Former President of the United States Donald Trump speaking with attendees at an Arizona for Trump rally at Desert Diamond Arena in Glendale on Aug. 23, 2024. Photo by Gage Skidmore | Flickr/CC BY-SA 2.0
Former President Donald Trump has some bold educational policy proposals that he says he is ready to implement if elected president in November, including a proposal to let parents elect school principals that even one of his top supporters says is “not logistically possible.”
Public education advocates panned Trump’s education platform as detrimental to teachers, students and public schools.
The Republican nominee for president in late July posted a list of education policies on his campaign website, called the “Plan to Save American Education and Give Power Back to Parents.” The plan includes his takes on popular culture war issues like policies for transgender students, parental rights and patriotism in the classroom.
But it also features a proposal to “implement massive funding preferences and favorable treatment” for schools and districts that implement a few policies, including the direct election of school principals by the parents of that school’s students.
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Jim Byrne, president of the Tucson Education Association, told the Arizona Mirror that this is the type of proposal that might sound appealing as an abstract concept, but would be harmful to schools if it were ever put into practice.
“It would be disruptive, destructive and detrimental,” Byrne said.
The Tucson teachers’ union president added that the plan could not even be considered direct democracy without including all of the other people, besides parents, who are invested in a particular school, including teachers and students. The proposal would also seemingly exclude all of the residents of the school district whose taxes fund public school but who don’t have children, have grown children or whose kids attend a different school.
Marisol Garcia, president of the Arizona Education Association, of which Bryne’s union is a local affiliate, told the Mirror that this proposal clearly demonstrates that Trump and his team don’t understand how public education works.
“I think it’s pretty funny, because I don’t even think they know what principals do,” she said.
Garcia is a former assistant principal who said most of that job was taken up with scheduling, student discipline, monitoring lunch and drop-off and pick-up lines, as well as building relationships with students and parents and planning professional development for teachers.
And the democratic process already determines who is hired as principal at public schools although not directly. School boards elected by residents of the school district vet and choose a superintendent, who then hires other administrators, like principals. Typically, the school board votes to approve the hiring of principals, but the board is also tasked with developing systems of evaluation for principals and can vote not to renew a principal’s contract.
Garcia added that a school principal needs a specific educational background and training to be successful in navigating the intricacies of the job.
Although the co-founder of the controversial group Moms for Liberty, Tiffany Justice told the Mirror that she agreed with several of Trump’s education policy proposals, she said the direct election of school principals was not one she could support.
“I know how difficult it is just to get people to run for school board and how expensive it is,” she said. “I just don’t understand how electing school principals would actually be something that could be done within the four-year time — or even if it should be done, honestly.”
Moms for Liberty, a nonprofit that is officially nonpartisan but has close ties to violent right-wing extremist groups, including the Three Percenters, the Oath Keepers, and the Proud Boys, does not endorse national candidates for office. But Justice has personally endorsed Trump and said that many of the group’s approximately 130,000 members nationwide agree with at least some of his education policy proposals.
The Southern Poverty Law Center has labeled Moms for Liberty as a far-right extremist group, a designation Justice has adamantly denied.
Justice founded the far-right group in 2021, alongside two other Florida women, in reaction to schools’ COVID-19 policies and the perception of some parents that schools boards weren’t listening to parents about their concerns about things like online learning and masking policies.
Justice and her co-founders were all current or former members of Florida public school boards, so she’s familiar with how the system works. She said that instead of electing principals, parents will have the most impact by getting involved in their child’s education and providing feedback to school districts.
“It’s a nice idea that sounds like something nice to say, but it’s not something that’s going to be practical,” Justice said of electing principals. “It’s just not.”
I think it’s pretty funny, because I don’t even think they know what principals do.
– Marisol Garcia, Arizona Education Association president
But Trump has shared plenty of other proposals that she does agree with, including cutting federal funding for any school “pushing critical race theory” or “gender ideology.”
The claim that critical race theory, a graduate-school-level concept that examines how institutions in the U.S. impact racial groups differently, is being taught in K-12 schools has been widely and repeatedly debunked. But Justice — along with many of Trump’s supporters — still say that its tenets are being pushed on students.
