Trump’s Goal of Burying History Won’t Work If Teachers Refuse to Stop Teaching

President Donald Trump is waging an all-out assault on education by issuing executive orders designed to privatize schooling, attack immigrant and transgender students, prohibit solidarity with Palestine, chill dissent on college campuses and censor discussions of race, gender, sexuality and systemic oppression in schools.

One of his latest orders, misnamed Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling, threatens federal funding for schools that teach truthfully about Black, Indigenous, and people of color’s history or structural inequality, while also banning discussions of gender identity. These actions are about indoctrinating young people with what I call “uncritical race theory” — an ideology that denies systemic racism, either dismissing it altogether or reducing it to nothing more than isolated individual bias.

As if this wasn’t enough, Trump is preparing to escalate his assault on education by issuing an executive order to abolish the Department of Education (DOE). While only Congress has the legal authority to completely end the DOE, The Washington Post reports that Trump’s order “directs the agency to begin to diminish itself. …The new administration has been trying to reduce the workforce by putting scores of employees on administrative leave and pressuring staff to voluntarily quit.”

Let’s call this move what it is: an extremist power grab designed to dismantle public schools and enforce ideological conformity. If successful, this order would gut $18.4 billion in Title I funding, which provides crucial support to high-poverty schools, and strip $15.5 billion from disability education under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), leaving millions of students without legally required accommodations. The Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, which protects students from racial, gender and disability discrimination, would be hollowed out, further fueling the school-to-prison pipeline and allowing systemic inequities to go unchecked. And Trump’s attack on the DOE isn’t just about K-12 education — it also threatens the federal student loan system, throwing $1.6 trillion in student debt into chaos and potentially stripping away protections that prevent borrowers from being preyed upon by private lenders. This isn’t about “local control” or efficiency; it’s a direct attack on public education, paving the way for corporate profiteering and right-wing ideological supremacy.

Let’s call this move what it is: an extremist power grab designed to dismantle public schools and enforce ideological conformity.

Trump’s Executive Order Is Illegal

Trump’s executive order to defund schools that allow students to investigate aspects of history and identity he doesn’t want them to learn about is not only immoral — it’s illegal. Title 20, Section 1232a of the United States Code (20 U.S.C. § 1232a) explicitly prohibits the federal government from directing or controlling school curricula — a provision that directly contradicts Trump’s attempt to ban discussions of equity, making his executive order not only authoritarian but also unlawful — stating:

No provision of any applicable program shall be construed to authorize any department, agency, officer, or employee of the United States to exercise any direction, supervision, or control over the curriculum, program of instruction, administration, or personnel of any educational institution, school, or school system…

This law, first enacted in 1970 as part of the General Education Provisions Act (GEPA) and later amended, was designed to ensure that education remains under local and state control, preventing federal overreach in dictating what schools can and cannot teach. Even when federal funds are allocated to education programs, they cannot be used as a mechanism for controlling school curricula. Yet, in a staggering display of hypocrisy, Trump and the GOP — who endlessly champion “states’ rights” and “local control” when it suits their agenda — are now using federal power to dictate school curricula and punish educators who refuse to comply.

Trump’s Order and the Tradition of Hiding History

The attack on truthful education is part of a long history of erasing Black resistance and maintaining white supremacy in schools. From the United Daughters of the Confederacy’s efforts to rewrite textbooks and glorify the Confederacy; to the Dunning School at Columbia University that promoted a white supremacist interpretation of Reconstruction, portraying it as a tragedy of corrupt Black rule to justify Jim Crow laws; to the Florida Board of Education today whose official state curriculum proclaims slavery to have been of “personal benefit” to Black people; reactionary forces have always sought to control historical memory.

Trump’s policies are a continuation of these efforts. Through executive order, he has reestablished the 1776 Commission, a body designed to promote a sanitized, celebratory version of American history while discrediting historical truths about oppression and struggle. The Commission is tasked with implementing a “Presidential 1776 Award” to recognize students for their “knowledge of the American founding.” But what does it mean to truly understand the founding of the United States?

This isn’t about “local control” or efficiency; it’s a direct attack on public education, paving the way for corporate profiteering and right-wing ideological supremacy.

When I teach high school students about the American War for Independence, I introduce my students to Thomas Paine, the English-born writer whose best-selling pamphlet Common Sense helped galvanize the colonies to break from British rule. But Paine did more than advocate for independence — he also exposed the hypocrisy of revolutionaries who fought for liberty while enslaving Black people. In March 1775, he published African Slavery in America, one of the earliest antislavery articles in the colonies, and excoriated his peers by asking, “With what consistency, or decency, they complain so loudly of attempts to enslave them, while they hold so many hundred thousands in slavery, and annually enslave many thousands more…?” Paine’s words anticipated the powerful critique Frederick Douglass would later make in What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?:

What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. … Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the Old World, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me, that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival.

This is the history that Trump and his fellow uncritical race theorists don’t want you to learn. For all their braying about patriotism and the importance of 1776, it’s doubtful that a student in my class who knows the truth about Fredrick Douglass or about Thomas Paine — one of the most influential of the American revolutionaries — would be eligible for the “Presidential 1776 Award.”

Yet as the right escalates its war on history, the Democratic Party has largely refused to mount a meaningful defense of antiracist education or a serious opposition to Trump. The February 2 New York Times headline captures this reality: “‘We Have No Coherent Message’: Democrats Struggle to Oppose Trump.”

