critical race theory” by name, it employs the language often used by CRT opponents to criticize teaching about institutional racism.
A once-obscure academic concept, the theory has become a fixture in the fierce US debate over how to teach children about the country’s history and structural racism. An academic framework most often taught in law schools but not in primary and secondary schools, it rests on the premise that racial bias — intentional or not — is baked into US laws and institutions.
Conservatives have invoked the term to denounce curricula they consider too liberal or excessively focused on America’s history of racial discrimination. Supporters say understanding institutional racism is necessary to address inequality.
Christina Greer, an associate professor of political science at Fordham University, said the order came as no surprise.
“As a candidate, he said there was radical indoctrination of students,” she said. “He’s making sure to frighten students and educators across the country so they can’t teach the real history of the United States.”
It was not clear how the order issued on Wednesday would affect how the history of race relations is taught in American schools. During his inaugural address last week, Trump criticized education that “teaches our children to be ashamed of themselves — in many cases, to hate our country.”

SCHOOL CHOICE

The first order also directs the US Department of Education to prioritize federal funding for school choice programs, a longstanding goal for conservatives who say public schools are failing to meet academic standards while pushing liberal ideas.
Many Democrats and teachers’ unions, on the other hand, say school choice undermines the public system that educates 50 million US children.
Federal test scores released by the National Assessment of Educational Progress on Wednesday underscored the challenge faced by educators in the wake of widespread learning loss during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The scores showed that one-third of eighth graders tested below NAEP’s “basic” reading level, the most in the test’s three-decade history, while some 40 percent of fourth-graders also fell below that basic threshold.
That executive order also directs US states on how they could use block grants to support alternatives to public education, such as private and religious schools.
US education is primarily funded via states and local taxes, with federal sources accounting for about 14 percent of the funding of public K-12 schools, according to Census data.
Trump’s order could affect some $30 billion to $40 billion in federal grants, estimated Frederick Hess, an education expert at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute.
“This stuff is directionally significant,” said Hess, adding that Trump’s directive represented “the most emphatic support for school choice we’ve ever seen at the federal level.”
The first order also calls for allowing military families to use Pentagon funds to send their children to the school of their choosing. It also mandates that Native American families with students in the Bureau of Indian Education be allowed to use federal funds in selecting their schools.
A number of Republican-leaning states have in recent years adopted universal or near-universal school choice policies, paving the way for vouchers or other methods that allocate taxpayer funds for homeschooling or private tuition.
Josh Cowen, a professor of education policy at Michigan State University, said that Trump’s executive order is aimed at sending “an aggressive statement about his position on vouchers” even if his power to reallocate funds is limited.
Cowen said the bigger potential financial impact on education lies with a bill reintroduced in Congress this week that would create a federal school voucher program with an estimated $10 billion in annual tax credits. 

WASHINGTON: Meta has agreed to pay $25 million to settle a lawsuit filed by President Donald Trump against the company after it suspended his accounts following the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, according to three people familiar with the matter.
It’s the latest instance of a large corporation settling litigation with the president, who has threatened retribution on his critics and rivals, and comes as Meta and its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, have joined other large technology companies in trying to ingratiate themselves with the new Trump administration.
The people familiar with the matter spoke on the condition of anonymity Wednesday to discuss the agreement. Two people said that terms of the agreement include $22 million going to the nonprofit that will become Trump’s future presidential library and the balance going to legal fees and other litigants.
Zuckerberg visited Trump in November at his private Florida club as part of a series of technology, business and government officials to make a pilgrimage to Palm Beach to try to mend fences with the incoming president. At the dinner, Trump brought up the litigation and suggested they try to resolve it, kickstarting two months of negotiations between the parties, the people said.
Meta also made a $1 million donation to Trump’s inaugural committee and Zuckerberg was among several billionaires granted prime seating during Trump’s swearing-in last week in the Capitol Rotunda, along with Google’s Sundar Pichai, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, who now owns the platform X, formerly known as Twitter.
Ahead of Trump’s inauguration, Meta also announced that it was dropping fact-checking on its platform — a longtime priority of Trump and his allies.
Trump filed the suit months after leaving office, calling the action by the social media companies “illegal, shameful censorship of the American people.”
Twitter, Facebook and Google are all private companies, and users must agree to their terms of service to use their products. Under Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, social media platforms are allowed to moderate their services by removing posts that, for instance, are obscene or violate the services’ own standards, so long as they are acting in “good faith.” The law also generally exempts Internet companies from liability for the material that users post.
But Trump and some other politicians have long argued that X, formerly known as Twitter, Facebook and other social media platforms, have abused that protection and should lose their immunity — or at least have it curtailed.
The Meta settlement comes after ABC News agreed last month to pay $15 million toward Trump’s presidential library to settle a defamation lawsuit over anchor George Stephanopoulos’ inaccurate on-air assertion that the president-elect had been found civilly liable for raping writer E. Jean Carroll.
The network also agreed to pay $1 million in legal fees to the law firm of Trump’s attorney, Alejandro Brito.
The settlement agreement describes ABC’s presidential library payment as a “charitable contribution,” with the money earmarked for a non-profit organization that is being established in connection with the yet-to-be-built library.
The Wall Street Journal was first to report on the settlement.