Tracking Trump's executive orders: Undermining safe learning environments

Executive Order 14190: Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling

Date Signed: January 29, 2025

Key Provisions:

• Executive Order 14190 asserts that “radical indoctrination,” including educating students on topics such as white privilege and unconscious bias, allowing students to self-identify as trans and non-binary, providing counseling services for students’ social transition, is inherently “Anti-American,” and “undermines national unity”
• Executive agencies, including the Secretaries of Education, Defense, and Health & Human Services, along with the attorney general, will come up with a plan titled “Ending Indoctronation Strategy” that will eliminate federal funding for schools that refuse to implement “patriotic education,” refuse to forcibly “out” students, and/or refuse to revoke “gender ideology” teachings
• It will assert that keeping a student’s self-identified gender orientation as privileged information violates the parent’s Federal statutory right to information

Interfaith Alliance Counterpoints:

• Instead of focusing on how best to support students, Executive Order 14190 baselessly points fingers at educators who are trying to create safe learning environments where all students feel a sense of belonging.  
• Executive Order 14190 demonizes educators who attempt to foster critical thinking and empathy in students and restricts the freedom of educators, families, and the state and local governments they elect to determine curricula taught in schools. Multiple studies have shown that teaching about unconscious bias has “been found to reduce bias against stigmatized groups, such as African Americans, and to suppress unconscious prejudices”. Eliminating these practices in schools undermines efforts to ensure a more equitable society, and will complicate teaching students on the complexities of social structures. These teachings help create national unity, not undermine it like President Trump asserts in Executive Order 14190.
• This Executive Order requires that federal funds be stripped from schools which refuse to forcibly and nonconsentually “out” students to their parents. This creates an unsafe learning environment for students and educators.
• Interfaith Alliance is extremely worried about the consequences Executive Order 14190 will have on transgender and non-binary youth, who are being scapegoated in an effort to undermine confidence in public education. Schools should foster an environment where all students feel that they belong, and not fear being outed or vilified due to who they are.