“Kids are being taught that somehow the color of their skin is a determining factor in their ability to be successful in life,” Justice said. “That’s child abuse.”
But Byrne, who taught classes like world history, U.S. history, Mexican-American history and African-American history, before becoming president of his union, said that schools aren’t teaching critical race theory. But they are using curricula that directly reflects the lived reality of their students.
“What we’re doing is centering the voices of the people who have traditionally not been a part of classroom curriculum, instructional materials and textbooks, centering the authors, historians and people from the community who reflect the students in our classrooms, because, historically, those have not been involved in public education,” Byrne said.
Justice said that teachers making claims like Byrne’s were attempting to “gaslight” parents.
“It’s just such baloney nonsense identity politics nonsense,” she said, adding that she knows that students are being taught that the U.S. is a systemically racist country, and that amounts to critical race theory being taught in K-12 classrooms.
“Black children and white children do not learn math differently,” Justice said. “So, this idea of culturally relevant teaching is baloney. Teach the kids how to read, teach them how to do math, teach them how to do science, teach them history — all history, accurate history. But that is a baloney talking point that you just used, you knew is pushed to try to somehow weave in their ideological indoctrination into the classrooms, and we reject it completely.”
Around 45% of students in Arizona’s K-12 schools are Latino, and Byrne pointed out that if federal funding becomes contingent on specific curricula being banned in schools — even if it’s just perceived as being related to critical race theory — it will likely have a chilling effect on the use of materials that are culturally relevant to those students.
“I think some of the students who pay attention to news items and pay attention to what’s happening in the world would be impacted, Day One,” Byrne said. “That’s their culture’s history, part of their background and history is being denied.”
Another of Trump’s proposals, to create a new credentialing body to certify “patriotic” teachers, left both Garcia and Byrne with questions, but Justice called those questions “nonsense.”
“Who defines the word patriotism?” Garcia asked. “And what evidence is there that any educator is spending any time indoctrinating students?”
Teachers already barely have time to teach the standards required by the state, said Garcia, an elementary history teacher.
She also wondered who would make up such a credentialing board and what litmus test they would use to determine which teachers are patriotic and which ones aren’t.
“Does that mean that they have a flag in their Twitter handle? I mean, I don’t know what that means,” Garcia said.
Justice was adamant that patriotism wasn’t subjective, but didn’t define the term.
“This is such a nonsense comment, I’m not even getting into this with you, on this question,” Justice told the Mirror, when asked if she thought patriotism meant different things to different people.
Instead, Justice said she believes teacher credentialing should be overhauled completely and that teachers should not be telling their students that “America is a bad country.”
“We should be teaching children about lots of things that happened in American history, we need to be aware of all of them so that we don’t repeat past mistakes. But America is a beacon of light and still the best country in the world,” she said.
Overall, Justice said she and others in her organization support Trump because of his dedication to an extreme vision of the role of parental rights in education, the advocacy for which her organization was founded. She favors his plan to give preferential treatment to schools that adopt a parental bill of rights as well as the implementation of universal school choice.
Arizona law currently contains a Parents’ Bill of Rights and the state in 2022 expanded its private school voucher program to all students in the state.
Garcia and Byrne both argued that the expansion of universal school choice, or publicly funded vouchers that pay for students to attend private schools or to be homeschooled, has been detrimental to the public schools that the vast majority of K-12 students attend.
Byrne said that he hopes Trump is foiled in his attempt to replicate Arizona’s universal school voucher program across the country, which he said could contribute to the destruction of public schools.
Garcia added that the cost of Arizona’s school voucher program, which was expanded from serving around 12,000 students in 2022 to more than 78,000 this year, was costing public school teachers and students. The cost of the program was $332 million last fiscal year — a figure that is expected to grow to around $429 million this year.
Justice told the Mirror that she’s interested in dismantling the federal Department of Education, and said that she would work to make sure many of Trump’s proposals were implemented if he’s elected and puts her in a position of power.
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