President Donald Trump’s Wednesday executive order combating radical gender ideology and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) education in public schools could prove disastrous for Maine’s far-left school districts, which could risk losing part of their funding.
[RELATED: Maine Education Department Tells Public Schools to Ignore Trump’s Order on Transgender Ideology…
“Parents trust America’s schools to provide their children with a rigorous education and to instill a patriotic admiration for our incredible Nation and the values for which we stand,” said President Trump.
“In recent years, however, parents have witnessed schools indoctrinate their children in radical, anti-American ideologies while deliberately blocking parental oversight,” he added.
Trump’s order takes aim at radical gender ideology, which says a person can be born into the wrong body and encourages children to undergo irreversible chemical or surgical procedures to make them appear more like the opposite sex.
Proponents of gender ideology push to allow transgender-identifying males to compete against women in sports or to enter women’s-only spaces such as bathrooms and locker rooms.
Gender ideology has infiltrated Maine schools, with biological males dominating in girls’ sports and state law requiring schools to treat children based on their self-defined gender identity rather than biological sex.
The order also seeks to stop schools from indoctrinating children with DEI principles that claim people are inherently oppressors or victims, and teaching some children to believe themselves to be blameworthy or inherently evil because of the color of their skin.
Under the new rules, any public schools caught teaching discriminatory DEI principles such as “white privilege” or promoting gender ideology by doing things like helping a child present himself as the opposite gender and “socially transition” without parental knowledge could completely lose federal funding.
Parental rights advocacy groups, such as the American Parents Coalition, celebrated the order as a major victory.
“During the pandemic, many parents got an inside look into their children’s school curriculum and were rightfully horrified to find political indoctrination incorporated into lesson plans. Political ideologies and activist agendas, such as Critical Race Theory and gender ideology, were taking priority over core competencies like reading, math, and science,” said the group’s executive director, Alleigh Marré.
“When parents sounded the alarm, they were labeled as domestic terrorists and told that their voice didn’t matter. President Trump’s executive order today puts parents back in the driver’s seat and puts education back at the forefront of schools. This is a crucial step forward to ensure children continue to recover from learning loss and are given opportunities to thrive,” Marré continued.
In addition to fighting radical left-wing indoctrination, Trump’s order re-establishes the 1776 Commission to educate children on American history, the nation’s founding principles of merit and equality under the law, and the U.S. Constitution.
In the final months of his first term, Trump signed an executive order creating the commission, but President Joe Biden reversed the order on the first day of his presidency.
Following an earlier order from President Trump codifying the biological reality of two sexes, requiring biological sex to be used on official documents, and preventing biological men from being placed in women’s prisons, the Maine Department of Education called on schools to resist the order.
The letter reminded schools that the order only applied to federal institutions and demanded that they comply with Maine law codifying gender identity as a legally protected characteristic.
The new order does nothing to alter Maine law, but it does impose penalties on local schools that continue to support gender ideology and racial discrimination in the form of DEI by withholding essential federal funding.
The Maine Wire reached out to the Maine Department of Education (DOE), asking if they plan to change their position on gender ideology and DEI in light of the possible loss of federal funding, but they did not immediately respond.
Trump’s threat to pull federal funding from schools that indoctrinate children into DEI and trans ideology came shortly after a group of 29 Maine Republican representatives penned a letter warning the DOE to comply with Trump’s order targeting gender ideology. Approximately ten percent of Maine’s education budget comes from federal funding.
[RELATED: Maine Republicans Urge DOE to Comply with Executive Order Protecting Female-Only Spaces…]
That letter appeared to do nothing to sway the department, although it may be forced to change its policies if it loses federal funding.
“State representatives are calling on the Maine Department of Education to face reality and walk back it’s ill-advised guidance to Maine schools on harmful Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) and gender ideology initiatives,” wrote the state representatives.
The Maine Republicans celebrated Trump’s order as a return to reality and criticized Maine schools for focusing on indoctrinating children into left-wing beliefs rather than educating them.
<span class="dsq-postid" data-dsqidentifier="34715 https://www.themainewire.com/?p=34715">14 Comments
Good.
Finally, no more racism being taught in Maine schools and the grooming will also stop
YES!!!!!!!
Good idea but you know janets answer to every problem is to raise taxes. Stand by while she forecloses on every privet property in the state to fund her agenda. In reality without federal funds the school system here would be paid about what its worth.
Good News !
Maine doesn’t need any Leftest Schools .
This just plain common sense .
Queer Genders and DEI have no place on the school menu .
Wonderful to have a president with balls and a first Lady without!
HOLD! the line
Local State and local school boards should only be concerned with improving student test scores. Your sex is what you are born with. To increase your brain power is job of all, parents, town, school boards, educators. Parents will have to fight for that.
Excellent…..hopefully our “teachers” will focus on our Maine students’ grades now.
The Maine Commoner of Education, Pender Makin, has a B.A. in English Literature, and as such she should have some thoughts on teaching reading skills to to our students and I would like to hear them. Also so I would like to hear ideas on why our reading scores are declining and what the teachers can do to improve the scores and what a parent’s role is inimproving their child’s reading scores. I would truly like to know, as the leader of our States schools her thoughts on this matter.
And to our Governor why did you pick Pender Makin as Commissioner of Education?
I think it would be better if funding was stopped and Maine schools had to prove they weren’t teaching that garbage before funding was reinstated!
President Trump’s executive order is a huge win for parents and students who deserve an education based on facts, not radical ideologies. This is exactly why Maine’s lawmakers will hate it—they thrive on keeping the public confused, compliant, and unable to think critically. A well-informed, independent-thinking population is the last thing they want because it threatens their grip on power. Maine’s education system has been hijacked by activists who prioritize indoctrination over real learning, and Trump’s move is a major step toward restoring sanity and parental rights in schools. No wonder they’re panicking.
I thought conservatives were for states rights and local government, not government by Presidential fiat.