Even more than the Jan. 27 earthquake off the Maine coast or the flyover of military jets for the funeral of a Navy captain four days later, the barrage of executive orders and memos emanating from the Trump White House rattled Marblehead last week.
Interim superintendent John Robidoux counseled the town’s principals on how to respond if U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers showed up at the town’s schools.
Recipients of grants and other forms of federal funding — including the schools, Council on Aging and Marblehead Museum — had begun scrambling for answers by the time first one and then another federal judge blocked a federal funding freeze announced in a since-rescinded memo from the Office of Management and Budget.
But one executive order that we were heartened to see did not prompt an immediate flurry of activity is the one titled, “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling.” Robidoux told the Current it would be business as usual for the town’s schools, at least for now.
Trump’s K-12 executive order seeks to prohibit schools from recognizing transgender identities or teach about ideas like structural racism, “white privilege” or “unconscious bias.”
In addition to telling schools what not to teach, the executive order seeks to promote “patriotic education.” The country’s founding should be portrayed as “unifying, inspiring and ennobling,” and lesson plans should offer “a clear examination of how the United States has admirably grown closer to its noble principles throughout its history,” according to the order.
In addition to a potential loss of federal funding for school districts who fail to help end “illegal and discriminatory treatment and indoctrination,” the executive order also envisions the U.S. attorney general coordinating with state attorneys general and local district attorneys to file “appropriate actions against K-12 teachers and school officials who violate the law.”
Needless to say, teachers did not enter their profession thinking they would be forced onto the frontlines of a multipronged ideological war. Nonetheless, they have been conscripted.
In comparison to the targets of Trump’s other executive actions, K-12 schools may have a stronger hand. They should not be shy about playing it.
As a recent New York Times story noted, Congress sets the formula for distributing to states the major federal funding stream that supports public schools, Title I. At least in theory, that means Trump cannot alter the formula — though separation-of-powers concerns failed to deter the issuance of the OMB memo.
That same New York Times story quoted Adam Laats, an education historian at Binghamton University. Laats likened Trump’s executive order to the Red Scare in the mid-20th century, which saw teachers accused of Communist sympathies lose their jobs or be taken to court.
“To my mind, this executive order is a blast of steam, dangerous especially because it can encourage local aggressive activism,” Laats told the Times.
Laats struck a hopeful chord, too, noting that “political attempts to ban ideas from the classroom have rarely been successful.”
But unfortunately, school leaders here and across the country are not out of the woods. The executive order contemplates the secretaries of defense, education, and health and human services using the next 90 days to develop an “Ending Indoctrination Strategy” to present to the president. Through that process, they may well unearth additional coercive tools to which the district will need to respond.
As these pages regularly document, there may never be unanimity about everything that happens within our school walls. However, it is essential that myriad decisions — about curricula and counseling, about athletic participation and bathroom use — remain local ones, informed by our local educators’ training, experience and judgment, rather than being dictated by the federal government.
Our educators have our support as they navigate this unprecedented intrusion into their life’s work.
