The Trump/Vance campaign and its allies are so busy whipping up hate for immigrants, it seems they couldn’t have time to malign another favorite class of villain: teachers. But the candidates’ recent comments and columns like this one in The Wall Street Journal show teacher-bashing is an ongoing campaign.
The federal government’s limited role in K-12 and control over just a small portion of ed spending has justified limited national media coverage of education as an election issue. The New York Times’s primer on the presidential candidates’ positions neglects education, despite its high public interest; in a new Gallup poll, 84% of registered voters said it is extremely/very important to their vote. And critically, education intersects with other urgent issues—especially democracy.
MAGA Ascribes Teachers Great Power
A well-funded propaganda effort that intensified with MAGA’s rise has depicted teachers as a dangerous force exerting outsized power over America’s children. Panic about teachers “indoctrinating” and “brainwashing” students on behalf of alarming causes—and actively hiding it from parents—is standard fare on sites such as Heritage Foundation’s and The Federalist and across the Murdoch universe. Social media teems with activists, acolytes, bots, and trolls echoing the fear-mongering.
Legacy political media tends to frame this activity as part of culture wars designed to garner votes, and so it seemed around the 2022 midterms. The GOP exploited fears around children and schools and frustrations with pandemic schooling to win gubernatorial and legislative seats and politicize traditionally nonpartisan school boards, an effort that continues this cycle.
Both Trump and Vance are smearing teachers on the campaign trail. At a recent rally, Vance positioned himself as a warrior against school “indoctrination.” Earlier comments of his incorporate the conspiratorial tone and personal attacks typical of far-right groups like Moms for Liberty and attack dogs like Christopher Rufo and Corey DeAngelis:
“Randi Weingarten—who’s the head of the most powerful teacher’s union in the country—she doesn’t have a single child,” Vance said. “If she wants to brainwash and destroy the minds of children, she should have some of her own and leave ours the hell alone,” said the father of three biological children. “...That really disorients me. And it really disturbs me.”
Language suggesting teachers are coming after children to possess them has become common: “They think your kids belong to them.” This line of attack is increasingly bizarre, like Trump’s imagining that educators have the power not just to rewire children’s minds but to reshape their bodies. More than once, he’s lied that schools are performing secret sex-change surgeries on kids:
Can you imagine you’re a parent and your son leaves the house and you say, ‘Jimmy, I love you so much, go have a good day in school,’ and your son comes back with a brutal operation? Can you even imagine this? What the hell is wrong with our country?
It sounds like a pitch for a sick MAGA remake of the mid-century witch hunt film Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
The Power—and Motives—Teachers Don’t Have
The absurdity of indoctrination claims can make them laughable. Many teachers respond online with some weary version of: If I could indoctrinate children, I’d be able to get them to bring a pencil/stay off their phones/hand in homework on time.
Indeed, if teachers had the power ascribed us, we would have better pay and working conditions, healthy and modern school facilities, small classes, aides, and other supports for improved learning. We wouldn’t be crowd-sourcing for supplies. Surely there would be no mental health issues or bullying or shootings.
If we had anything near that power, we would face few problems with student discipline, attendance, and work completion, stay safe from abuse, violence, and harassment, be immune to pressure to inflate grades and pass along unprepared students—and thus be more effective at building students’ skills and knowledge.
Because these are the main hopes, wishes, and goals of America’s teachers.
But MAGA assigns teachers both enormous power and sinister motives. The recent WSJ polemic follows one strain: we’re a bunch of Marxists. The reason young people overwhelmingly support Harris is they were taught by rabid anti-capitalists:
Too many of today’s youth fall in line with progressives because they’re undereducated and overindoctrinated with someone else’s agenda….Profit is a bad word. It’s gimme, gimme, whether it’s student loan forgiveness, free healthcare or tax credits.
(The evidence? In one high school, a science class did a recycling project.)
A few years ago I wrote an op-ed for NBC about the myth that America’s teacher corps is an army of radical leftists. Even Heritage understands it’s a myth when they’re being more serious. From a survey they commissioned of K-12 teachers, Heritage found teachers aren’t terribly “woke” after all:
…teachers are not extremely ideological. In most cases, teacher views are moderate or slightly left of center. The average teacher response was consistently more moderate than that of the average liberal in the nationally representative sample.
Nevertheless, the organization persists in propagating inflammatory lies. Early in their Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership is a passage alleging porn is required reading in schools and calling for the imprisonment—and labelling as sex offenders—of teachers and librarians who distribute what it deems pornographic. All this stems from and perpetuates the disgusting lie that education is rife with “groomers” and “predators,” a smear that allows patently false and ludicrous comments like those Trump made about surgery to gain any purchase.
