Everyone is talking about Project 2025 and what it tells us about possible plans for education (and everything else) under a Trump administration. The GOP has also whittled out a platform.
We need to talk about Agenda 47.
Agenda 47 is the Trump manifesto. It’s not an actual document, but a series of videos in which Trump addresses the camera. So rather than the hopes and dreams of hangers-on, or an easily ignored party platform, this is Trump talking about what he has in mind for the country. There’s overlap with Project 2025, but still worth examining on its own.
Agenda 47 addresses several education-adjacent issues, but let’s start by looking at the main event—President Trump’s Ten Principles For Great Schools Leading To Great Jobs.
The title is its own statement about what education is for—just to train children for work. But let’s look at the 10 principles. In this agenda item, Trump actually delivers the basic outline; it’s the explanation accompanying the video that gives the details (in what is often unTrumpian language).
Restoring Parental Rights
Well, some parental rights for certain parents.
Trump will “turn back the tide of left-wing indoctrination” and throw his weight behind the “fundamental right of parents to control the education, healthcare, and moral formation” of their children.
Most of this item is about anti-trans policies. Any hospital or school that supports a trans student will face penalties and a loss of federal funding. Trump will ask Congress to pass a law establishing “the only genders recognized by the United States government are male and female—and they are determined at birth.” So, no “parental rights” for trans parents or parents of trans children.
Great Principals and Great Teachers
Remember Trump’s great idea of electing school principals. Here it is. If the principal is doing a lousy job, parents should get to fire them and hire someone else.
Of course, that would be cumbersome—maybe if the parents elected representatives to make hiring and firing decisions. They could be an elected board that ran the school. Of course, in Trump’s America, taxpaying non-parents don’t have any say in any of this.
“To reward great teachers,” Trump would also provide incentives to states that abolish tenure and adopt merit pay.
Knowledge and Skills, Not CRT and Gender Indoctrination
Trump will get CRFT, transgender ideology and left-wing indoctrination out of schools and put reading, writing and arithmetic “back IN,” as if the last decades have not seen schools saturated in reading, writing, and math.
Trump decries “underperforming” students, cites the NAEP proficiency numbers, and blames the “Biden school closures,” which conveniently ignores that the bulk of school closures occurred in spring and fall of 2020, when Trump was still President and Betsy DeVos was refusing to provide districts with any guidance. But Trump will also blame a mental health crisis on Biden’s school closings (at no point does he mention what the school closings were in response to. In Trumpsylvania, COVID never happened).
Again, federal funds cut off to any school “pushing” any of these forbidden policies.
Love of Country
Trump will bring back the 1776 Commission, and “ensure our children know the truth about the American Founding, learn the stories of our remarkable heroes, discover the glories of Western Civilization, and come to appreciate the United States as the freest, most prosperous, and most virtuous nation in the history of the world.”
That’s all reruns. The novel new idea here is the creation of a “credentialing body to certify teachers who embrace patriotic values and support the American Way of Life.” Do they get to wear a special uniform? Maybe a brown shirt?
Freedom to Pray
Of all the zombie policy complaints in the education world, this remains one of the dumbest. Students are free to pray in school. They have always been free to pray in school. But Trump will protect the heck out of this.
Safe, Secure, and Drug Free
Someone in Trumpland has caught on to the increased concerns over safety and discipline in classrooms, and they would like to pin it on the “leftist takeover of school discipline and the juvenile system.” He will ask the justice and education departments to overhaul standards in order to “get violent thug’s out of our children’s classrooms.” So I guess “thugs” are not also our children, and thug parents will not be getting their parental rights.
Trump wants to arm teachers and “hire veterans, retired police officers, and other trained gunowners as armed guards in our nation’s schools” which will help deter “unhinged maniacs.” He’ll promote zero-tolerance policies for student illegal drug use or possession in school. And he’s going to look into how those trans drugs cause all sorts of mental health issues. That list of parents not entitled to parental rights just gets longer and longer.
Universal School Choice
The key word here is “universal.” That means no matter how wealthy you are, even if your child never went to public school, you can still force your fellow taxpayers (including the ones less wealthy than you) to help pay your child’s private school tuition. Of course, they could enjoy that same voucher benefit—if the school will accept their child.
Trump supports this idea with a variety of statements that are not true. Voucher systems do not save taxpayers money. They do not lead to higher achievement. There is no reason to think that increased competition (if it even occurs) helps improve schools. What a voucher system does is end a community’s commitment to ensuring each child gets a decent education. Not only do I not have to pay taxes to educate Those Peoples’ Children, but get to make Those People pay taxes to educate mine. And it all happens within a system that has no public accountability, no elected responsibility to the voters, and no requirement to follow rules for transparency or non-discrimination.
