President Donald Trump’s Department of Education has announced that it will partner with right-wing think tanks and organizations to develop a new curriculum for “patriotic education” in American classrooms.
Earlier this week, the Trump administration redirected $137 million initially meant for programs aimed at minority students toward what it described as “American history and civics education.”
Education Secretary Linda McMahon announced Wednesday that the money will be directed toward discretionary grants aimed at K-12 schools that adopt a new curriculum being drawn up by the 250 Civics Education Coalition—a consortium of more than 40 right-wing groups that launched on same day. The goal, McMahon said, was to advance education that “emphasizes a unifying and uplifting portrayal of the nation’s founding ideals” in advance of the nation’s 250th anniversary in 2026.
It is not Trump’s first crack at instilling the nation’s youth with a “patriotic education.” In the waning days of his first term in office, Trump unveiled the 1776 Report, which, education columnist Jennifer Berkshire recently noted in The Baffler, “was widely panned by actual historians for its worshipful treatment of the Founding Fathers, its downplaying of slavery, and its portrayal of a century-old ‘administrative state’ controlled by leftist radicals.”
While little has been publicized yet about what McMahon’s new endeavor will look like, it is known who will be crafting it. The initiative is being led by the America First Policy Institute, a MAGA-aligned think tank that has been responsible for staffing Trump’s second administration and has received over $1 million from his political action committee, the Save America PAC. Until 2023, McMahon herself served on the board of AFPI.
In 2022, the group presented a piece of model legislation for a “Civics Course Act” to be introduced in states. It included requirements for students to spend ample time studying the nation’s founding documents and figures while banning the teaching of what it called the “defamatory history of America’s founding,” which suggests that slavery or inequality are in any way inherent to the nation’s institutions.
It also banned the concepts of “systemic racism” and “gender fluidity” and forbade teachers from giving students course credit for engaging with “social or public policy advocacy.”
Also included in the coalition is Hillsdale College, a private Christian liberal arts school in Michigan that has proposed its own K-12 curriculum, which Vanity Fair notes “has been criticized for revisionist history, including whitewashed accounts of US slavery and depictions of Jamestown as a failed communist colony.”
Another participant is PragerU, the overtly partisan and often factually loose YouTube channel that has been tasked with creating children’s educational content in nearly a dozen red states.
The group has produced content venerating figures notorious for practicing slavery, like colonist Christopher Columbus and Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. Its videos have argued, among other things, that climate change is a myth, that European fascism was a “far-left” ideology, and that Israel has “the world’s most moral army.”
The pro-Trump youth group Turning Point USA will also be involved in crafting the curriculum. Its longtime leader, Charlie Kirk, who was assassinated in Utah last week, went on a crusade last year to, in his words, “tell the truth” about Martin Luther King Jr., whom he described as “an awful person,” while claiming his signature achievement, the 1964 Civil Rights Act, was a “huge mistake.”
An offshoot of Kirk’s group, Turning Point Education, said Kirk’s assassination has increased its resolve to promote a “God-centered, virtuous education” in US public schools.
The 250 Civics Education Coalition has not yet published a curriculum. But according to the Department of Education, it will be rolling out “a robust programming agenda” over the next 12 months.
During Trump’s second term, he has undertaken an effort to purge federal museums and national parks of what one executive order called “improper ideology,” which has resulted in the erasure of exhibits and monuments to Black and Native American history. Last month, he lamented that the Smithsonian Museum focuses too much on “how bad slavery was” and ordered a review of the museum’s content.
Federal websites, meanwhile, have systematically eliminated many pages that acknowledged the accomplishments of nonwhite historical figures or important events in women’s and LGBTQ+ history.
Critics in the education world view Trump’s effort to use grants to induce them to adopt his preferred curriculum as an illegal effort to propagandize children.
“The law is clear,” said education historian Diane Ravitch in a blog post. “Federal officials are prohibited from seeking to influence or direct curriculum in any way.”
Since 1970, the federal government has been barred by law from “any direction, supervision, or control over the curriculum” of public schools.
“Civic education is and must be non-partisan,” said Ted McConnell, the executive director of the Campaign for the Civic Mission of Schools. “While the funding is long sought, this is the wrong approach and smacks of authoritarianism.”
This story was published in partnership with Common Dreams. Read the original story here.