Trump Orders Expanded Private School Choice, an End to ‘Radical Indoctrination’
The 74 Million | By Beth Hawkins | January 30, 2025
Edicts seek to create vouchers for military and Native kids, promote ‘patriotic’ curriculum, curtail protections for trans students.
President Donald Trump signed two executive orders Wednesday directing several federal agencies to prioritize the expansion of private school choice, to curtail what he calls “radical indoctrination” in schools and to take unspecified action against teachers who aid the “social transition” of a student.
The orders also call for using federal funding to revive an advisory commission Trump created in 2020 to promote patriotic instruction, and for restricting trans and gender-nonconforming students’ participation in sports and use of bathrooms that align with their gender identity.
The U.S. Department of Education is to emphasize school choice — described as universal K-12 scholarship programs — in making discretionary grants and to issue guidance to states about their use of federal funds. The secretaries of the Defense and Interior departments are to create plans to allow military families and those with children in Bureau of Indian Education schools to use federal funds to send their children to the schools of their choosing. And the Department of Health and Human Services is to issue guidance on how states that receive block grants for child care and other services for families and children can use those funds at private and religious institutions.
Teachers unions were quick to call the school choice order an effort to illegally funnel federal dollars to private schools. “President Trump is using his Project 2025 playbook to privatize education because he knows vouchers have repeatedly been a failure in Congress,” National Education Association President Becky Pringle said in a statement. “When voters have a say about vouchers, they have been soundly rejected — time and again — at the ballot box.”
But Frederick Hess, director of education policy studies at the center-right American Enterprise Institute, says the main thing the order regarding private school choice does is signal what the Education Department will emphasize when considering grant applications and in telling states how they may use their federal allotments.
“What will matter a lot is not the general direction of the EO, but the particulars of how the departments start to put this stuff into practice,” he explains. “What we’ll see is how much they think there’s room to reinterpret the existing rules, and how much this is an effort to offer explicitly different guidance.”
The executive orders were among dozens issued in the 10 days since Trump’s second swearing-in. The edicts have created confusion and sparked legal challenges as states and interest groups charge that the president is overstepping his authority to mandate changes to laws and programs.
On Monday, Trump ordered a freeze on federal spending, only to rescind it two days later after a federal judge ordered a temporary pause on it going into effect. A White House spokeswoman then said the freeze had not been rescinded, only the memo ordering it. An executive order ending birthright citizenship, which is enshrined in the Constitution, also was met by a court challenge. Broad confusion about orders for federal employees to return to in-person work and reports of a supposed buyout dominated headlines.
The order “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling” calls for withholding funds from schools that teach “gender ideology” and “discriminatory equity ideology” and for legal action against teachers who “sexually exploit minors,” “practice medicine without a license” or otherwise facilitate the “social transition” of a student.
By law, federal officials cannot dictate what is taught in U.S. schools — a prohibition Republicans have long supported and that stymied Trump’s efforts in 2020 to mandate the use of a “patriotic” 1776 curriculum. And while the current U.S. Supreme Court majority appears poised to uphold bans on gender-affirming care for minors, right now transgender and nonbinary students are legally entitled to use the restroom of their choosing.
Citing the complexity of the federal government’s relationship to the nation’s 131,000 public schools, education advocates counseled patience.
“The education community has developed a habit of going from 1 to 11 on everything Trump does instantaneously,” says Hess. “Getting more clarity before getting overly excited or overly critical is probably going to make for a more useful debate.”
Regarding the school choice order, he adds, “I think most of what’s here is probably sensible and reasonable and wholly consistent with what one would have expected.”
As with many of Trump’s executive orders, it’s unclear what the practical implications of the new mandates will be. Federal education dollars represent a small proportion — about 11% in 2021 — of K-12 school funding. The lion’s share is sent to states to help pay for services for children with disabilities and those living in poverty. A host of rules govern how the rest is spent.
President of the education policy organization 50CAN, Derrell Bradford anticipates that allowing military families to use their federal education funds to enroll their children in the schools of their choice will be well received. Schools operated by the Department of Defense are routinely among the highest-performing in the country, but servicemembers move frequently, and many dislike switching schools.
Bradford also says the order likely will make it easier to access the main federal program for funding new public charter schools and expanding successful ones. The Biden administration, he says, slowed Charter School Program grantmaking.
It’s unclear, Bradford and Hess say, whether there are enough private school alternatives to schools run by the Defense Department — particularly overseas — and the Interior Department’s Bureau of Indian Affairs to make vouchers meaningful for those students.
There are significant differences between Trump’s capacity to move quickly following his second inauguration and his first, Hess notes. In 2017, private school choice had a passionate champion in then-Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, but fewer institutional advocates lined up to create and administer vouchers and education savings account programs. The rapid adoption of states’ private school choice programs in recent years has changed that, he says.
Because Trump’s first election was a surprise to many, it was hard for the administration to staff its Education Department, Bradford adds: “This time, it seems like there is a larger number of people who know how government works and have an idea how to advance their goals.”
