February 3, 2025
California Signals Rejection Of Trump’s School Choice Executive Order
Liz Sanders, the Director of Communications for the California Department of Education, said in a statement that the order issued by Trump is a violation of federal law
On Jan. 29, Donald Trump issued yet another executive order, his preferred method of bypassing Congress. The issue he was concerned about in this order seems to be school choice, and he titled it “Ending Racial Indoctrination In K-12 Schooling.”
According to The Bay Area Reporter, California state education officials, who have long been pro-public school education, responded by telling Trump the federal government cannot dictate what schools can and cannot teach.
Liz Sanders, the Director of Communications for the California Department of Education, told the outlet in a statement that Trump’s order violates federal law.
“President Trump signed an executive order today that does nothing but require the Secretary of Education to determine what federal education funds can legally be rescinded as a penalty for teaching curricula that President Trump finds objectionable. We can give the Trump Administration that answer right now: nothing,” Sanders stated. “It is against federal law for the White House to dictate what educators can and cannot teach by threatening to defund essential public services for students.”
Sanders continued, “School curriculum should not vacillate back and forth depending on the occupant of the White House, which is why federal law already prohibits the federal government from leveraging grants to mandate specific instructional content in schools.”
Trump’s executive order contains language that advocates eliminating “all federal funding or support for illegal and discriminatory treatment and indoctrination in K-12 schools, including based on gender ideology and discriminatory equity ideology and protecting parental rights,” taking a page out of the predominantly right-wing arguments in favor of school choice, which critics argue will have the long-term effect of gutting the public education system.
Although California opposes school choice, in Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott has engineered a hostile takeover, purging his party of those opposed to it. He has made it one of his emergency items for the 89th Texas Legislature to pass.
Despite this, individuals like Bob Popinksi, the Senior Director of Policy for Raise Your Hand Texas, oppose Abbott’s plans.
As Popinksi told KCENTV in 2023, “Right now, we’re about $4,000 behind the national average per pupil funding. We’re in the bottom 10. So, before we even think about vouchers, we need to invest in our public schools. In Texas, we have about 300,000 private school students. If you were to multiply that by the $10,000 — that’s a $3 billion program right away. Money going towards private schools that aren’t held accountable for anything under our state’s laws.”
According to a 2021 Forbes op-ed from Raymond Pierce, the President and CEO of the Southern Education Foundation, school choice has its roots in the arguments of segregationists who wanted to ignore Brown v. Board of Education.
“Today, public schools educate a majority of the South’s (and the nation’s) African American students and students from low-income families. Across the board, those schools continue to face funding challenges, in part because of ongoing successful efforts to siphon public education funding into private schools,” Pierce argued.
He continued, “The truth is that voucher and tax credit programs structure choices to promote de facto segregation, contravene constitutional considerations, and threaten to dismantle hard-fought and socially beneficial historical progress. They represent a serious setback for universal free public education and the equality and equity goals it promotes.”
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