Project-Based Learning
How this got on the list is a mystery. Trump “will support” this kind of learning because it helps get students ready for a job. Okay.
Internships and Work Experiences
Trump will direct funds toward schools that get students into internships or part time work. This fits with a trend in red states toward loosening child labor laws, because some people are going to be laborers and meat widgets, so let’s get them started now. Young workers are cheap and plentiful and don’t know enough to complain. Let’s put them to work.
Trump cites the Cristo Rey Catholic school network which takes students form low-income families and farms them out as employees as part of a work-study program.
Jobs and Career Counseling
“President Trump will implement funding preferences for schools with job and career counselors on-hand—because getting a great job best suited to your God-given talents should be a primary goal of education.”
One wonders—what do you get when you put together “women are supposed to stay in the home and take care of their family” and “the purpose of education is to make a person employable.”
Oh, and about the Department of Education
He’s going to close it down, “very early in the administration.” He’ll be sending all education and education work and needs back to the States.” Why?
“We want them to run the education of our children, because they’ll do a much better job of it. You can’t do worse. We spend more money per pupil, by three times, than any other nation. And yet we’re absolutely at the bottom. We’re one of the worst. So you can’t do worse.”
None of that is true. We do not spend three times more per pupil than any nation. Depending on what measure you’re using, we land somewhere in the middle for test results. We have always been somewhere in the middle on PISA test results, and the important question to ask is, are these test results reflected in other ways, like international standing or economic success (spoiler alert: no).
“We’re going to close it up — all those buildings all over the place and yet people that in many cases hate our children. We’re going to send it all back to the States.” As always, there’s no explanation of why he didn’t accomplish this during his previous term of office.
Homeschool Parents
In a separate Agenda 47 video, Trump promises to be a champion for homeschool families. This seems to mainly involve extending the use of 529 Education Savings Accounts for homeschool expenses.
529 plans were created to allow tax-advantaged savings for future college expenses. Put the money in the bank today; take it out in ten years when your child enrolls in college. The Trump tax cuts allowed parents to take $10,000 per year out of the 529 to pay for K-12 education, tax free. This is the benefit he proposes for homeschoolers.
He also proposes to make sure that homeschooled students can also participate in school benefits such as sports and clubs. This is already the law in many states, including Pennsylvania.
American Academy and Accreditation
Trump proposes to tap endowments of large universities “plagued by antisemitism.”
“[W]e will take the billions and billions of dollars that we will collect by taxing, fining, and suing excessively large private university endowments, and we will then use that money to endow a new institution called the American Academy.”
He will use it to set up a world-class education available to every American, free of charge. Top-tier and on line. It will grant degree credentials that the U.S. government and all federal contractors will recognize, the “full and complete equivalent of a bachelor’s degree.”
Even better, one presumes, than Trump University.
If you’re wondering how such an operation could hope to be accredited, well, Agenda 47 includes a plan to take over the college accreditation system. It will be a way to “reclaim” institutions that have become “dominated by Marxist Maniacs and lunatics.” Fire the “radical Left accreditors” and impose new standards that will include “defending the American tradition and Western civilization, protecting free speech, eliminating wasteful administrative positions that drive up costs incredibly, removing all Marxist diversity, equity, and inclusion bureaucrats, offering options for accelerated and low-cost degrees, providing meaningful job placement and career services, and implementing college entrance and exit exams to prove that students are actually learning and getting their money’s worth.”
Plus, direct the Justice Department to pursue federal cases against schools that engage in racial discrimination “under the guise of equity.” These will impose fines up to the total of their endowments. funding both the American Academy and a restitution fund to benefit the oppressed students.
Addressing Rise of Chronic Childhood Illnesses
What is he talking about? Perhaps a post from “holistic pediatrician” Elisa Song, disputed by the CDC. There has been a spike in respiratory infections, but Trump cites a “stunning rise in autism, auto-immune disorders, obesity, infertility, serious allergies, and respiratory challenges.” That does not appear to be a true thing.
But Trump is going to convene a special Presidential Commission of people “not bought and paid for by Big Pharma” (which Trump says he understands “better than anyone else”).
Many of these are repeated versions of earlier videos on the Agenda 47 page.
Bottom Line
The overfall themes are familiar. Dismantling public education and replacing it with a free-market you’re-on-your-own system. An absolute panic regarding LGBTQ persons. Parental rights—but only for parents who hold to the proper, government-approved values. A system for enforcing and indoctrinating a particular brand of nationalism, Communist China style. A list of fantastical goals in line with many Trump failed business ventures. And many objectives unlikely to ever be achieved (as witnessed by the fact that Donald Trump previously had four years in power to achieve them, and did not).
It’s a plan that fundamentally changes the nature and purpose of education in this country. It’s a plan that voters should reject.