This is More Than a Culture War
But this isn’t simply a culture war to win elections. This vicious propaganda has helped MAGA activists and politicians in many states pass laws and issue directives banning words, books, topics, and courses. These laws, along with online harassment of teachers and threats of violence against schools inspired by MAGA’s demonizing rhetoric, have had the intended effect of cowing educators and ushering in an era of soft censorship in schools. And we know what they want to do at the national level—the same and more. And we know why: It serves MAGA’s authoritarian project.
The Trump/Vance campaign has voiced support for Project 2025’s most important plans: eliminating the US Department of Education and creating a two-tiered education system funded with public dollars.
With respect to the DOE, they hope at a minimum to cut Title I funding, which is provided to schools from the USDOE and is directed specifically at low-income students and students with disabilities. This is just one way they would seek to defund public schools. The other is to divert education funds from public schools to private schools, religious institutions, and homeschooling through broad voucher programs and ESAs, as a growing number of red states are already doing. These programs are causing budget issues and worse academic outcomes as they grow larger.
One objective of villainizing teachers is to increase support for voucher programs by offering the parents they frighten a way to save their children from their evil clutches. It also provides an excuse to bring Christianity into the public schools via building chaplains, Ten Commandments posters, required teaching from the Bible, and more.
The goal is a growing system of private schools for the wealthy and religious—with limited oversight, no unions, and the ability to discriminate in hiring and admissions—and a shrinking system of public schools for the rest of America’s children, with kneecapped unions and increasing restrictions on curriculum, especially in history, science, English, and health.
The Power Teachers Actually Have
While MAGA stokes fear of teachers, they fear the power we do have.
What is that? The ability to inspire curiosity about the world and humanity. To introduce students to multiple perspectives. To help them explore current events and their connection to a full and complex history. To show them what the various disciplines have done and can do. To teach them how to ask questions, conduct research, read critically, form evidence-based conclusions, express themselves. To empower them with confidence and the skills to match it.
This all sounds very grand, and it is—these are the things a democracy needs in its citizens. Each teacher plays a tiny, unglamorous role in this difficult, messy, aspirational project, and if we were secret about our goals (we have lots of mugs declaring them) and communicated better within and between schools (try to get a department together for lunch), you might be able to call it a conspiracy. Of course, where we do organize in unions to achieve public goals like fair pay and smaller class sizes, MAGA directs more fury our way.
Demonizing teachers in order to take greater control over education is an authoritarian tradition. In a recent must-read in The Nation, fascism expert Jason Stanley writes:
One way that the Nazis worked toward this goal was by encouraging the public to draw a connection between overly permissive educational practices and what they saw as “sexual perversion.” During the Weimar era, a small number of German educators had undertaken progressive and experimental reforms, lending students more agency in classrooms, eliminating corporal punishment, and adapting their schools to focus on “individual development, social interaction, and educating students for practical reality”—in other words, training them for participation in civic and democratic life.
Stanley explains why teachers are a danger to authoritarians and fascists, and he highlights the need to protect “honest and fearless teachers.”
Despite the progress MAGA has made toward its goals in education, the issue can absolutely be a winning one for Democrats. The party and its candidates up and down the ticket support policies addressing what’s most important to the majority of parents, including well-funded public schools including pre-K, infrastructure improvements, school and gun safety, academic tutors, mental health help, and free school meals. It’s incredibly normal, somewhat boring stuff that the two parties once largely agreed on—maybe why the party’s policies don’t get much press.
Unfortunately, some of the limited coverage of education can fall into familiar political media traps. Trump’s education plans, like eliminating the DOE, has been described as unlikely or illegal or, as in a WaPo piece this week, “difficult to implement.” Never mind that he’s already shown us he’s willing to break the law. Project 2025 exists to show a future Trump Administration how to make things happen that shouldn’t happen in a democracy.
Too many articles sanitize Trump insanity—even present it as “big” and bold—while demanding more specifics from Democrats. Here, Trump’s few outlandish rants about schools mean he “drives the education debate.” Harris’s plans are alleged to be vague—despite an extensive Biden/Harris record. What the MAGA-dominated GOP wants is certainly not vague. Yes, their plans are “sweeping,” also detailed, complex, weird, and dangerous. Of course Harris should attack them. Battling authoritarianism is her job one, two, and three.