The subheading continues, “More than 50 interviews with Democratic leaders revealed a party struggling to decide what it believes in, what issues to prioritize and how to confront an aggressive right-wing administration.”

While Democrats often offer rhetorical opposition to book bans and curriculum censorship, they have refused to take bold, structural action to protect educators, students and schools from these attacks. The Biden administration, for example, did condemn Republican efforts to censor history but did little to enforce federal protections against racial discrimination in education. As book bans escalated and states prohibited teaching about Black history, the Democratic Party never launched a national campaign to combat these laws, and certainly never supported the annual Teach Truth Day of Action organized by the Zinn Education Project and supported by educators, students and families all over the country.

As the right escalates its war on history, the Democratic Party has largely refused to mount a meaningful defense of antiracist education or a serious opposition to Trump.

When confronted by conservatives on education, Democratic politicians often respond by insisting that Critical Race Theory (CRT) isn’t being taught in K-12 schools. While it’s true that most educators had little familiarity with CRT before Republicans launched their crusade against it, the right — amplified by media outlets — successfully rebranded any form of antiracist teaching as CRT. Instead of challenging this false narrative head-on, liberal politicians largely relied on denial, repeatedly insisting that CRT wasn’t in schools, without addressing the deeper question of whether teaching about systemic racism belonged in the curriculum at all. This defensive strategy backfired, making it seem as though they were evading the issue rather than standing up for the right of students to learn about racism, oppression and history. The reality is that many Democrats feared that openly defending antiracist education — whether Black studies, ethnic studies, or CRT — would cost them politically. Their reluctance to take a principled stance left them vulnerable to right-wing attacks and signaled a broader unwillingness to fight for a truthful education system. As professors Daniel Kreiss, Alice Marwick and Francesca Bolla Tripodi argued in an article for Scientific American:

Rather than dismissing manufactured concerns over CRT as fake, Democrats should embrace the robust teaching of America’s racial history in our public schools and make an affirmative case for why it matters for American values of fairness, equality and justice. Democrats should then focus on articulating how attacks on CRT are meant to divide people of all races who otherwise share interests. Rather than dismissing these attacks as isolated incidents, Democrats should mount their own sustained and coherent campaign to argue affirmatively for diversity, equity and inclusion programs and for complementary efforts such as the 1619 Project.

The refusal of the Democrats to defend honest education about race has been so flagrant that it has angered or demoralized wide swaths of its base in the wake of the 2024 presidential election. The evidence of this is abundant. As Paul Waldman and Greg Sargent argued in a column for The Washington Post, “When Republicans turned an obscure academic topic known as critical race theory into a national boogeyman supposedly poisoning the minds of our youth, Democrats were caught flat-footed. They weren’t sure how to react: Debate what it actually means? Explain that it isn’t something that gets taught to kids? In the face of relentless conservative demagoguery, they were flummoxed. … And Democrats still seem uncertain how to respond.”

The way to respond was clear to many millions of educators, students and families around the country: banning history and books are the marks of despotic regimes and should be forcefully opposed. Yet even in the face of intensifying authoritarian policies that have led to many teachers being targeted, being fired, or receiving death threats for teaching about race or gender, Democratic Party politicians have largely refused to passionately defend teaching honestly about history and identity — a result of their obsequiousness to the same billionaire class that funds the Republican Party.

In the wake of Trump’s presidential victory, many Democratic Party establishment figures blamed their loss on the party being too “woke” and pontificated that if they had just further abandoned trans people and communities of color, in favor of advancing arguments to defend the working class, they could have won the election. It is true that the Democrats’ failure to fight for working class issues like raising the minimum wage, curbing inflation, fighting for affordable housing or taxing the rich to pay for education contributed to their defeat. But the truth is that trans people and communities of color are part of the working class — and as long as the wealthiest one percent can convince people that trans people, immigrants, or Black people are the problem in our society, various sections of the working class will be fighting each other in a squid game while the rich look on in amusement. That is why honest education that helps the young see each other’s humanity is so important.

Resisting the Truthcrime Laws

Trump and his allies certainly fear the power of an informed generation. Unfortunately, too many corporate Democrats also subscribe to uncritical race theory and too often would rather accommodate Trump than risk the upheaval and potential shift in power that can occur from young people learning — and acting on — historical lessons of social movements.

For all their bravado, the uncritical race theorists are terrified of youth who are armed with the lessons of history and ready to act — as the 2020 uprising for Black lives, largely led by young people, exposed. They fear students who read Frederick Douglass and Thomas Paine and aren’t afraid to consider what their ideas mean for our society today. They fear the hundreds of students in Los Angeles who recently walked out of school in protest of Trump’s latest attacks on immigrants. They fear the thousands of educators around the country participating in the Black Lives Matter at School Week of Action, defiantly teaching the lessons that Trump and his enforcers want banned.

And most of all, they fear an education that exposes young people to a wide range of ideas and teaches students not what to think, but how to think critically and question everything.

As Jason Stanley explains in Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future, “If we are to stop the United States’ drift toward fascism, we must recognize the nature of the challenge facing our educational institutions. Schools and universities are indeed on the front lines of the multi-decade far-right effort to reinforce anti-democratic myths.”

The difficult truth is no one is coming to save us from the banning of history and this slide into fascism — including the Democratic Party. But once we understand this, our task becomes clear. We must build robust, independent, social movements and fight to teach the truth — because no executive order, no political intimidation, and no forced ignorance can erase history, so long as we refuse to stop teaching it.